MY ART LIFE continued 4

At nineteen years of age I started art school, the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts. The final assessment of the second year was especially important. To pass, everyone at the academy had to reproduce an artwork. I couldn’t bring myself to do this. Teachers warned me that I would fail. On ‘Judgement Day’ I showed up with a blank piece of canvas and stated that I could only consider making a reproduction of my own work. Agape the other students waited. However, I got a high grade. This wouldn’t be the last time. At the University, the teachers often took us outside to paint landscapes. There weren’t any funds to travel far and for three years I returned to the same spot to make sketches. I turned every stone and felt there wasn’t a spot left that I hadn’t painted. On an assessment day I showed up with a white canvas again. “What do you want?” the teachers asked me. “A place for my emptiness” I replied. And again I managed to get a high grade. What also happened was that my canvasses were removed. For example, I had made a sensual portrait of a girl in my class 'X girlfriend" and exhibited it in the school building. Teachers removed it, stating that it didn’t belong there and that it certainly wasn’t the idea to create work outside of the module.You have to go to Paris or Berlin, they said. There you have the freedom to paint something like that. I then took down the painting and stamped on it with my foot. The teacher asked what the meaning of this was, but I replied:” I’m adding my signature to it.” “You surely have to go to France!” the teacher concluded, which in Lebanon is synonym for Western-Europe. “Some time later I started painting naked men who opened their jeans to take out their genitals, and I explained that the genitals, which transformed into apples, were the forbidden fruits which Adam and Eve ate, when the first sin was committed and man was cast out of paradise….Thank God actually. When I tried to talk to people about the paintings at that time, they reacted with indignation before I had finished speaking. The reactions were: What in God’s name are you doing, you’re painting naked men, taking their genitals out of their pants!....to pee with it? There weren’t any among them who thought:…Oh, to masturbate with. Jesus Christ, he’s masturbating! Yes really, just look at the model, aren’t you getting the idea that there’s something sensual, something erogenous about it? I asked. Oh, then there’s really something wrong with you, they replied.”
The paintings with naked men were on display at a major expo in the Citadel of Tripoli in 1992. My work was exhibited next to the work of my Academy teachers, right next to their landscapes.

My new ArtWork

 

MY ART LIFE continued 3

For years since that discovery I kept improving my way of expressing myself in art. My parents wondered what was to become of me. They advised me to do something significant, but art remained the only form of language that I wanted to express myself in. My parents refused to encourage me. “My father was against it. He wanted me to become a lawyer. When I refused, he cut off the money flow” (Casimiri, Amigoe, 2001).
I don’t really remember a lot about this unpleasant period. I turned to nature and made many landscapes. I spent all the money I had on art materials and I started to visit independent exhibitions, among which one with work by Paul Guiragossian (Jerusalem, 1926-1993). I hadn’t decided to attend Art school yet, but was deeply impressed with Guiragossian’s work. The umbrellas and sunshades that Guiragossian painted are still present in my own work today. I never regarded these, or other similarities between them as a mere coincidence.
“It’s no coincidence that two individuals from the same country and same culture have a lot in common in the way that they paint. The way of living, the atmosphere drives you into similar lines and colours. That’s why I still say: it comes with the style not with the subject.”

In my teenage years I devoured books about philosophy (Schopenhauer), literature and art (Gibran, Gauguin). Because of the historical connection between France and Lebanon, I also read a lot about Paul Cézanne for whom I had a predilection. I started to reproduce the landscapes of Cézanne. But, because I had a feeling I could do it differently, more sophisticated, and more exceptional, I did it in my own way.

MY ART LIFE continued 2

Because of that, I developed a broad view on current affairs and learnt to view matters from a different angle. At home many discussions took place, but I didn’t want to take sides. Many of my eighteen brothers and sisters did, however, choose a unilateral stance in life. This was sometimes a drastic choice based on religion and prejudice.
It is only logical that with such a familial and cultural background I started my search for an identity at a very young age. I refers to this myself as identification, because without identification you actually don’t have a passport to the world. As a result, one of my first exhibitions was called “Search for Identification” (Gallery ’86, Curaçao, 1999).
For these paintings, I travelled back in time, through the Renaissance, the Greek and Roman periods and the ancient civilizations in the East, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt.

