MY ART LIFE continued 4

At nineteen years of age I started art school, the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts. The final assessment of the second year was especially important. To pass, everyone at the academy had to reproduce an artwork. I couldn’t bring myself to do this. Teachers warned me that I would fail. On ‘Judgement Day’ I showed up with a blank piece of canvas and stated that I could only consider making a reproduction of my own work. Agape the other students waited. However, I got a high grade. This wouldn’t be the last time. At the University, the teachers often took us outside to paint landscapes. There weren’t any funds to travel far and for three years I returned to the same spot to make sketches. I turned every stone and felt there wasn’t a spot left that I hadn’t painted. On an assessment day I showed up with a white canvas again. “What do you want?” the teachers asked me. “A place for my emptiness” I replied. And again I managed to get a high grade. What also happened was that my canvasses were removed. For example, I had made a sensual portrait of a girl in my class 'X girlfriend" and exhibited it in the school building. Teachers removed it, stating that it didn’t belong there and that it certainly wasn’t the idea to create work outside of the module.You have to go to Paris or Berlin, they said. There you have the freedom to paint something like that. I then took down the painting and stamped on it with my foot. The teacher asked what the meaning of this was, but I replied:” I’m adding my signature to it.” “You surely have to go to France!” the teacher concluded, which in Lebanon is synonym for Western-Europe. “Some time later I started painting naked men who opened their jeans to take out their genitals, and I explained that the genitals, which transformed into apples, were the forbidden fruits which Adam and Eve ate, when the first sin was committed and man was cast out of paradise….Thank God actually. When I tried to talk to people about the paintings at that time, they reacted with indignation before I had finished speaking. The reactions were: What in God’s name are you doing, you’re painting naked men, taking their genitals out of their pants!....to pee with it? There weren’t any among them who thought:…Oh, to masturbate with. Jesus Christ, he’s masturbating! Yes really, just look at the model, aren’t you getting the idea that there’s something sensual, something erogenous about it? I asked. Oh, then there’s really something wrong with you, they replied.”
The paintings with naked men were on display at a major expo in the Citadel of Tripoli in 1992. My work was exhibited next to the work of my Academy teachers, right next to their landscapes.