kameel Hawa | Sketches
Graphics, Typography, Design, Painting, Saudi arabia, Mohtaraf, Beirut Graphics, Kameel Hawa
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MOMENTS by Kameel Hawa @ Galerie Cheriff Tabet

Artist Biography Kameel Hawa draws, paints, sculpts and designs. He projects words into art pieces, shaping typographic sculptures out of Arabic and Phoenician alphabets. He dabbles with photography, creates books and magazines and experiments with screen prints and other art forms. An autodidactic artist, he is today best known for his sculptures: the typographic monument of Beirut, the tribute to his alma mater AUB, and the eight interpretations of the word Fann (Arabic for Art) which have drawn both popular and particular acclaim. An accomplished designer, Kameel founded AlMohtaraf some three decades ago, a regional graphic design house which he still inspires and drives to date. AlMohtaraf is famous for combining refined aesthetics with modern design solutions, unfailingly maintaining a profound continuity with indigenous needs and values. Kameel has had several solo exhibits in Beirut, Cairo and Kuwait. He has participated for years in the Beirut Art Fair and the Beirut Art Week. His...

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A cup of coffee please

Yesterday I had a small encounter with an order of one coffee at my Riyadh hotel, this time AlFaisaliyyah. I called room service and asked for a cup of Nescafe’. When the waiter came a while later, on the tray he  had the coffee powder in a small open pot. I noticed the ‘blond’ color, and told him this must be Nescafe’ Gold! He confirmed. So I told him I only  drink the normal Red Mug Nescafe’. He apologized saying that the Hotel only serves this type. So I called reception and explained, using an argument that I had used Before in similar cases, saying that the Hotel cannot serve a ‘variety’ of a drink, and not serve the main regular type. You can have Nescafe’ gold for those who might like it, but you cannot not have Nescafe’ proper first. Similarly if a guest asks for a cup of tea,...

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WORDART ANIMATION

A WORD ART ! If anything has frontiers it is art; if anything has no frontiers it is art. Take my ‘word art’ for it. [embed]https://vimeo.com/87153151[/embed] How much art goes into the designing of a “word”, one can not always tell for sure. This book, or if you wish to call it sample portfolio, is a compilation of designed Arabic words that do not belong to classical Arabic calligraphy، nor follows any set parameters or rules. Today this kind of work is called ‘Word Art’. Though it has gained popularity, this term is yet to be better understood. The artworks in this book are of two types: The first one is spontaneous, drawn with free hand ink strokes; the second – more studied and less spontaneous – intends to be a representation of an object, an idea and sometimes a person’s name. In the past, Arabic calligraphers executed works of a similar nature:...

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A laugh or two!

Every time you hold a product and turn it around its made in China. So I thought to save us and china the trouble, we ask the Chinese to stop writing this statement, and we just write on the the very few remaining products this!     email drawing   A New toy! To overcome boredom on weekend evenings here in Jeddah, I sometimes do what many people do, go window shopping in malls. Watching how products develop and are displayed is one my pastimes. But I am also a person that admires, among the beautiful things in life, amusing toys. Once as I passed a toy shop, an old question that was still striving in my mind since when my children were kids, popped up. For years I have been under the impression that toys have become a meager choice. A stuffed bear or a plastic car. To cut the story short I entered the...

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Why the vase?

Few years ago, I had written the short introduction to my small book ‘flowers in vases’, and in it I try to explain how come I only paint flowers in vases, and never in nature. The explanation I gave ( included below) pleased many, and I surely still hold to it. Only now I feel I wish so add a more realistic and sort of tangible reason: the vase without flowers is empty and sad, and the flowers without the vase are scattered with form. The vase gives the bouquet of flowers a perfect base out of which they can flow out and up in a beautifully composed chaos! And different flower arrangements make such a variety of compositions. To conclude I once wrote those few lines of verse on the same:                                      ...

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The invisible silence

By and large, cities have spoiled the reputation of sound, nearly getting it dumped in the same category with noise. City music itself built a sort of continuum with bothering noises. Cities swarm with noise, big and small, close and far. The passing by cars, trucks, busses and trains , the planes flying over, the cranking of shops, elevators, televisions, mobiles…all around us is noise. Echoes of noise persist even after their sources have withdrawn! This explains so well the term “noise pollution”, that was ‘in’ for quite a while, but now seems forgotten. But one can only realize the nature of this pollution, when good chance takes him to a far away mountain village. Yet even here some traces of noise remain. Reaching still further away, on mountain slopes, fields or even empty deserts with no horizon, one would suddenly encounter that infinite invisible silence. The quality of silence becomes...

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The forgotten things around us

We have been conditioned by a sort of hyper awareness, to those flickering products of the digital age, that continue to embark on our lives with new changes, and apps! But what about the other things? The long list of things that, mainly out of habit, we keep using without giving them any attention. Things that have witnessed little change, not only in our lifetimes, but even through the many ages before. Count on your fingers: The soap bar, the cotton towel, the glass of water, the cup of tea, the chair, the bedcover, the fork and knife, even the pencil and pen! They are all there, as good and useful as ever. We use them, and are used to them. Some become favorites, and ‘love’ items, others just silent, handy and obedient standers by. Put together they constitute a sort of a silent majority of our existence. If they haven’t changed much...

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A tour of my exhibit

here you can have a brief tour of the exhibit ‘kameel Hawa drawing the line’, which comprises litho prints, art pieces and paintings with different media.You will notice special sections like bird corner, squibble corner, word art and books. Within the bird corner there are some art pieces of metal, like three huge jars of steel cast, some photos are of guests during ending evening. The prima donna of my Exhibit Holding the relief print in my hand I had the urge to do this stroke of blue! The singular blue color stroke made such a difference. It turned a litho print into the most cherished piece of art in my exhibit, although I couldn’t price it as such. Just a singular fluid blue that crosses over the outline of the woman in a bathing suit by the pool ladder, reaching down to the water level. As if the sketch was totally reinterpreted. I have no...

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Writing a line…or two

Line sketches, are the springs of my Beirut exhibition. Old and new, were brought in, so to speak, and reproduced through various media, as if to revive the intrinsic value of the line sketch. All drawing for me is a line drawing. In oils, or water colors, in type design or word art, in the beginning is a line- actually an outline that defines the form, gives it shape and actually brings it to life.In preparing for the exhibition, sketches even from the early years, were turned into relief linoleum prints. Others into screen prints in line and color. Some were hand colored after prints were made.Screen prints of simple lines reproduced new iPad sketches on both paper and canvas. Here the digital was pulled back into the tangible, so to speak and not the other way round.Line prints on canvas were developed into oil paintings, some were used to...

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ART IN THE MAKING

ART starts with feeling. And ends up (in visual arts)  as something you want to keep looking at. I define art as the human process of transforming an intense doze of feeling, accumulated in the self, through impressions and emotions over a period of time, into a drawing, a line of poetry, or a tune or any other human activity we can call art.   Art in the making if you wish, is the act through which the artist gets into this complex moment where the workings of the human self, through a surge of sentiment, collects from its reservoir of impressions and visual formations and ideas, brings together and puts into a queue those elements and the artist, holding to a tip of a thread starts the process of turning all into a work of art, whatever that work of art may be. v   ...

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