A friend of mine sent me a quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
As an artist, I am able to immerse myself in my art. It helps me to reflect on the transitory nature of my work and my existence. In this crisis, am I not having to face my own mortality?
Thus, I am grateful and thankful every morning to be alive and even though there is danger to my loved ones, and great suffering among people, the lock-down allowed me to deepen my focus on my art without the usual distractions of daily life and to focus on what is most essential to me personally and to me as a human being.
Art, like human beings, is expressed personally, individually and uniquely by each one of us. It allows us to concretize our unique perception and manifest it. And I hope that each one of us will express their “art” in their own unique way, to contribute to the varied tapestry of humanity.
I want to leave you with an old woman’s wise advice: Do not spend your life focusing on the acquisition of wealth, but spend every moment in gratitude for your existence.
Rana Chalabi is a Syrian-Lebanese artist living between Beirut, Lebanon and Cairo, Egypt. Her work spans a wide variety of themes, media and even continents, but is dominated by her interest in movement, both aesthetic and spiritual. Movement fascinates her – to capture the ephemeral nature of three-dimensional dynamic forces through the static media of paper, oil, charcoal, inks and sculpture. Movement is life, and she wants the viewer to resonate with that movement, inner and outer. She has exhibited throughout the Middle East, Europe, USA and in East Asia.
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