A blog about art, politics and shared society in Israel
Chapter 2: Walid Abu Shakra: An artist in search of the sublime
(This is the second in a series of posts I’ll be publishing in the coming weeks about the background to an art exhibition opening at the museum at Kibbutz Ein Harod. The show is a retrospective of the works of five artists from one extraordinary family: the Abu Shakras of Umm al-Fahm.
I’m an American-born journalist on the staff of Haaretz English Edition who has been living in Israel since 1987. I’m Jewish, but I have long been interested in learning about the country’s Palestinian population. They have contended with countless challenges, which continue to this day, but this is their home, and they aren’t going anywhere, although that is something that some parts of the Jewish population still doesn’t understand.
To me, the Abu Shakras, their birthplace, and the art gallery in the city that’s associated with them, tell a story that goes beyond art. Call me naive, but I think that story can point a way forward to reconciliation among Israelis. Writing shortly after the November 1 election, I know how tempting it might be to think that “all is lost.” But this is our shared home, and we don’t have the option of losing faith. Maybe this newsletter will serve to provide readers with reason to be more hopeful. DBG)
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Walid was the trailblazer. If he hadn’t gone first, it’s unlikely that Said, Asim, Farid or Karim Abu Shakra would even have conceived of becoming painters themselves; and certainly the Mishkan Museum at Ein Harod wouldn’t be presenting the retrospective show “Spirit of Man, Spirit of Place.” Walid is the one who left Umm al-Fahm -- although his hometown never left him, in the sense that a large part of his corpus is dedicated to depicting it. He’s also the one who, as he became increasingly committed to Sufi Islam, put aside art for a period of 25 years. When he did return to produce a final burst of prints, it was in response to a deathbed request from his mother, who was perhaps the other greatest influence in his life. His life may appear to be filled with contradiction, but there is a consistent line that runs through it.
I asked Walid’s brother Said, who has done as much as anyone to preserve, document and expose to the public Walid’s life and work, if there were signs of an artistic tendency in the family in generations prior to Walid, who began drawing in kindergarten. Said pointed to his maternal grandfather, Sheikh Yusuf Shraydi Jabarin, who was caught on the wrong side of the border at the start of the 1948 war, and never returned to Umm al-Fahm. “Sheikh Yusuf made his living making straw floor mats,” said the grandson, who never met him. “He and the family would collect the straw ]in the fields] after people finished their harvesting.” His daughter, Maryam, told her children that Yusuf’s mats were prized for their palette of colors, and that families would order them for marital dowries.
It may be more significant, however, that Sheikh Yusuf was a student of Sufism, an approach to Islam and to life that has had an influence on all of the Abu Shakras, and on Walid in particular.
Maryam was only 12 when her family married her off to Abd al-Qadr Abu Shakra. He too was a descendant of a legendary medieval Sufi sheikh. Just barely out of childhood, Maryam brought her dolls with her, and would take them out to keep her company when her husband was on the road. Two years after the wedding, in 1946, Walid was born, and the dolls now became his.
Umm al-Fahm at the time was the urban center of a population that was largely subsistent on agriculture, with lands spread widely around the region. The young Abu Shakra family owned lands in nearby Lajjun, and that’s where they lived. When the war began, in the spring of 1948, they fled Lajjun, which had strategic importance situated as it was at the northeast entrance to Wadi Ara. Walid was then 2.
Says Said Abu Shakra: “They expected that any moment they would be returning to Al Lajjun. And after a bit, when it was clear they weren’t going back, my father snuck back into their house there, to take the food.” The following day, he reentered the battle zone to retrieve what he hadn’t managed to remove the day before, but the house was no longer standing: It had been blown up the Haganah. The same fate awaited the rest of Lajjun, upon whose ruins Kibbutz Megiddo was established a year later.
Not owning a residence in Umm al-Fahm, the family initially camped out in an olive grove there, before putting up a primitive hut, made of mud spread over a wooden frame.
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By the time Walid began high school, traveling to a Jewish school in Afula, because Umm al- Fahm did not yet have one, he had added ceramics to his love of drawing. Now, at school, he was introduced to art history as well. He was a good student, but when, in 1963, his father lost the truck he used to haul gravel to construction sites in a road accident, the son was required to leave school and go to work. And so, at age 16, Walid moved to Tel Aviv (although by law, the Arab population was still subject to a military regime, and was not free to move about the country), where he held down three jobs at once, while sleeping in a hut in Jaffa. He told Eli Armon Azoulay, in a 2012 interview for Haaretz, that it was the hardest period of his life: “I remember giant rats running beneath my ripped-up bed.”
