Spotlight Q and A with Rana Raouda (2322 Words 12 min. Read )
1- When was the first time that you sensed internally that you are born to be an artist and did you ever question this decision throughout your life?
My moto: “I did not choose to be an artist I decided to remain one!”
I don’t remember when I first heard the word “artist.” I don’t think I even knew what it meant.
But I do remember the feeling — a kind of painful sensitivity to the world around me. It was like moving through life with an open wound. Oversensitive, enormous empathy, observing … Every feeling and sound pressing deeper than it should.
Before I could name it, I was already living it.
One of my earliest memories comes from when I was about five years old, in the Bekaa Valley with my father. We had stopped to buy dairy, and I waited alone in the car. I looked out the window and saw the valley stretch wide beneath the sky — and I did not just see it, I felt it. I didn’t think “landscape” or “view.” I saw shapes, textures, colors and hues. My eyes broke it down into abstraction: the way the shadows divided the hills, how the colors shifted in layers. I was too young to know it then, but I was already seeing like an abstract artist.
I did not recall that moment clearly until I was 32 years old. It came back to me vividly, like a scene developing in a darkroom. It was as if my memory had been holding onto it in silence, waiting for me to grow into the artist I had always been.
Even earlier than that, at school, I was already fascinated by the language of color. I remember the magic of rinsing my brush in a jar of water and watching the paint dissolve — these slow, dreamlike twirls of pigment dancing in water I would stare at them in awe, lost in their silent movement. “Raouda!” my teacher, would remind me in a scolding tone. “C’est sur la feuille qu’on dessine!” But I was already drawing, not on the paper, but in the water, in my imagination, in the invisible spaces where color met emotion.
About questioning this decision? Oh YES, all the time!
Life doesn’t pause to wait for art. I had to earn a living, pay rent. I took jobs, some kept me closer to beauty like teaching ballet, some others I loathed but endured them with gratitude, like many do. And as every artist knows, it’s rarely easy at the beginning — to live from art, or for art, when the world demands other things from you.
Still, every time I turned away from it, something in me quietly suffered. A silent ache would grow inside me. I kept my brushes in the kitchen, next to the forks and spoons — as a reminder. As if to say: “Don’t forget who you are.“
There were moments of crisis when I would throw my hands up and say, “That’s it — I’ll open a falafel shop!” It became a running joke, but behind the humor was a real fear — that the world wouldn’t make space for the life I came to live… that maybe, I had been wrong.
But the truth is, even when I doubted it, even when I pushed it away, art never left me. Like Joe Tarrab, may God bless his soul, told me once, “Even when you are not painting, you still are.”
It waited quietly like the memory of that valley. Like the swirl of color in the water. Like the brushes in the kitchen drawer.
2- We know that you had an artistic experience in the USA, how was that different from your European or Lebanese experiences?
My experience in the United States was unlike anything I had known in Lebanon or Europe. It changed everything, not just how I worked, but how I believed in the work. If Lebanon shaped my sensitivity, and Europe refined my knowledge, it was America that gave me freedom, raw, spacious, and vital.
In the 1980s, the American years gave me this non-judgmental feel and limiting beliefs I felt elsewhere. There was a sense that everything was possible. “The sky is the limit” wasn’t just a saying, it was a mindset. There was no rigid tradition to be loyal to, no unspoken rules of how art should be. I didn’t just learn new tools and techniques; I learned that I was allowed to be free, free to explore, to try, to fail, to change direction without having to justify myself.
At the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., I had the good fortune of meeting a teacher who quietly shifted the course of my life: Mr. Blaine Larson. He never gave long lectures. He didn’t hover or correct. He would simply walk around the studio, and when he passed my table, he’d tap it just once. That subtle knock said everything. I knew whether to stop, to keep going, to change. I don’t know by what magic he understood my work so clearly, nor how I understood his silence so fully. But I did. He gave me one piece of advice I have carried with me ever since:
“Rana,” he said, when in doubt, because you will be in doubt, look at this painting and say to yourself: I can paint!”
I titled that piece “I Can Paint”, and it remains in my private collection , facing me for when in doubt.
There was another unexpected turning point. Curious, I had signed up for a printmaking class, but from the very first session, I knew it wasn’t for me. The repetition, the measurements, the process of making endless same copies, it felt the opposite of what I sought, the “accidents,” the surprise, I ran to withdraw, but the school refused to reimburse the credits. So, I made a deal with the teacher: don’t grade me, don’t expect anything, just let me use the studio and tools in my own way.
That quiet rebellion of being left alone gave birth to one of the most important breakthroughs in my career. With no pressure and no rules, I began to work the way I had dreamed as a child, staring into the watercolor cup, mesmerized by the dance of pigment in water. I was pregnant with my daughter at the time. I called this series Série Chloé, a tribute to the transformation happening in me, both as an artist and a mother. It was a pivotal moment, un moment charnière dans ma peinture, that allowed me to shift into a new language of expression.
In America, I learned that I didn’t have to follow the rules. Even though, I admit, that having an academic base here in Lebanon allowed me the freedom that I actually could invent them. Or better yet, I could paint without them.
