Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Palestinian artist and calligrapher Saeed Falah Ghnaim, nicknamed Al-Nahri, was born in 1961 in the city of Sakhnin in the Galilee of Palestine, which has been occupied since 1948. His talents and artistic inclinations emerged at an early age. He continued his academic studies at the Vebitso College in Haifa, graduating from the Department of Graphic Design and Calligraphy in 1983. After graduating, he worked in several Palestinian newspapers, such as: the Palestinian newspaper “Al-Sanara” published in the city of Nazareth as a designer, art director, and cartoonist. He also worked in the Nasserite newspaper “Kul Al-Arab”, the newspaper “ Al-Ittihad ” published in Haifa , and the newspaper “Al-Ahali” in his city of Sakhnin .
His life
A calligrapher who worked hard on himself, delving deeply into the latest available techniques, and the ability to trace his artistic steps in the fields of Arabic calligraphy , connected to his deep faith in his Arab nation because it is the only art that presented the message of the Arab and Islamic nation in the most beautiful image, and the most splendid aesthetic, cognitive and spiritual form, described in the words of God Almighty in His Holy Quran.
After extensive study and numerous experiences, he participated in a number of group and individual exhibitions in the fields of arts in general and Arabic calligraphy in particular, inside occupied Palestine and abroad in Arab and foreign countries. He received a number of awards and certificates of appreciation.
Anyone who touches his paintings with sight and insight will be certain that he is facing a distinctive artistic case and a new Palestinian flavour in the fields of art, classical Arabic calligraphy, and movement in the space of freedom and technical work, reflecting the truth of his training and experience, and putting him on the path of his correct personal ambition, as a bearer of a cultural and intellectual message and aesthetic content, and an indication of the identity of a human being within an Arab homeland whose kinetic name is Palestine, because it is a homeland and a soil that encapsulates the Arab and Islamic world, and even the entire cosmic world, in its great status and position in the folds of the true Islamic religion , and its explicit mention in the Holy Quran through Surat Al-Isra, and numerous narrations of the hadiths of the greatest Arab prophet Muhammad, may God’s prayers be upon him, and the status and position that Arab calligraphy occupies, as the pearl of Arab and Islamic arts, is what made the artist, the calligrapher Al-Nahri, completely side with the paths of this wonderful Arab art.
His calligraphic paintings take hold of the reins of the craft and the skilled and knowledgeable craftsmanship of the Arabic letter’s ability to shape, rotate and construct it according to the known principles whose first letters were written by Ibn Muqlah, Ibn al-Bawwab, Yaqut al-Musta’simi, and those who followed them in this framework of innovators and modernists, even though he departed from them in many of his calligraphic combinations, and he is seduced by the clear lines of Diwani, as a technical path and a formal structural fabric, to complete what was started by the predecessors who were shining signs in the history of the Arab and Islamic nation, and we think that the artist calligrapher al-Nahri is one of them.
His paintings combine the characteristics of drawing and colored photography that mimic the aesthetics of nature, and are carried by the precision and softness of the line, entering into the fields of pictorial sculpture of sequences of letters and the contents of descriptive and written phrases, as successive and harmonious matrices in the height and movement of the letters, carried by symmetry and repetition, and the architectural structure of the engineering of its letters within the rhythm of the paintings, and its touching of the surfaces of the paper and creating aesthetic visions that reflect the state of marriage and plastic embrace between the main elements manifested in the phrases, and the colored backgrounds that complement the spirit of the text, its mysticism, its symbolic references and the nature of the description.
Paintings that combine the realistic idea expressing the existence of the Palestinian on his land, clinging to his rights, existence, traditions and heritage, and his legitimate resistance on the front of faith and culture, and draw the features of formal visions for the recipient, and take in the space of intended visual pleasure, and push him to discover the capabilities of the Palestinian Arab to act and influence his surroundings, through its compositional structure and the meanings of its arranged words, connected in one way or another to the word of God, and the sayings, wisdom and proverbs included on the lips of Palestinian Arabs generation after generation.
Calligraphy paintings contain intellectual reverence and formal prayer, standing in the niche of the embracing surfaces, doing their aesthetic work of pleasure and self-satisfaction in the eyes and feelings of the recipient, and opening a wide window on the manifestations of faith, and the talk of the soul and the whispering in the divine self as the beauty of absolute totality. It narrates the stories of the prophets and the righteous, in some of them it depends on the personification of living beings in formations that gather the fragments of the moral narration of the phrases, and the artistic form in its abstraction open to the rules of Arabic calligraphy and its manifestations.
Source
Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
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