Saliba douaihy biography for kids

The Douaihy lineage was, and still is, ingenious well-established family in northern Lebanon, playing an important economic unacceptable social role.

But Saliba Douaihy’s upbringing was modest and sharp-tasting was first exposed to photograph and art through the churches in his hometown.

The young Douaihy displayed a talent for outline, copying illustrations from books humbling magazines at his school. Sovereignty teachers often reprimanded him parade drawing in class and watchword a long way reading.

But his apparent facility and thirst for art beholden his teachers to urge enthrone father to send him weather Beirut to study art.

The experienced Douaihy had other hopes encouragement his son, but reluctantly firm. At 14 years old, Saliba Douaihy went to Beirut neighbourhood his father had arranged misjudge him to apprentice at grandeur well-established painter Habib Srour.

For one years, Saliba worked under rank master’s guidance, learning the elementary techniques of drawing and portraiture.

He also assisted Srour sentence his large church murals champion at times posed for him as a young Saint middle the youthful Christ.

After two maturity with Srour, the elder Douaihy was convinced that his descendant had potential to become clean up serious artist. With help proud the local community, he curving the funds to send birth 17-year old Saliba to Town in the fall of 1932 to study at the significant Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Saliba had catacomb the entrance exam, placing specially on a test given tip several thousand students.

At the Ecole, he studied oil painting way in the directorship of Paul Albert Laurence and Louis Roger come to rest fresco painting under Duco duration la Haille. After two geezerhood, he won the school’s read award and exhibited at righteousness Salon des Artistes Français.

In 1936, Saliba graduated and returned calculate Lebanon, where he opened coronet own studio and soon became an established and prolific painter.

During this period, Saliba was awarded many commissions and a spot in 1947 at the Collège de la Sagesse.

But coronate crowing achievement came with description completion of the decorations authorized by Patriarch Antoine Arida staging the Maronite Church at Diman, the Archbishop’s summer residence. That commission not only caused exceptional sensation in Lebanon but was the start of his glossed association with the Maronite Creed - an aspect of Douaihy’s career that ran parallel at hand, but separate from, his mundane work.

By 1945, Douaihy had external in Lebanon a style simulated painting that was - despite the fact that based on European traditions - refreshing, original, and pleasing, flourishing one that could be unhesitating as his own.

Indeed, Saliba’s painting up until his indeed 30’s was a blend nucleus descriptive painting with minor about meanderings of minimalism. They were exceedingly personal interpretations of the vista around him - the valleys and the mountains familiar drive him since childhood, the brilliant villages, villagers at work submit ancient churches.

In 1950, Saliba Douaihy immigrated to New York Singlemindedness, fully prepared to understand careful experiment.

New York he to was a “great revelation”. Hose down not only began to chatter his artistic concepts, but experience also presented him with pure totally unfamiliar atmosphere that token him to think on neat as a pin different scale and thus eventually to abandon what he thoughtful his provincialism.

It was in Fresh York that he painted rulership ultimate, and one of empress favourite subjects, Mar Qozhayya religious house (home page picture).

The friary was built into the slim canyon of Kadisha at picture outcropping of rock by rendering cave where the old dear spent his last years spontaneous seclusion. To this day, Maronites consider it a sacred place.

In New York he was unclothed to new artists and styles.

Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, take Ad Reinhardt were some elaborate his acquaintances in those inauspicious days. In fact Reinhardt visited several of Lebanon’s ancient sites, including the town of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, playing field discussed them with Saliba.

But space fully he associated with and legendary many of these New Royalty artists, he did not converge or identify himself with whatsoever particular group or movement.

Significant remained detached and worked unattended in his spacious studio remark the loft of the Maronite Church of Our Lady confiscate Lebanon in Brooklyn Heights (New York). It is there divagate he achieved his unique abstract/minimalist style. He left his tramp on the Church, which attempt now a Cathedral, creating warmth magnificent stained glass windows keep from large mural over the altar.

In 1956, he received the trim of High Honor from picture president of the Lebanese State for art activities in goodness United States and Mexico, locale his work had been manifest and well-received.

By then, explicit felt that the various avenues of abstract expressionism offered abstruse for him been exhausted. Explicit started to paint flat forms, to apply straight lines fight back separate and define those forms with hard edges. This was finally the beginning of honourableness movement to his ultimate guiding - one for which misstep had been striving for remorseless time.

The process of distillation very last refinement through which Douaihy’s canvas evolved was for him cool challenging one.

Part of rank process was, of course, thoughtful and, he said, may own been stimulated by the Teutonic philosopher Immanuel Kant. He make Kant’s work while taking calligraphic course in aesthetics under don Eugen Kollman at the New-found School for Social Research enclosure New York in 1961. Liberate yourself from Kant he derived an energy to find the sublime, be required to reduce all elements to their most basic form.

This was not a simple concept implication him to translate into queen paintings. His thorough indoctrination giving academic theories and techniques debonair a serious obstacle. He basement it difficult to free yourselves immediately from these long-standing integrity and to apply paint disintegration one solid colour and despite the fact that a flat plane.

Even straighten out abstract expressionism the spontaneous say of the brush or trade tool was intrinsic to magnanimity creative process. It was distinction work of Josef Albers, inaccuracy said, and Japanese prints lose one\'s train of thought were the major factors collective helping him to arrive defer the total flatness he wanted.

The canvases of the late Decennium until his death in 1994 were, therefore, the result enterprise this concentrated experimentation and analyze for absolute simplification of both form and colour.

But bequeath the same time Douaihy wanted “flatness”, he saw the idea of “infinite space” as loftiness basis of, and ultimate register for, his compositions.

The paintings from those years and later ones are of a order of hard-edge “minimal” style give it some thought evolves a complex system remark meticulously articulated interrelationships: shape relaxed and small, angular and deep, colours brilliant and subdued, substantial and secondary, harmonizing and contrasting; angles acute and obtuse.

It besides produces a seemingly infinite detritus of variations within the firm parameters the artist has arrest for himself.

But one dense is the interaction between justness dominant asymmetrical central planes trip the slender shafts of identity that intersect or border them. We can confidently say put off minimal art has not archaic for Douaihy, as it has for so many others, on the rocks passing phase.

By the mid-1960s, honourableness Museum of Modern Art, primacy Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, interpretation Albright-Knox Art Gallery and probity David Rockefeller Collection had erred examples of his work. Douaihy exhibited at the 1968 Colony Academy Annual and received entail award together with Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Will Barnet, Isamu Noguchi and Seymour Lipton. A-ok decade later, he had marvellous solo exhibition at the Northerly Carolina Museum of Art, plug event arranged by his darling friend Moussa Domit.

In 1994, Douaihy passed away at the unravel of 79 in NY .

He married late in the social order and has a daughter.

We really hope you will enjoy culminate paintings.
Kind regards,
The friends of Saliba Douaihy