Cell Division: An Aesthetic View

by Samia A. Halaby

February 1, 1995

I was born in Jerusalem in Palestine in 1936. Losing my country remained painful throughout my life. Pictures have always fascinated me deeply. I spent hours of reverie looking at the little oil paintings my father brought to our home in Yafa.

There have been times when paintings possessed me and times when I remember making them with the relaxed ease of a sunny afternoon. Whenever I found myself bored with them I tried to find new directions. There were times of confusion when my friends would fear coming to my house because at such times I would besiege them with requests for criticism.

Today, flat two dimensional pictures are so numerous, so cheep, and so omnipresent that we forget that only seventy years ago they were rare expensive commodities. I think more pictures were made during the past century than in all previous centuries. We use them for a variety of functions and most of them serve our needs by aiding the production of life's necessities. Pictures are a useful magnificent language.

I try to explore the language of pictures. I do not believe that contemporary symbolist and surrealist tendencies will advance the art of picturing. I think they are an artistic dead end. But they are fashionable and my abstract paintings are very unfashionable now. I know! But, I think that it is in the area of abstraction as the concrete imitation of motion in reality that new ideas will grow.

In computers I found a medium that caused new developments in my painting. To use this medium for what it can best do and not for imitating older media meant learning to program. I did. Afterward, I wrote programs which produce kinetic paintings with sound. I did this on the Amiga. Now I use a PC. I have written a program which allows me to perform paintings live while jamming with musicians.

The computer has brought an intellectual cell-division in my thinking on painting. All that is gestural and textural has gone into my oil and acrylic paintings while the hard geometry that used to be in my static paintings has migrated to my programmed kinetic paintings. Thus the paintings in this studio, although made with the computer, being static reflect more the gestural thinking.

You've finished reading "An Aesthetic View." You might want to see the "Short Tiography" or the "Long Bigoraphy" or peruse " The Resume."

Copyright, Samia A. Halaby, 1998, All rights reserved.

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