With the coming of this month, spring wakes from its long slumber, spreading its perfumes, its colors, and its shades... Let us listen here to our true artist, our friend Mr. Moustafa Farroukh, as he speaks to us of "Spring by the Artists' Brush."
... The Springtime of Life, by the brush of Moustafa Farroukh
The season of spring is one of the seasons of the year most beloved to man, his favorite among them. He awaits it every year with bated breath and makes ready for it, for in it he finds hope after despair, movement after stillness, and light after darkness; and at last he feels in it life stirring its stir and coursing through his veins.
The season of spring has inspired a great deal in men of letters and poets, who have composed upon it their most delicate verses and entrusted to it their tenderest feelings and their loveliest expressions, so that spring, in their verse and their prose, stands fresh and radiant across the ages; we echo its refrain from the folds of their splendid works, and so we live and draw life.
Nor was spring's fortune in the world of the art of painting and the power of the brush any less than in poetry — each is the echo of the other. Could the masters of art fail to be moved by spring and its blossoms, its perfume and its colors, when spring is the symbol of light, the emblem of color, the picture of life and the heart's beat, the lord of the seasons?... And are not artists those who live in constant harmony with nature, sharing with her her winter and her summer, her autumn and her spring? So show us spring in winter, and summer in autumn?!
Spring in their eyes is color and light. The artist is enamored of color, bewitched by its delicacy, its harmony, and the gradations of its tones; and then there is light — and light is the substance of his inspiration, the element of his art, and the cause of his vision.
Spring is, moreover, inspiration and fragrance; it is a
poem which bountiful nature sings to us, to renew our love for her and our attachment to her.
The spring of art is the everlasting spring, and for this reason the artists of old did not leave it out of their art. Botticelli, that genius, immortalized it in a great painting he named "Spring," in which he mingled flowers with fair maidens dancing amid the blossoms of spring on a carpet colored with every manner of plant; by the maidens he signified the breeze, the blossom, the fragrance, and love, and beneath their feet the flowers sprang up and spread the earth with their beautiful carpet.
The artist Botticelli's love of flowers goes back to the city of Florence, which is a paradise and a spring — the city of flowers, whose light greets you wherever your eye falls upon the sweet hills and the open expanses, in the city of Dante, poet of Paradise, and the city of Beatrice, lady of the fair and princess of exalted love.
In this painting of Spring the fair maidens appear circling round Spring and playing with him, letting their blond hair stream out behind them with the breeze, so that the whole scene gains in gaiety and delight. This painting counts among the most beautiful and celebrated paintings on this theme.
And the painting of the artist Fra Angelico — he too gave spring a place