nahem.shoa@aol.co.uk
www.nahemshoa.co.uk
For over 30 years I have loved drawing and painting all types of trees, their gnarled twisted form, strange branches, growths and usual bark has captivated me. Whether I draw or paint in front of them, or there forms linger in my imagination, trees for me are the inspiration that unlocks my emotions and feelings in my art. They are incredibly hard to draw and demand your total concentration and powers of perception to paint and draw well and its only now at nearly 50 that I feel about to draw and paint their portraits. I have always been a good listener and have an ability to convey in paint true feelings because the more I observe things, the more open and un judgmental my vision becomes, which lets me see freshly and allows my subjects speak their own truths.
In the beginning to 2018 after two years painting 3 metres paintings on the theme of Paradise and Paradise Lost for a group show(IntoThe Wild Abyss) at The Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery in June 2017. I spent the first two months painting a new 3.6 metre long forest painting (Other Worlds) it was partly based on a few tree drawings, memory of forests and my imagination and the final painting turned out to be in terms of my own work a breakthrough, a new kind of painting for me. This has inspired me to do a series of forest paintings so For the last 4 months I have spent hours making drawings of trees in city parks and heaths, and for me I see them as forests of the city. Over this time I found a way of drawing solely by mark making that seems for my own art to be a bridge between observation and the imagination. The Forest is a fragile thing, whilst I was drawing trees, millions of acres of forests around the world were being destroyed by huge forest fires.
In the daytime the forest feels sweet and welcoming, but at night they are scary places to enter, every fable, poem, story, film and novels you have seen and read makes us all terrified to enter the dark forest because we know all the dark creatures of the night, ghosts and spirits start to wake up (A perfect metaphor the the artists studio). There is a time in-between day and night, sometimes called the blue hour, which is mysterious, hauntingly beautiful and I want to turn my artist fingers into magic wands to convey this. Just like the 14th century poet Dante, I want the viewer to be able to enter the underworld, see all of the terrible things of our modern world and then make their way back to the light with their heart filled with love.
Our relationship to nature is reaching a critical point and our hyper capitalist model is destroying the planet for profit. We have to find a different path in the forest to take us to the light.