3- if you were to tell us about one person who affected your artistic path the most who would that person be and why?
I have not built my artistic life by following one master or one school. But there is one memory that has stayed with me. One red spot of paint.
It was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. first floor, a small room behind the staircase. I was walking through when I saw a small painting by Odilon Redon. Not a large masterpiece. Just a quiet work in the corner. But on that canvas, there was a single red spot.
And in that spot… something happened. Paint was talking to me.
Along the way, there have been a few people rare, but essential. There was Miss M. Irani, my teacher at what used to be BUC (Beirut University College). She was my first real art teacher, someone who saw the seriousness in what I was doing, She gave structure to the beginning.
Then came Blaine Larson, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C. (explained in my US journey question 2)
There is also my little sister. Not a teacher, not an artist just someone who believed in me through everything. She supported me in quiet, consistent ways. She grounded me during times when it would have been easier to give up. And then there was Brigitte, my friend, an intellectual and a Kandinsky lover. We lost touch, each of us moving to different continents. And then one day, many years later, we met again. And first thing she asked me: “Et ta peinture, Rana? Ta peinture?”
It was not just a question. It was a call. As if she was asking about my soul. The importance of my painting hit me then as this undeniable responsibility almost as a mission I had
When my daughter was young, and needed all my attention, I had the courage to drop the job I did not enjoy and made me stay away from her all day this is when I had the courage to give full gear to my art. I looked after her during the day and (napped with her) then painted at night. And this is how I started having exhibition after exhibition.
Last but not least, my late husband Raphael, who was a writer himself with a sharp sense of critique believed in my talent. He helped me while travelling with my paintings in Europe.
Even though they did not shape what I paint. But they shaped how I stand in it. And sometimes that makes all the difference.
4- There is a spiritual sense to art that you do. Not necessarily religious one but rather a profound spiritual reflection that an at connoisseur can sense. Can you share with us this spirituality?
My painting is, before anything else, spiritual. Not religious. Spiritual in the sense of connection. A kind of verticality. A movement upwards, or inwards. A thread between what is seen and what is unseen.
I don’t start painting just like that. I have to enter a certain space. A space that is not from here, not material. Clear the path. I wait for it. I prepare for it. Sometimes music helps me access it. Sometimes it’s silence. But until I reach that space, I cannot begin.
Painting, for me, is not about expressing an idea. It is about entering another state. One where I am not fully the author. I am present, but I am also listening. Receiving.
This is why the spiritual is not a theme in my work, it is the condition of it.
But to understand where it came from, one has to go back in time.
I grew up during the Lebanese civil war, in a multicultural and multireligious home , in a violent and very ugly Beirut. Nothing around me expressed love nor beauty. My father, God Bless his soul, passed away during those years. Fear and sense of survival were the main feelings.
In such a climate, beauty was almost an act of rebellion. Tenderness felt dangerous. But even then, I searched for it. I needed to believe that something else existed. I was so STUBBORN about it, something higher, lighter, untouched. That longing for the unseen, the immaterial, became my spiritual thread. And it led me to painting.
I could see a small square of blue sky from my bedroom window, and in it I could imagine all the love and beauty I insisted existed somewhere. No one could stop my imagination.
The only material beauty I could see in Beirut where the windows in the old Lebanese houses. I started painting those timidly, then these, became with time windows of the soul. “Des paysages de l’âme.”
The source is always LOVE for me. As I believe It is the ONE and ONLY source for everything.
I often wandered, had I been born in Rome Italy for instance, where art and beauty whispers around each corner, would I have become an artist?
I like to talk about Faith, not religion, as it is very personal.
When in doubt, just look at Nature.
5- How do you evaluate the current status of art coverage in Lebanon (in all aspects, good and bad) and do you support polite and constructive criticism?
Art is not given enough serious coverage in Lebanon especially not from an intellectual or critical perspective. There are exhibitions, openings, images shared on social media, but real, in-depth writing? Context? Interpretation? Very little. The conversation around art often remains superficial, driven by trends or personalities, rather than by true engagement with the work itself.
We lack serious art criticism and even more urgently, we lack constructive criticism. I absolutely support it. I need it. Constructive critique is not only valuable; it’s essential. It is life-saving for artists. It helps us grow, reflect, and step outside of our comfort zones. It builds a bridge between the work and the viewer, between the personal and the public.
Without real critique informed, respectful, and curious, art risks floating in a vacuum. It becomes decoration, or worse, a product without soul.
An artist said rightfully, “Sans engagement, l’art est stupide”
Criticism, when done well, gives art a narrative. It roots it in history, in culture, in meaning. It invites others to see what they may have missed.
What we often get instead are either empty praise or silence. And neither is useful. Praise without depth is as dismissive as ignorance.
I believe Lebanon has many powerful artists, but we still lack the intellectual infrastructure to support them fully. We need writers, thinkers, and educators who understand art not just commercially, visually, but culturally and spiritually. People who can give language to what art is trying to say. Who can ask difficult questions, and honor the complexity of the answers.
Photo Credits: Photos of Rana Raouda by Chloe Khoury (@ckeey.jpeg)
