Raya Al Manji is a painter from Oman who specializes in the still life of historic objects. She has been in Taipei doing an artist’s residency for about a month.
“It could be that a month of staying here is too short,” she said.
“I thought when I came here that I was going to have a look and find the still life, but it has been difficult to see old stuff here.”
Photo courtesy of Treasure Hill Artist Village
Al Manji has been living at Treasure Hill, a former squatter site remodeled into an artists’ village. The site is lush with greenery, but the objects within are not relics.
At her solo exhibition Beauty of Civilization, Al Manji is displaying watercolors based on local scenes: Treasure Hill’s cultivated lotus garden and pretty hill-propped homes behind a concrete bridge.
The other half of the gallery presents historic objects from Oman, a coastal country on the Arabian Peninsula. In watercolor and oil, she depicts old combs, traditional fabrics and defunct kitchenware borrowed from homes and found by happenstance.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“Oman is modern, but people do like to keep old things,” she said.
“They put things in their room and hang it, like the house is a museum.”
Al Manji paints from photographs that she takes of each object, though her approach is romantic and almost anti-photorealistic.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“I use the photograph because it gives me a shape to follow, but the colors you only understand by touching and seeing and feeling the object,” she said.
From Light to Light is a fragile-looking old Omani lamp against a rich swirl of colors — yellows, oranges, pinks and cream, all the colors of the sunset. The lamp has a blue and an almost pearl-like luster. Prior to painting it, she had lived with the lamp, carrying it about on her day-to-day routine in an effort to create “a relationship.”
“I put it outside, in the sand, in the house, indoors and outdoors,” she said.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“I discovered the colors that change so much. You can see the lamp is blue here, but it is not always completely blue. This blue changes when you put it in the sand, the colors change when you put it indoors.”
In Taipei, she’s used this approach to create her own history with not-too-historic objects. She watches the lotus at different times of day. With a graphic pen and light watercolor wash, she has painted a portrait of another Treasure Hill resident, a large but dainty-looking snail with multihued shell.
“Every day here the snails come to meet me when I come out. I find a lot of snails on my way to my room, especially when it rains. I really thought I should paint them,” she said.
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
“When you build a relationship with an object, you are able to see its beauty.”
Photo: Enru Lin, Taipei Times
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