Dana Al Helal At Marina Waves

I went yesterday to an art exhibition for upcoming artist, Dana Al Helal. Dana who’s leaving soon to florence to pursue her studies in fine art, focused mostly on portraits. Behind each face portrayed by her paintings a story waiting for you to make it up. You will notice a common theme in her paintings too, smoking, africanism or even arabic pop-culture all mixed together. ALthough the whole thing took her 6 months of work, the collection seems little or maybe It’s the way they were organized in the rather small rooms.

Now the hard part, Although she asked me personally to “be nice” I’m afraid you won’t like what I’m about to write. I was told that some of the paintings were drawn using your fingers directly on the canvas, good job. I really, really couldn’t tell, except for some of them … the shading in one of the paintings which as far as I remember was a close up of a face (and you had a few of them) was … erm … almost like a first-grader’s hand drawing. I’m talking about only ONE of them, just ONE. The rest were nicely executed. I especially liked the portrait of the bold african woman with the tile squares on her eyes, I loved it actually.

Today is the second and the last day for this exhibition, so you should go and check it out. It’s held at Marina Waves, the weird some-how-far building. Go to the marina’s somebody somebody al-subah hall where the ad thing was held last week. Walk or drive to that thing, and while we’re at it. Watch the blank concrete of the entrance of marina waves before it gets legally vandalized by yours truly.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Art, Criticism, Kuwait. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.