Chatting with the Omani artist Naila al Maamariyah generates good feeling as she utters positive words about the universe and life. An artist who is filled with all this positivity will surely paint bright cheerful artworks. Her personal exhibition “God’s Dominion” included 30 artworks inspired by the surrounding and the environment around her to gain a true beauty from colour and form which reflects the power of Allah almighty in his creations.
“The beauty is created by Allah. The harmony of colours is just like a symphony. We play with them as we wish,” she commented.
When planning for this exhibition, Al Maamariyah said: “I started with butterflies but I wasn’t much convinced because the butterfly formation requires a unique method that I wasn’t planning for. I was looking for diversity. I chose birds because their body structure can result in numerous paintings.
“I choose the abstract art to focus on colours only without involvement on the tiny details. From each bird, I chose a particular part to sovereign. Sometimes, the viewers of my paintings would not understand from the first glance that this part is of a bird. They might think it is a desert or a hill, however, a close look at the painting would give the whole idea”.
I focus on geometric forms since my journey in art started and I continued using these forms until now. The circle means the continuity, the vertical lines means the integrity, while the horizontal lines mean the stability.
Some works contain dots. The dot is the first element of fine art that has no geometric element. It is a code but the body of the bird contains these dots. I just shaped them in my own way to give the work more aesthetic features.
Reflected in her eyes, etched in her mind and stored in her hearing, saying with the loudest voice through her work, Allah is the greatest creator and the creative photographer. That’s what the artist had in mind, the colour beauty of the creatures and the hues of their beautiful colours, and the differences in their forms and colour harmony tell the human mind clearly that it is only by God’s miracle. He can only bring it with great power.
The artist took the element of birds as a colour study to enjoy the sound of the birds chirping and the variety of their types and shapes that gave her enough imagination and positive energy for expression. “As I have seen from the charms of nature centred in birds, they are in themselves a natural art that grasps the artist attention, along with the realisation of colour beauty as an artistic value in the works. She expressed this with meditation and took the colours of the birds and painted them in its abstract style and its own technique with a wondrous colour consistency in all of her paintings and artistic strokes.
My message to art students is “look around and contemplate at the creatures of Allah, you will see marvellous colours and extraordinary life. Not just mixing of colours, as we are taught in schools”.
It is worth noting that her exhibition was launched under the auspices of Sayyid Said al Busaidy, Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Youth, for Culture. It will run until January 21 in the headquarter of the Omani Society of Fine Arts.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
