The sky is not a limit

Young Syrian artists in London

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to some children in Lebanon about an exhibition of their artwork in central London. Exhibited at St James’ Market Pavilion near the galleries of Mayfair in collaboration with New Vision Art Gallery (on which more below), the young artists’ paintings demonstrated an abundance of talent from very different and difficult circumstances.

The artists are studying at Alsama, a charity that provides education for over 880 displaced Syrians aged eleven to eighteen, across the two main refugee camps in Beirut. As Alsama’s Noah Rouse tells me, the charity teaches a wide range of things including the most basic: 96% of their students arrive illiterate or innumerate. The goal is to change this within six months, and to bring students to university readiness within six years.

Alsama also teaches art, and this is what I saw in London. One student, Nadia Khodr, 16, adopted a cool blue palette for a meditative image of a faceless girl, painting. The artwork indicates receptivity to two principal sources. The first is Vincent van Gogh, whose unqualified passion is strongly evoked in her swirling, starry skies.

The second source is Mr Mahmoud, who introduced Nadia to the use of a limited palette, a technique he employs in his own work in Lebanon. Teaching nine art classes at Alsama, each with twelve students, his influence is far reaching. When asked about her dreams for the future, Nadia says she would like to know and develop her own style, so that students of the future will be inspired by it. And perhaps become an art teacher herself.

For Abd Al-Hay, 15, ancient history is an inspiration. He offers the viewer a cornucopia-like bowl, full of huge fruits in a variety of colours, their contours picked out in fine spirals and judicious highlights. His other painting shows a hoplite standing before a burning arcade, his tattered tunic and wounded body showing the dangers he has faced. The soldier’s upright pose suggests that the fighting might be over, at least for now.

Art, Abd Al-Hay says, can change the world, because it can show what he wants to see, and express his dreams. The fruits give you powers, give you energy. What does the gladiator show us about the artist? Loyalty to his country, he tells me, and to his family.

Zahraa Al-Qadri, also 15, paints the familiar narrative of Adam and Eve but projected into a future beyond the recorded story. A wide, sparkling sea has spread itself over the roots of a leafless Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why is it out to sea? Because nobody knows the location of Eden.

Expelled, Adam and Eve are nowhere to be seen. Now snakes rush up the trunk, towards the last remaining red apple which glows tantalisingly against the blue sky, streaked with clouds. Two golden-winged angels flutter about the lifeless tree: can they hold the snakes back? Or will it turn into driftwood?

Zahraa’s principal artistic reference is Salvador Dalí. Another of her works in the exhibition was a surreal picture of a woman with her face in two halves, human and fox: ‘a good face and a tricky face’. Encircling snakes suggest an iconography of good and evil, but things are not clear-cut; they lash against the girl just as much as the fox.

I found this work refreshing and the project exciting. The exhibition ran concurrently with Frieze, which I didn’t go to (out of indifference, I regret to say). Fortunately, talent is everywhere. With the right training, these students of Alsama, Arabic for ‘sky’, could go far. Farther than Frieze!

The exhibition was created and hosted by New Vision Art Gallery, an online platform designed to generate fair and transparent financial opportunities for children and teenagers in conflict zones. It exists to give a platform to artists who are too often overlooked. This year, Alsama Project was selected to exhibit alongside the young artists of New Vision Art School in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the school that inspired the concept of the gallery.

I didn’t meet the Haitian artists, but I was blown away by their work.

It is all for sale and you can purchase it on the New Vision Art Gallery website.