TALENTED young Saudi women are breaking new ground every day. A different and exciting art exhibition opened this week featuring cartoons and caricatures by four under 25-year-old Saudi girls. The exhbition is at the Beaux Art Maison on Al-Shuhada Street in Al-Hamra District in Jeddah. Organized by the Talented Girls Patronage Group of Makkah, the Girls and Cartoons Exhibition aims at opening new doors for Saudi women.
“We believe in a women’s role in the civilized development of our society and therefore believe in supporting women and providing them with the opportunities to express themselves,” aid Lamia Attas, the founder of the group that takes ‘together towards creativity’ as their slogan with the goal of supporting young women who are talented in art, literature or science. The exhibition presents cartoons by two girls-Nouf Koshak and Dania Gari — as well as works by an upcoming caricaturist, Tamadur Kutbi, and those by an already flourishing caricaturist, Hanaa Hajjar.
The Talented Patronage Group bought two stories from a writer who writes comics and asked the girls to draw cartoons illustrating the stories. Nouf’s work is in English and it is entitled ‘The White Match,’ while Dania’s is in Arabic, ‘The Hero of Acrobats.’ The girls were given freedom to develop the stories, the characters and names. Their drawings were evaluated by Atif Abdul Fattah, editing general secretary of Mickey and Superman Arabic magazines. He believes that they will soon be ready for colored cartoons and better character expressions that will make them professionals.
“It took me a year to complete the job because I was in college at the same time so I only worked during vacations,” Nouf explained. She graduated with a degree in English literature and never attended art college; the only art classes she had was in school. She began expressing herself artistically at ten and two years ago, she began focusing on animated cartoons. “I love animated cartoons and because I read a lot of comics, I started to try and draw my own,” she said. She particularly likes Japanese cartoons, which is obvious from her style. She would like to have the opportunity to go to Japan and learn the style or at least have an expert comment on her work; she even began learning Japanese. She intends to continue developing her skills and hopes to publish her work.
“We will be presenting the work of other talented girls. All of these girls developed their own talent after reading comics because there are no specialized schools here which teach cartoons. Unfortunately they are not encouraged, even by their parents, because comics are not taken as a serious art form so we hope to find them a publisher that will print their work,” Lamia said. The group also plans to provide cartoon-drawing lessons by a professional at its center.
The exhibition runs until April 5, 2006. For information on the exhibition call 6614651 and about the girls [email protected].
