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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters With a little help from nature
By Youssef RakhaFrom Mediterranean and Red Sea shores to the traditional carpentry workshops of Cairo, a middle-aged artist passes, carrying plastic bags full of wood.
Nobody knows what this is about, not even Gamil Shafiq himself: for nearly a decade, almost compulsively, he has collected driftwood. "I was collecting the stuff for 10 years without knowing what to do with it, without any ideas for it whatsoever. I would just look at what the sea threw at me and I would like a piece of wood, feel strangely drawn to it. There are some weird kinds of wood to be found, some of them must be hundreds of years old. They're weathered, rotted or moth-eaten. Then the salty water takes everything away from them, until there's nothing left but the most solid substance, and in the meantime they will have been sculptured."
Fleeing Cairo's polluted summer heat, Shafiq stays alone in his seaside chalet (in the Mediterranean resort of Madinet Al-Sahafiyin, designed by Hassan Fathi), fishing and painting -- the two main concerns in his life -- enjoying the quiet and healthy surroundings. At times he uses the wood he has collected to practice carpentry: he builds a gate for the chalet, puts together various objects for use inside it -- a table, a box, a stool. "Life over there is so healthy and so conducive to work. You have time on your hands. In Cairo, where you wake up late and spend so much time getting from one place to another, the day is ultimately very short. But when you wake up at five to the sound of the sea, a single day feels like a whole week."
A well-established painter, Shafiq has always harboured a latent passion for sculpture. Now he begins to feel he is at a crossroads in his career, edging slowly towards a different phase. One day around the middle of 1998, he returned from his early-morning wanderings to take out his carpenter's tools, and also his paint and brushes. What he finds himself doing -- for the next twelve months -- is something entirely unexpected.
"I would just look at what the sea threw at me and I would like a piece of wood, feel strangely drawn to it... some of them must be hundreds of years old. They're weathered, rotted or moth-eaten. Then the salty water takes everything away from them, until there's nothing left but the most solid substance, and in the meantime they will have been sculptured" "At this point in my life painting has become a routine thing and it's very exciting to be doing something different. When you've been painting for so long, you've already developed your style and you're confident about what you're doing. But with this, it's a challenge, it has the freshness of childhood discoveries. You place the piece before you and stare at it - for a day, two days, two months - then you suddenly discover what it says."
Shafiq underwent a similar experience five years ago in Romania, where, during an international symposium, he transformed some 150 stones from the Tuscana riverbed into fish - the symbol he feels most drawn to. "In my first year at college, I tried out everything, but when it was time to specialise I was undecided. I finally settled on painting, yet throughout these years I'd always had the desire for sculpture. It was difficult to realise this desire, though, practically speaking... Maybe this is a kind of compensation for my frustrated desire to be a sculptor, a belated atonement. Because with the driftwood, nature has helped me out quite a bit, in fact it's done most of the hard work for me, and all I have to do is discover it... Of course this is not really sculpture, generically speaking. These works are somewhere between paintings and sculptures, which is part of their fascination for me."
Flat three-dimensional depictions of mostly faces and fish (Shafiq's trademark themes), the approximately 50 works making up Shafiq's exhibition are indeed a source of fascination. The faces, painted in natural browns and for the most part preserving the texture of the wood, draw on Coptic icons and, specifically, the Fayoum mummy portraits, while the fish are for the most part suggested by the shape of the piece of driftwood, the particular flow of its grain, the bulge or dent of its edge.
"There is a plastic value in these pieces, which you must respect and preserve. Over the years the wood develops its own values, in form and texture, its own creative character which is just as effective as art. That, I think, I managed to keep. All I did was trim a little here and there, change the toning very slightly, with a bit of paint or by burning the wood, nothing drastic. Just enough interference to bring out the plastic value residing in the wood, articulate it, and add my own feeling for it."
Even when he needed to supplement the driftwood with pieces he could not find on the seashore, Shafiq would use the most weathered and beaten wood he could find: the debris from old carpentry workshops which he would leave in the sun until it dried out and cracked, or the bark of decaying trees. "I wanted nature to do as much as possible. This crack here, for example, suggested the mouth of a fish. If I hadn't left the wood in the sun it wouldn't have looked like that. But I never had predetermined ideas when I first collected the wood. And I wasn't drawing directly on the Fayoum portraits, but our heritage is always there, in our genes, and no doubt we have a connection with these things. I think that impression has a lot to do with the use of the same colour for everything - I experimented with various natural substances until I found the right one for each piece - and the state of the wood. The other day I was sitting here surrounded by them and I said to my wife, 'It's as if they've come straight out of the tombs.' And they do have that ancient, weathered quality. But they're just pieces of wood, you know."
Ancient as they may look, these pieces constitute a new technical departure for Shafiq. It only remains to be seen how the public will react to them.
