With Omar Onsi — The Artist... in His Studio

... You are on the shaded sandy path leading to his house atop a hill overlooking Beirut, in Zaydaniyya. Before you is the great gateway, above which, from behind the glass, the red eyes of blossoms peep, straying among the greening leaves... Around the house are meadows rippling with a luxury of color, left, as their owner wished them, in nature's keeping — but for shrubs standing here and there, radiant in the fullness of their budding, and but for a row of poplar trees rising in loftiness and might... And your imagination runs ahead of you into the house where the masterpieces are: hung, standing... leaning, sleeping... Would that you had a thousand eyes to gaze your fill!!

Do you suppose this artist has moved all Lebanon into his studio... village by village... and knoll by knoll? Every painting has a story surging with colors... and with memory. And there is no one like Onsi, so jealous of his memories, so careful and protective of them out of excess of love, that they are never lost. Without effort he brings out for you, from his hiding places in the corners, canvases going back to his youth — those from his years in Jordan (1922–1927), these from his studies in Paris (1927–1930) — and around you are hundreds of paintings from his fertile production in Lebanon over the last quarter century.

Notice the pride in his eyes as he shows you paintings by his father the physician, bespeaking great precision and taste... Here lies the secret: art in Onsi is an authentic inheritance that found good soil and good tending, so it grew and throve and flowered!

To the artist Khalil Saleeby and his wife belongs the credit of discovering Onsi and guiding him: they took note of his first extraordinary gifts while he was still a student at the American University of Beirut, and friendship grew firm among them. "Others, my son, were created for medicine or for the law," Saleeby told him more than once, "but you are woven for art alone!"... And so Omar Onsi left the university for the spacious fields of art.

That was in the year 1922, and from that time our friend has never ceased exploring the horizons of art, roaming its world, drawing inspiration from his own self, submitting to no particular school among the various classical or modern schools. Whatever developments have overtaken art in the recent period, Omar Onsi has kept his own school, in which whoever of the rising generation wishes may follow him. And with all this he is forever inquiring and studying, never conceding for a day that he has reached a rank in art that contents him... His studio is frequented by the highest of society and by amateurs alike, and he makes no difference in receiving General Weygand, or Mrs. Penrose, or his small pupils!

On Onsi's canvases the traits of his personality are clearly reflected: what childlike sincerity! what balance! what transparency! what gentleness of soul! And though he paints you scenes touched by the light climbing over them, so that they dance here and drowse there in the haze of the shadows... he will never wreck their foundations, mocking their harmony, dragged along after those extremist whims they have named "modern art" — you will never start back before any canvas of his: no discord, no trifling with things sacred. Enough for you that tranquillity and gladness flood the depths of your soul. And is not this, upon your life, the definition of art in its simplest expression??

From a talk by the artist Youssef Howayek about his oldest friend: "Omar Onsi is a true artist, and a philosopher in the course of his artistic life without knowing it! His is the precedence in raising the level of Eastern art... and his works will remain alive on the day other works crumble and are folded away!"

And in description of his canvas, let us listen to Dr. Abd al-Rahman al-Labban: "Onsi is a tender poet who composes his poems in choice, refined lines and fresh colors, and chants them to a delicate rhythm of warm shadows and merry, dancing lights..."

Dear reader!...

You may pass him standing on a mountain slope, heedless of everything, his hair disheveled, never lifting his eyes from the canvas except to stare into the far horizon, hurrying his brush to mix its colors, recording a violet sunset, or a rosy sunrise from behind a mountain. Stand in awe. You are present at a moment of creation! And our rare artist — this is his life: nature's companion, a searcher after beauty, seizing it wherever he finds it, so that it trembles under his fingertips in a throb of life: image and color and shade, as though time had halted in its course... and that scene stands there, never to move!!...

And dear reader... one last whisper!...

On a day when joy chokes and stifles in your heart, and your sky grows heavy and dark with cares... feast your senses on an "Onsi" canvas: the world will smile on you anew, the sun will glitter again, and from paradise a dew-moist breeze will brush your face...