“A portrait belongs to a family” (Post 82)

I am using text from my Journey with Jeddah book, which I trust the reader may enjoy. The extract is taken form the Portraits with ink and watercolour on paper chapter. Please note that the image attached, is not the one I am referring to.

A colleague gave me a gift, namely a set of watercolour pencils with an intense brightness, and I wanted to see what one could do with these. I used these in combination with the black ink outlines, and at times I even applied some white acrylic paint highlights.

Most of the people depicted here are strangers and I photographed them with their permission in the old city, willingly lending me their countenances. As you can see, most of these works have a ‘green’ shade and this could be due to my attempts trying new colour combinations as I was trying to awaken the intensity of the pencils for which they are famous. Yellow over blue makes green and I must have made this ‘mistake’ very often it seems, not that it is a problem.

Let me mention something exciting. During the ‘Everyone is a Hero’ exhibition one of these works caused some ‘trouble’, but I am not sure if it was ‘serious’ trouble, it seemed more like ‘business’ trouble to me. One day after school the gallery notified me that I should make my way to the gallery as soon as possible because there was a gentleman who wanted to call the police because I painted his father.

When I arrived the ‘angry’ conservative gentleman was very pleasant and he told me that someone had alerted him to the fact that a portrait of his father was hanging at the gallery. We talked in front of the artwork which had caused the stir, and I asked him if he was sure it was his dad and he assured me it was indeed. (We even took a selfie of the two of us in front of the work.)

I agreed to send him the reference photo I used and then he proceeded to ask the price, which I supplied and he immediately asked me to lower it for him, which I did. It was very clear that he was not going to call the ‘art’ police and that he was indeed impressed with the bright watercolour portrait. We parted as friends. His sister came to fetch the painting when the exhibition ended.

Have a good day. Let us have humorous moments; please stay out of trouble; no one wants to get into trouble with the “art police”.