Arabian
Oil and gasoline
Abdulwahed Al-Mawlawi
The second medium listed above for ‘Arabian’ is not a typo. When I first saw this painting I was struck by the intensity of what I assumed was watercolour because of the wet-in-wet effects. Abdulwahed explained he achieved this watercolour ‘look’ by painting with oils thinned with gasoline, then dripping undiluted gasoline onto the wet painting. Don’t try this at home, kids!
Arab horsemen
Watercolour
Patricia Al Fakri
I met both artists whose work is shown here, Abdulwahed, a Qatari, and Patricia, who is British, at the Dubai International Arts Centre when I worked there in the 1990s.
We all bought a lot of each other’s paintings at the Arts Centre, and the
reason I selected these two for this blog post, is that I’ve just embarked on a project to
document my collection of horses - paintings,
archaeological replicas, carvings, and just plain collectables.
I haven’t ever painted any horses myself, so what I’d planned was to do one now – depicting some of my most interesting carvings, sculptures etc – and then to write a blog post about it. That painting is taking quite a bit more time than I thought it would, so these paintings are introducing the topic. Maybe my (somewhat less professional) horse painting will be ready in time for next week’s blog post.
