My Friend Salwa

.. Your fingertips told me of the genius of colors and lines.. and the story of the canvases..
Your eyes told me of a far horizon.. of piercing through the known to the unknown.. of unriddling talismans and secrets.. Your feet told me of resolve and faith and strength that pounds the earth and rocks the mountains..
What tomorrow is this that awaits you, Salwa?
What tomorrow is this that turns.. that hovers about you?
What tomorrow is this of which we know nothing but the white void?

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.. Your strings writhe.. and your depths clamor with the call.. the call to creation and invention..
But your brow is hard and stubborn.. as though behind it were an unyielding soul that mocks fates and idle feelings..
And you lend your canvases a hardness from that brow.. As for what lies behind the lines and the colors, none see it but those who have been granted a surpassing sense in the fingertips and in the eyes..

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.. And you walked in the procession of the world's artists, yearning with every atom of your atoms to build a beautiful tomorrow.. and a strong, rebellious generation..
Its god the mind, and its prophet knowledge..
And after a deep trial of the spirit, you arrived where you arrived: at abstraction, and the embodying of the unseen, drawing inspiration from round and triangular and curving lines.. and from pure colors, which bespeak a personality strong, firm-rooted, believing, without perplexity and without anxiety.. sure of yourself with an absolute sureness.. And the canvas, in your hands, moves in a marvelous harmony.. and the colors cry out and revolve upon themselves.. Everything in the universe is a unity.. everything in the universe has a value..
The whole world is in harmony.. drawn close, brought near to us by mighty machines.. which now heighten our sensitivity, and now mock distances and time..

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It is as though you were speaking, and colors and lines were your speech.. as though you were saying: the world is joined part to part, and the greatness of man lies in his surpassing power, which masters nature, and creates, and uncovers secrets, and composes whatever forms it will, to make of the discordant a flowing harmony.. and of the scattered a well-knit unity.. This beautiful composition is nothing less than a creation without peer in the world of creation and invention.. And thus man shares with nature in her matchless genius.. he offers us compositions, as nature does, and we might call them leaps..

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... And in Paris you lived years.. you lived bent over your canvases, painting and painting, creating and creating.. And Paris took notice of you, and pointed to your canvases in its most famous newspapers and magazines, all of them pointing to your splendid artistic gift and to your eminent place in the world of modern art.. So hear what the French critics said of you:

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.. "Your exhibition is like a cutter of stone who shatters walls with his might.. The tension in your canvases, and the commanding will, make us feel a great terseness and concision..

.. "You are not, Salwa, merely a creative pupil of the modern school of art.. you are far from accepting the recognized laws to the letter, for you have brought them into being a second time, after adapting them to your temperament and your mind, and you have colored them as it pleased you.. And it is likely that you adapted them in keeping with your Arab mentality..
As for the colors and lines in your gouache paintings, they bespeak simplicity and purity.. and an inspired vitality.. This is the greatest proof that their author possesses the qualities of the sincere and faithful artist, who creates with a strong will and an astonishing power..

.. "You have been able, Salwa, to bring out in your canvases a supple, pliant sensibility, so that in your first fruits a generous Eastern spirit is gathered.. blending and flowing into the depths of the Western direction and its conceptions of art.. without your being influenced, in what you painted, as a mere follower is influenced; rather you rejected, with the rejection of one confident and assured, the traditional impressions.. and cut for yourself a path of inspired newness..
Life pulses and speaks in what this supple brush has created.. this brush rising toward the light.."

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.. Have you heard what these French critics have said of you, in the world of art and beauty.. in the world of creation and invention.. in a world all life and motion and renewal.. in a living world that moves on and on.. before which the current of reaction is put to shame, and every one of its pillars is broken???

.. And what of our Arab world?.. What — say, what have you to tell?? Did the Arab pass by indifferent, as he passes by all the faces of life?..

Did he pass without sensing or feeling.. without asking.. without standing one single minute, silent, probing, searching?.. Did he pass by scoffing?.. Did he stand chattering, blaspheming against man and his worth?.. Say, how is it in Lebanon?.. What have you, O land of thought and radiance! What have you?.. Have you critics?.. Are your critics artists and men of letters?.. Then what have you in Lebanon??

Thurayya Malhas
Amman