Untitled (041A7854), 2024
29.7 x 42.0 cm
Walid is one of Mohammad’s younger brothers. He was four when he started painting with Streetcolors. He had an issue with elocution and could not speak, and he had to undergo several operations. Even so, he had an intensity that was rarely seen in a child, says Karine Wehbé, founder of Streetcolors.
Wehbé describes how on his first day with them, he picked up the paper and threw lots of paint onto it, and over time he developed a swinging gesture that was amazing to watch. He would sometimes scream while using brushes in a crazy way. He was intense and many times he would paint and then scream because he could not speak.
Medium: Painting
Frame: unframed
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This image is of a sparse proto-figurative abstraction of floating forms that read like ghost face ovals. With few repeated actions of curved arcs, dots and blottings the scene is built on a mostly empty off-white paper, which is the dominant part but remains silent, allowing the marks to become structural.
The maroon and light blue arcs of the form on the left is similar to the ghost face in the centre which jumps out first in the space. Their thick strokes are textured along the outer curve with toothed marks. The maroon acts as a warm outer skin, which is joined with the cool halo forming blue which creates an inner atmosphere. They contain the eyes making legible the reading of the resulting form as face with features.
The discreet dots of yellow above the two dense maroon ones create a striking contrast as the former pops against the heavier nose marks. This is the large face in the centre around which are other characters.
The pale blue face on the right introduces a second character with a lighter register. It is softer and translucent with faint edges, which is more distant and less bodily than the central figure. In between then is a teal coloured set of curving trail beads that seems to connect them, and mediate with the more abstract far-right blue strokes. This latter form seems less representation but still is redolent of a figure like a totem and has an assertive presence because of its vertical form.
And the tiny drips, specks and marginal marks read as incidental stains acting as background chatter, preventing the work from becoming as clean cartoon. This balances the image with the evidence of the making.
Process
This ink and paint on paper work is made in the same way as most children's at Streetcolors Beirut; sat down, bent over, and standing over the work and through several sessions, and developing styles that are their own with specific sets of forms, colours of interest, and patterns distinguishing them from one another.
They are supported by the volunteers who help them handle their tools and prevent them from creating a violent mess. Children who started making artwork with them have found a balance in their mental states. Those who started out frozen and unable to speak found the ability to expand their scope and began making friends; and those who started out extremely violent and aggressive became more settled over time.
Visual echoes
Joan Miró’s staging of the cosmic within a white field with few marks becoming characters connect to the feature dots in arc shape of the proto-figures here. Walid’s outline and eyes of the large central figure recall Paul Klee’s figures constructed out of few structural cues along with his imperfect edges that leave material evidence of the making intact. The shapes and dots acting as independent pictorial events with the saturated blues, especially in the far-right figure punctuate the overall image very much like in Wassily Kandinsky’s work.