“Painting With and Without Brushes” is the title of a group exhibition, which took place in Asmara from January 12 to 19, 2009 at The Gallery. The artists presenting their work are two Sudanese painters Hassaan Ali, ElTayeb DawelBait, and Ermias Ekube, Eritrean. The show was sponsored by the Peace-building Center for the Horn of Africa (P.C.H.A), the American Embassy in Eritrea, and the Cultural Affairs Bureau of the P.F.D.J. The art show was followed by a ten-day workshop of the same title conceived for upcoming Eritrean artists to familiarize themselves with new techniques and share experiences with professional artists.

Both the exhibition and the workshop are part of ongoing efforts undertaken by the P.C.H.A and their partners to promote peace in the region by, among other things, strengthening and developing friendly relations between the peoples of the region. In this column, we will be presenting a series of interviews conducted with some of the artists who took part in the show and in the workshop. We will begin with Hassaan Ali who had exhibited his work previously in Eritrea at the Alliance Française, Casa degli Italiani, and in Massawa, and had conducted a similar workshop 2 years ago in Asmara.

Hassaan Ali Hamed was born in Wadi Halfa, Sudan, near the border of Egypt. After Wadi Halfa was flooded by the Nile, he moved to New Halfa, on the eastern part of the Sudan near Kassala, close to the border of Eritrea. He studied at the University of Khartoum, and graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Political Science. He now lives and works in Egypt as a professional artist.

Q: Can you describe for us the kind of art you do?

H.A: I would say that I regard myself as an experimental artist. In my paintings, I use different kinds of media but I prefer oil paints.

Q: Can you describe your style?

H.A: I don’t have a style. I am an experimental artist, so I am against style. In a single exhibition, I can have two or three different styles. For me, a style is the end of experimentation. Experimenting means you are always developing, going into new areas.

Q: What are the areas in which you have been experimenting until now?

H.A: Until now, I can say that I have been experimenting mostly in the area of abstraction. I was obsessed with colors, lines, and their relations. My work is a result of images not meaning. Images develop. I don’t give titles to my paintings except when I work on a subject for a specific exhibition or biennale. Last year for example I participated in the Cairo Biennale. I presented six pieces titled “Dislocation,” about the war in Darfur, and out of 150 artists only 10 had a prize and I was one of them. I had the Excellency prize in that show.

Q: Do you see yourself as a Sudanese artist or as an East African artist?

H.A: I see myself as an artist, that’s all.

Q: You now live in Egypt. Has it had an influence on your work?

H.A: In Egypt, I live as a professional painter. Cairo is very rich culturally. Very often there are exhibitions from all over the world: American artists, French, German… There are several biennales: in Cairo, Alexandria. There is a sculpture symposium in Aswan, in the south of Egypt. There are also film festivals, experimental theatre, etc. This richness influences me, but I feel it is a kind of dialectical influence: I influence them and they influence me, we influence each other in a way.

Q: Do you feel it is important to have contacts with artists in the region?

H.A: Yes I think so. It is always important to exchange ideas, to know each other deeply in terms of culture and everything else. If we know each other, we can get to peace easily. If we don’t know each other, then there is a gap and this does not lead to peace.
I think art is one of the basic things that can get people together. Because artists are open, liberal, it is not politics. We can easily see this in the workshop. The artists worked together without barriers; they worked together easily, without problems.

Q: Your work is mostly abstract and for most people in our region, abstract art is not so easy to understand. How do you feel about that?

H.A: I think it is easy but some artists and critics make it difficult. Here, when you go to the market you see lots of T-shirts that have abstract designs and patterns inspired from the traditional culture without real figures in them, and people deal with it easily. But when they look at paintings they want to find meaning, and that is the problem. If they know that a painting is like a dress, people would understand that it is just about relations between lines and colors, motifs and symbols. In my paintings, there is a combination of pure abstraction and figurative abstraction. So if there are good art critics around, they can help to narrow the gap between artists and the public. But if the critics are not good, the gap widens. The role of the artist is to make art and the role of the critic is to explain. Some artists cannot explain their art. I leave it to the public to communicate directly with my paintings and critics can explain them if they can.

