Because Italy has long been a land sympathetic to art and artists, it was right that the Italian Cultural Club in Jeddah hosted an exhibition of three Saudi and two Italian artists. During “The Way of Art and Feeling,” Villa Italia, a small building inside the club, was decorated with various kinds of art.
Five women artists participated in the exhibition with nine art works each. The artists were Filwa Nazer who showed nine oil paintings of different sizes. Latifa Darwish exhibited three oud sculptures decorated with turquoise, silver and precious stones and she also showed three porcelain works and three examples of calligraphy with gold and silver thread. Maha Zaghloul showed nine works of clay.
From Italy, Amina Roma showed four water colors and five collages. Rita Canarsa exhibited nine oil paintings.
Latifa Darwish’s art was special and different. She did not use regular canvas to paint on; rather she painted on porcelain plates. One of the plates was of an actual scene of a very bold woman sitting and smoking a sheesha in a traditional Egyptian coffee shop alongside men. “I liked that bizarre scene and transferred it to porcelain,” Darwish explained. She loves using precious and semi-precious stones and silver as well as oud. “Instead of vases, why don’t we use oud trees with a nice scent with the incense we burn as part of our décor? Oud is, after all, part of our tradition.”
Darwish said, “Porcelain is music to me. The touch of it is very soft and smooth. With porcelain you cannot do the color directly; you have to concentrate the color gradually so that it sometimes take up to eight layers to make the right color.” Since 1993, she has been working with porcelain and painting scenes of Hijazi culture
This year’s exhibition was the second in a dialogue of Saudi and Italian artists. The first one took place in the same place in November and featured work by six Saudi artists who had studied in Italy.
“I did water colors and collage work which I began 30 years ago when I lived in Madina,” said Roma. The collage is her latest work and is what she is doing now. She has been influenced by Islamic art that she studied which taught her the value of space, color combinations and geometry. “The common theme is the search for beauty and harmony,” she commented.
Rita Cannarsa-Mirdad, who has been living here for 34 years, showed her loyalties to her country of birth and her country of residence, Italy and Saudi Arabia. Her oil paintings shows different aspects of the two countries displaying spring in Italy and the sea in Jeddah. She said, “I wish that more cooperation would take place between Italy and Saudi Arabia so that they would learn each other’s styles of art.”
