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Spotlight Q and A with Afaf Zurayk (547 Words 3 min. Read)
1. You are an outstanding artist and a great poet, what is the link between painting and poetry, and how does it reflect in the masterpieces you create?
For me, words and brushes have a will of their own. Lodged well within my soul, they unfold in space, embracing a rhythm that I listen to with care. In my poems and paintings sound and tone move to capture essences, distilled and nuanced in a process of both discovery and will. This inherent contradiction is exhilarating and addictive.
As I form poem and painting I sculpt their music, always listening deeply, and with awesome.
2. What are your most memorable experiences that you had from your time at Harvard University where you studied Islamic art, and from the times you spent at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and Georgetown University in Washington DC?
My time in the US, both as a student and as a teacher, was one of growth in learning how to recognize unfamiliar and challenging ground.
Both experiences brought out my vulnerabilities as well as my strengths and were milestones in my journey to understand my overriding assumptions and thus my inner self.
In the US I met and made life-long friends, and was enriched beyond expectations. I learned the true meaning of love as I struggled to understand. This love I now hold for Beirut, the city of my birth, its love overflowing, its struggles a testament to our deep humanity, containing and giving sustenance.
3. You have a close connection with nature, can you enlighten us about how nature inspires your work?
Nature is where I find my true self. Its silence. Its growth. Its decay and its rebirth are the miracles that make my life sustain itself, in my person as well as in my art.
But mostly it is nature’s silent song that moves my depths to emerge from darkness to touch the light – its ever nurturing gift.
4. We know that you describe yourself as an “introvert”, is this because of a direct negative influence from people in general or is it something intrinsic to how you find yourself in solitude?
Solitude for me is a state of mind. It makes the world turn. It helps me reach levels and layers of understanding and perception, consciously and not. It makes me move beyond myself, look deeply at life and begin the process of forming.
No one of us is an island.
Others have helped me to cross many bridges. They held me closely as I tumbled and fell. I sought solitude to process this with inclusion, not rejection. Solitude graces my art and poetry with richness as I live in togetherness, alone.
5. What is your favorite book and why?
The book that truly made me see is ‘Alone with the Alone’, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, By Henry Corbin, Princeton University Press, Mythos edition, 1997.
Reading it gave my creative experience a necessity and a beauty of belonging, as well as of aspiring, that shaped my life ever since. Their culmination was in the art and writing of my current exhibit at Agial Gallery – an attempt to ascend and to transcend.
