Halaqa Sponsors New Yemeni Talents [Archives:1998/25/Last Page]

The Minister of Culture was on hand to open the new Yemeni talent exhibit on Saturday June 13th at the Halaqa. The show will remain open for ten days. Self taught artists are showing that formal training does not necessarily mean success in the art world. Other young art students are coming to the show for inspiration for their own work.

Young Nabil Yasin, 14, has carefully watercoloured his way; his painting depicts the different walks of life in the country. The youngster wants to go abroad to Italy for training, his father said. ” He gets his inspiration from real life situations, like other youngsters and he is well aware of the modern techniques of painting outside Yemen,” he added.
The wife of the Yemeni doctor, Mrs. Alwine Attieq also exhibited. After living in Yemen for many years she has applied her knowledge of modern expressionism to the canvas as she paints highly contrasted figurative woods and masked arrangements. This artist balanced hot and cold colours carefully like in her “Karnival I”. Mrs. Noha Aslan, Miss Henna Khan and Al Anisi are other young Yemeni talent on exhibit showing that Yemeni art is not all traditional or folkloric.
There are traditional subjects and influences but the younger artists have applied refreshing tones to these themes catching the public’s attention. Such is the case of Khalid Duban applies a variety of brush strokes as he depicts young children out for a walk. Today too there is a tendency for the artist like Anisi to seek inspiration from past models in his realistic representations. His Yemeni styled still life followed a clear true to life approach that can be seen in works of the same school across Europe.
Amal Salaam used universally accepted symbols like the Statue of Liberty to represent the search for freedom. Miss Henna Khan and Issam Salaam made use of more common symbols in their approach to realism. Henna bravely sketched classic portraits in a bolder than usual approach; Carol Young who exhibited earlier in May, laid proof that not all female work comprises the repeated elements like flowers and still life. This is a talented artist who uses various themes to represent life’s hardships like in her “Halo of Burdens “. Other artists returned to the more modern classical depictions of local village life as Al Harazi did in ‘Hajara’, or Nabil Yassin’s work on ‘Shibam’ and other towns.
The public liked to see the typical images of the classic window styles in the village architecture or new interpretations of old pastoral scenes. The exhibit offered the viewer a choice of hand painted prints and cartoon images such as by Mehanni and Khan and small sculptures, plastics and posters worked on by students from the Industrial Institute which has recently celebrated Vocational Day. Some of the posters could be used for advertisement purposes while the sculpted objects on display could be used for home decoration.
Martin Dansky
Yemen Times

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