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 jeal-ous 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!