Unveiling the beauty and the pain

Fatma Abu Rumi is not afraid of flouting convention – or expressing her feelings through art.

By AVSHALOM AVITAL
Unveiling the beauty and the pain (photo credit: Avshalom Avital)
Unveiling the beauty and the pain
(photo credit: Avshalom Avital)
Artists, for the most part, have the courage of their convictions, but this can sometimes lead to conflict and confrontation.
Fatma Abu Rumi has certainly had plenty of that during her artistic career.
This week, an exhibition of her works opened at the Museum of Islamic Art. The show is called “Between Sorrow and Beauty,” and both come out strongly in all the items on display.
Abu Rumi, who was born in the Lower Galilee town of Tamra, takes a realistic approach to artistic expression, but there is also a strong presence of symbolism in the exhibition. One of the principal symbolic items is a painting of a hawk with its head covered, perched on the arm of a woman with colorful varnish on her fingernails. The bird symbolizes the dominance of the male in Arab society, while the head covering prevents the hawk from fulfilling its male-defined function, thereby allowing the woman to come to the fore.
“I think, to begin with, the observer sees the beauty in my paintings – the painting approach, the colors, and the beads and the ornamentation I add to them,” says the artist. “However, when someone looks more deeply at the paintings, he will see the content, which is not at all beautiful. The two things live together.”
Even so, realism and symbolism are not natural bedfellows. While the former conveys an image in a direct manner, the latter requires the observer to do some of the work, to ponder and construe the meaning behind the symbol.
“Realism belongs to everyone, but symbolism is about who I am,” she says simply.
Interestingly Abu Rumi, who is a Muslim, dipped into the world of Christian iconography for some of the works. The artist says the cross-religious foray allowed her more freedom to maneuver, and enabled her to sidestep some potential land mines.
“You know Islam does not allow people to paint human figures, because they say it is like competing with God,” she explains. “That doesn’t exist in Christianity. Churches are full of figures, and they even painted their prophet [Jesus]. So I used a lot of Christian symbols in my work.”
But she does her best to fuse the two religions in her oeuvre. “I use a lot of arabesque [artistic ornamentation], too, which adds beauty from the Islamic side.”
The latter is not just about embellishing the final product. Abu Rumi takes issue with quite a few areas of Islamic society, including the imbalance in the social standing of the genders. One painting features a silhouette of her father with a bridal veil over his head; another has him with a hijab over his face.
“I wanted to put the man in the same place that Arab society places the woman,” she explains. “This is my way of showing that I am not willing to succumb to the control mechanisms of men.”
Though such a strident attitude may not sit too well with the powers that be in Arab society, Abu Rumi intends to have her say, come what may.
“I am 35 years old and divorced,” she says – a none-too-common phenomenon in the Arab world.
“I wanted to study art, and my husband refused to allow me to do that for four years.”
He eventually relented, but it was too late to save the marriage.
“I studied art for four years [at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon], and when I finished my studies, I divorced him – I divorced him, not the other way round,” she declares with undisguised pride. “It is not at all acceptable in our society, and it is even tougher when the husband is a relative.”
But her father and the rest of her family have been “very supportive,” she says, adding that her father didn’t even mind her using him as an artistic vehicle for her contrary stand on accepted mores, even though he wasn’t exactly aware of his contribution to his daughter’s work.
“He came to my final exhibition, at college, and he was surprised that the other students recognized him instantly. He didn’t know his portrait was in there,” says the painter. “I took photos of him, which I used for the painting. He did not know why I took the photos, and he cried – with joy – when he saw his portrait. He is a religious man, but also very open. He worked in Haifa and Tel Aviv and other places, and has got quite a Western outlook.”
It seems that although she has a lot on her plate, she channels her trials into her art.
“Yes, they do say you have to suffer for your art, and that suffering can produce beauty,” she agrees.
“I use that in my work.”
In addition to the more recognizable symbolism from Christianity and Islamic culture, there is one surprising image in “Between Sorrow and Beauty” – a teddy bear.
“That’s from my childhood,” explains the artist. “I had a very difficult and unhappy childhood. I had a different way of thinking, and I can’t recall being happy as a kid.”
As a symbol of the more common, acceptable face of childhood, a teddy bear usually conjures up images of healthy innocence and happy, sunny days.
“Not for me,” says Abu Rumi. “In my work, the teddy looks like it has been slung to the side. The teddy is me. It looks sad in my paintings.”
Besides irking some quarters of Muslim society, her teddy bear images have ruffled a few Christian feathers.
“I did a painting with 12 teddies – a sort of ‘Last Supper’ – and a few Christians didn’t like that,” she says. “They thought I was being disrespectful of Jesus.”
In fact, she was only trying to convey her dismay at the hardships of life here. “For me, the painting is a symbol of the end of childhood, of how we have to cope with all sorts of political difficulties, all the social hardships we have, and financial challenges. We don’t really experience our childhood and the innocence it should have. I felt those social and financial difficulties when I was a child.”
But today, she is a grown-up. She can convey her feelings through her art, and clearly doesn’t give a hoot about the flak she has to parry in the process.
“I need my art to put my thoughts and feelings across,” she states. “I think that if I didn’t have that, I would be very frustrated and angry, and maybe even violent.”