When I was nine, my eyes were really opened. I discovered things that my peers did not know anything about, or weren’t ready for yet. For instance, identity, but also sexuality.
“ All of a sudden I knew I was born in the wrong country, that mine had to be somewhere else. I’d go to the coast of Lebanon, at the Mediterranean Sea and stare at the horizon and was certain that my future, my love would lie far behind that.”

Art would be the way, or a manner of camouflage in which I would start to express myself. Even before I became ten, when I was still in primary school, I made a drawing that awakened my creativity. It was entirely based on my own fantasy of a dripping, burning candle of which the melted wax represented a naked woman….

“ I came to the conclusion that the world merely revolved around love and sex. Why did everyone tell me they were crazy about their dog, for example, or that they loved flowers? Why didn’t they show that they love their father or mother, the girl or the boy next door? Why hide those emotions?”

MY ART LIFE continued 1

I was born in 1967 in the historical place of Baalbeck or Ballabak: Baäl meaning God, of the Bekaa valley. The town was originally built by the Phoenicians and was known in ancient times as Heliopolis. Baäl was, just like Helios, God of the Sun. (Note: This was not the same Heliopolis as the one in Egypt).
My quest for a universal language, a universal means of communication starts here, in a city that lies at an intersection of cultures.

Another mayor asset to my versatile equipment is the erudite background of my parents. I'm the son of a well-known politician who is also director of his own international school. My mother is a psychologist, teacher and manager of the school. So, naturally I grew up with a lot of erudition in my surroundings.
“If you see your father coming home from work and the only thing he’s holding in his hand is a book…then you quickly make a distinction between what is important and what isn’t.”

At fourteen, the young me already regularly took the place of substitute teacher at my father’s school, when a teacher had been taken ill. I quickly found it quite natural to stand up spontaneously in front of the class to start teaching. In many other ways leadership runs in the family as well. My grandfather led the Lebanese revolution against the French Colonizers, which contributed to the independence of the country in 1943.

The first of the originally Germanic Selmans came to Lebanon as a Germanic commander in the time of the Holy Crusades, a euphemism for the Holy Wars, which took place during the 11th until the 13th centuries. As the tale goes in family circles, he apparently fell for a woman from the region that is now Lebanon. They married and raised a family.
The Selman family was originally Christian, but later adopted the Druze’ religion, which contains elements of Christianity, the Islam and other visions. Finally, the family chose the Islamic religion.
However, within the Muslim faith there are different groups: One of my parents is Shia and the other Sunni; a difference which is as big as the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Through the difference in religions, I mastered the art of communication and persuasion as I often have to be able to please the different parties. Sometimes this would work to my advantage.

Except for the difference of religion, there was also the contrast between urban and rural life. My mother came from the city and my father from the countryside. When I was in the city I could sometimes benefit from my knowledge of the country and vice versa.

MY ART LIFE

Between concept and completion

Art is a sensory perception of the inner life projected onto a blank surface - Raed Selman


Born to paint human beings

I'm Raed Selman, known for my images of agitating, intriguing assemblies and kaleidoscopically formed groups of people. My extraordinarily receptive and sensitive nature brings me into surprisingly emotional conditions. With striking accuracy my knows how to formulate sensitive situations, using a self-invented alphabet and a fiery palette. The result is a boundless and contagious game of colours and lines; an incomparable sensation of colours and vivid layers of acrylics. Seeing my work makes people smile, mainly because I'm an artist who exposes himself in his paintings.
Certainly I agrees…“Well, every individual wants to show and expose himself, wants to be naked, but still they wear clothes. I paint myself.” And...“I was born to be a visual artist. I was born to be an artist and paint human beings.”

The City

Acryl on canvas 270x150cm

"collection SCARLET Telecom Lelystad"

S e l m a n

How much more historical wealth can a region have than when it encompasses one of the earliest roots of many current civilizations? And, how much knowledge would a newborn of this ‘consecrated’ ground already have raked in before he has even started acquiring knowledge? Anybody born in the East-Lebanese town of Baalbeck, or maybe this applies to Lebanon entirely, must be heavily loaded by its culture, and either evolves with it, or, succumbs to it.