Q: Can you tell us why you generally don’t try to explain your paintings?

H.A: I don’t know. I just cannot explain in those terms: “what is this” and “what is that.” It is the vision of labor. As I said, the role of the artist is to paint and the role of the critic is to explain.

Q: Would you say there are themes that are recurrent in your paintings?

H.A: Yes, symbols, motifs and decorations from the Sudan. You know there are differences between the different regions, the south, the north, etc. I use these symbols and motifs sometimes but I am not copying them. I just use something of their structure, their design, but in my own way.

Q: And in your working process, do those designs come up often?

H.A: Because I am experimenting, they come up but not intentionally: a line comes up and then I remove or add something. It is not intentional. It comes in the process of painting. My dream is to paint like children: freely without imposing some drawing or thinking about a figure beforehand, but rather to enter the painting freely without thinking of a subject or preconceived images.

Q: Occasionally though, you have worked on specific themes as they relate for example to the flooding of your home village in the Sudan. Is that a recurrent theme?

H.A: In the current exhibition, I have displayed a sketchbook from last year’s exhibition in Cairo in which my main theme was Dislocation. But I am not fixed to that theme. So, yes it comes on and off. For example I have done 5 or 6 children’s books and that theme comes up in there.

Q: How would you describe your working process?

H.A: Openness. Abstraction.

Q: Do you think that African art is closely related to abstraction?

H.A: Yes I think so. Look at Picasso’s masks. Look at the work that Picasso and Braque did during their exploration of Cubism, it all came after looking at African art. If you look at African art, you will see there are distortions in animal or human figures, exaggeration of dimensions and this is abstraction.

Q: What about titles in your paintings?

H.A: Most of my paintings are untitled because I am then free to express myself, and people are equally free to communicate with my paintings without me leading them, framing them to search for meaning in my paintings.

Q: Are you not interested in working in a style akin to realism?

H.A: I did do that when I was young. I think for me it is a development. In abstraction, I can paint freely without the rules of painting and I like that.

Q: So how does it happen and what comes out when you paint that way?

H.A: I don’t know. What comes out and how it comes out is complicated. I feel that when I am painting, I am in the painting: moving, dancing. When I am painting, I am in the situation. When I come out of it, it is over. Sometimes I ask myself “how did I do this?” I think that the most difficult thing for painters is to explain how it is when they are painting.

Q: Do you feel that for you painting is a choice or a necessity?

H.A: A necessity. I can’t live without it.

Q: What is so powerful?

H.A: It is like magic, it is an obsession.

Q: Does it allow you to see things you would not see otherwise?

H.A: Yes, possibly.

Q: Do you feel it is a means of communication with others or with yourself?

H.A: First with myself, then I leave the others to communicate with my work and NOT with my ideas.

Q: So it is a direct means of communication?

H.A: Yes, a visual communication. I think this visual way of communication is so wide, so open, it can influence more than the communication of ideas. To me, this is also an abstract way of thinking. I think the world is abstract.

Q: Do you feel that you were able to communicate in that way with the artists during the workshop?

H.A: Yes, absolutely, although I do not talk very much, just whisper sometimes, but they understood me. I think the result of this workshop, the work that they did with me in two or three days, was more advanced than the previous workshop two years ago that lasted more than a week. This time the artists did lots of good products.

Q: Why do you think this second workshop was so successful?

H.A: In this workshop, we worked on two techniques. One of them was to work on textile using different approaches that were presented by Eltayeb, and this I think gave the young artists new ways of expressing themselves and later it came out in their paintings. In other words, the experience of fabric painting came out in the paintings they did with and without brushes. Maybe that is why there was greater groundbreaking this year.

Q: Finally, what relationship do you think there is between art and peace?

H.A: For me art is life, without art there is no peace. Without peace there is no art.


Thank you Hassaan Ali for sharing your experience with us.