Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Sharjah, UAE

Sketch03
I had heard a lot of good things about Sharjah, but it was not untill the Sharjah Art Bienale started that I decided to paid a visit to the city. Not many people know that Sharjah is the Emirate with the most museums. The culture was always in the interest of the rulers from Sharjah.

I was delighted by the collection of arabistic painters in the art museum. It is a great collection, with beautiful watercolors showing scenes from the past in the middle east. I spent a long time watching carefully these watercolors. They woke in me the desire to go to all those places, to see how are they like today and to paint them again.

Before entering the museum I got distracted by this scene of the boys playing cricket. The indian and pakistani population is very high in the UAE and along with their culture they have also contribute with their love for the cricket. You find people playing cricket in the parks everywhere in the UAE.

The old buildings in the background host the art works for Art Sharjah Bienale exhibition. (You can see that I included the red and blue banners that announces the Bienale) All the elements together: Old buildings, heritage, new modern culture and popular culture are what I always look to portrait in my drawings.

PS: The drawing was done in March before leaving the UAE. I still have many unposted sketches and it is a pity to leave them on the sketchbooks. Some times I open my sketchbooks and feel a little nostalgic watching them.

6 comments:

  1. Saw this on the Urban sketchers site, and also commented there. I am now following your blog. Good job.

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  2. THIS is the kind of sketch I hunger for, in my own sketches and when I look at others' sketches. Seems to simple, spare, yet captures everything necessary to convey the place, the movement, the mood. How you feel about your sketchbooks is how I feel about my written journals, the poetry fragments, the creative writing threads, even just the simple daily recordings. So aren't you very glad you have them?

    Toni Brown
    (Desert Mermaid)

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  3. thanks @Noviceartist!
    thanks @Desert Mermaid, In a time where all kind of live documentation is digital..photos and emails, there is not much space left to the memory. The digital medium because is so easy to reproduce loose the value of the piece. If in a beautiful moment I made 100 digital photos.. or just one sketch, the value of the sketch is bigger that each one of the pictures. At the same time the pictures usually got lost in a hard disc, while the drawings or the written journals will remain. You are right in what you wrote, I 'm very happy I got my sketchbooks.

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  4. Omar -- I am smiling about your comments, above -- although I respond to and greatly admire what digital photographers can do, in my own efforts, I use the straight-out-of-the-camera approach or I use an 'old school' (film) camera. And for me, though e-mail and Internet closes the distance between people, I will always prefer correspondence via regular mail. I'd LOVE to correspond with you (just to get the stamps from the envelopes, as you travel so much). Smile! And finally: KINDLE and those types of 'books' will NEVER (for me) replace holding a real book in my hands to read.

    Toni

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  5. P.S. Do you have an e-mail address you would feel comfortable giving me? Mine is antoniafufu@yahoo.com. The one on your Website has returned my effort to communicate there.

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  6. This is a beautiful painting.

    I wish I could get to the exhibition before it's over.

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