We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Manal Deeb a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Manal, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Embedded in many of my layered artworks are images of my own face. They are self-portraits and they are not! The women faces I create are as beautiful, powerful and successful.
The women never look fearful or defeated. Despite any potential struggles with discrimination, poverty, loss or stress under occupation, they are still empowered. They look ready and able to carry the burdens for themselves and their families.
For me, the woman face is a springboard for revealing deeper and more spiritual connections. I create women on canvas who are a hybrid of their experiences and identities, each one a strong, unafraid and even hopeful individual. I perceive my hybrid self as empowered and positive despite my feelings of exile and memories of the loss of my childhood homeland.
I call myself a hybrid being both here in America and there in Palestine. This hybrid self provides me with the power of being resilient!
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I was just 18 years old when I immigrated to the United States from my hometown of Ramallah, in Palestine’s West Bank. I attended art school at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Now I am between Ramallah and the City of Fairfax, Virginia.
I have exhibited my art all over the U.S. and abroad. I am a knowledge-seeker, a wife and mother to three daughters.
I blend Arabic words and symbolic calligraphic forms with beautiful, sometimes tranquil, images of faces and people. I layer paints, pastels and inks, and sometimes digital images, onto canvases, evoking the look of chipped wallpaper or faded graffiti aging on weathered surfaces.
My paintings could be viewed as symbolic of the psychological layers we all carry of our own experiences, cultures and traditions. Exploring psychology has been my longtime obsession, and I believe it shows.
After drifting from art to raise a family, I returned to school to study psychology. I earned an advanced degree in the Psychology of Art at George Mason University. After maturing and gaining insight into her own psychology, I began a daily practice in the studio again. That was 15 years ago, and since then I have never stopped.
It’s a beautiful addiction, and it gives me life, to just get lost in the studio. Time goes by, and I look up and think, ‘How did that image happen in front of me? That was not a plan.’ I admire the surprise and the spontaneously.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Making art is an act of magic by itself!
As a maker of art, three main elements contributed to lead me to where I am now; freedom of expression, art and psychology education, seeing and viewing others’ art
To develop self into the artistic platform, try always to originate work that leaves an impression or a question, an art piece that the viewers can stand in front of it and try figure out your inner psychology.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I recently, for the first time, had the chance to act in a short film in Palestine, and more particularly in a refugee camp around Bethlehem. That experience has created so much emotions inside me as my role was a mother of the main film character, the Palestinian boy. The film crew, from the producer to the camera man and to others, have positively shown their satisfaction of my scene acts.
Encouraged by the feeling of that chance, I am looking to collaborate more into the movies. This may sound strange for a visual artist, nevertheless, the experience itself has fed my visual art creativity.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ygalleri.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ygalleri/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArtistManalDeeb
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manal-deeb-1a6a7563/
