"An Applied Artistic Renaissance" — with the Artist Salwa Rawda Shoucair

The artist Salwa Rawda Shoucair returned to Beirut during the past month after a year's absence in the United States, where she specialized in the applied arts, sent on a mission by Point Four.

Salwa's specialization ranged over more than one artistic field and more than one institute. She moved among the vocational art institutes, and the longest period she spent was three months at the academy of arts at Cranbrook, during which she mastered the art of making and glazing ceramics (Enamelling).

She then studied enameling on metals — silver and copper — then weaving in its various kinds, and silverwork: jewelry and fine household vessels. And she mastered the whole technique of that first act of creation in which the power of invention shows itself, and on which everything depends... After setting down the design, the artist would turn the model about with her two supple hands, true to the original...

The summit of her art appears in the glazing and in the marriage of colors, their blending and their harmony — and here the skill of the "abstract" artist is revealed. For it makes no difference to Salwa — or to any other artist — whether, for her artistic end, she takes up clay or canvas: the act of creation is one, and the rapture is one...

We knew this artist, shortly before her departure for America, devoted to abstract painting; her enthusiasm has not cooled now, but in her art she has turned from the field of canvases to ceramics, silver, and copper. What magnificent pieces come out from under her fingertips! Bracelets, rings, necklaces, and brooches; then ashtrays and ceramic ornaments and the like... And she insists that every piece remain single and unique, without a second!

Salwa Rawda is perhaps alone among our artists in specializing in these applied arts. We may have those who concern themselves with making ceramics or glazing them, but this artist has come to know the secrets of the craft — its ins and outs — and above all this, she has excelled at bringing out the practical side within a modern abstract artistic frame, in which no one can keep pace with her.

We hope, for the young artist Salwa, that our government will know how to profit from her gifts and her specialization, and appoint her supervisor of the applied-art department the day the "Women Teachers' College" is founded. There lies her broad field for spreading the idea among the rising generation of girls, in the cause of an awaited applied artistic renaissance.