Relief arrived in the form of a job opening at the income tax office in Hadera, for which Walid qualified because of his fluent Hebrew. He rented a room in the home of a Jewish couple, Fanya and Arye Kotchuk, both Holocaust survivors, with whom he shared a warm relationship. Recognizing his artistic talent, they encouraged him to study art. Initially he enrolled in community-center painting classes, but at the further urging of the Kotchuks and one of his art instructors, he applied, and was accepted to, the Avni Institute of Art, in Tel Aviv which he attended from 1967 to 1971.
Both of his artist brothers recall how Walid, on weekend home visits, would offer art lessons to his younger relatives, and also used them as models for his own drawings. Farid told me that he always showed up with a supply of items that he could give out as prizes to anyone who made a good drawing, things like a mechanical pencil or an eraser. “We went crazy over them,” he recalled. “And we would work during the week so that when he came on the weekend, we could show him and get more prizes.” Walid also used his siblings as models for his own drawings.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of Walid’s attending art school, one of the first Israeli Arabs to do so, whether at home or overseas. Prior to the 1948 war, although the Palestinian economy was largely agriculture-based, there was nonetheless a significant class of educated and creative people. But nearly all of them left during the Nakba. As the writer and critic Antoine Shalhat explained in the catalog of a 2009 exhibition of work of Palestinian-Israeli artists, the departees “included not a few highly regarded writers and poets, playwright and artists. In fact, the lion’s share of those who remained were fellahin who were concentrated in rural villages.” He adds that the “implications of this change on the [community’s] cultural and artistic life… can be compared to the most powerful of earthquakes.”
Following graduation from Avni, where Walid was a prize student, he made and participated in group shows in both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His initial paintings may surprise someone who identify him with his delicate and understated prints of nature: Much of Walid’s work from 1971 and 1972 was characterized by brightly colored, sharp-lined acrylic paintings of geometric shapes. Many of the shapes are based on Muslim architectural motifs – in fact, in his preliminary sketches from the time, one can see the buildings from which the details were drawn -- but this is far from obvious. The early work also includes ink sketches on paper, sometimes of elderly residents of Umm al-Fahm, sometimes of farm animals, even one of a rabbi.
In 1972, while sitting and sketching in a chapel within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Walid met a young English tourist named Penny Carter. A relationship developed, and during a trip to Europe, which included a visit to her parents to introduce Walid to them, he began to consider continuing his art studies abroad. In 1974, he and Penny were married, at the British Embassy in Israel, after her conversion to Islam, and they moved to London. Armed with sterling recommendations from several of his Avni teachers, and a grant from the Israeli Council for Culture and Art, Walid began studying engraving at what was then the Central School of Art and Design (today, Central St. Martin’s school).
Before leaving, Walid gave his father a sum of money equivalent to what he would have been expected to earn in Israel during the two years he expected to be studying. This was his contribution to the support of his family. Still, writes Galia Bar Or in her article about Walid in the exhibition catalog, his father had trouble understanding why his son wanted to be an artist. Maryam, his mother, on the other hand, “a woman of pure soul and innocence… supported the path of art in which three of her sons chose to walk.”
Eventually, Walid settled on on engraving, a genre whose many different techniques he explored fully. In an interview with Tel Aviv Time Out, quoted by Bar Or in her article, he explained that, “In the copper plate I have always felt like my subject matter was there, and with the process of engraving I only had to extract it from the plate.” Increasingly too, nature was his subject of choice, often scenes from the shrinking Umm al-Fahm landscape that remained undeveloped as the city experienced rapid, unregulated growth.
Bar Or’s account of Abu Shakra’s path as an artist reveals a man in constant search of the sublime. Even before he began to study Sufi thought fulltime, giving up art for most of a 25-year period, it was clear that Walid was of a mystical bent. In her essay in the catalog, Bar Or traces his progression from engravings to acquatint to drypoint printmaking. A seminal moment came in 1975, when he visited a photography exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In his own copy of the exhibition catalog, which remained in his belongings after his death, Walid underlined a quotation from the 17th-century scientist and statesman Sir Francis Bacon, who spoke of “open[ing] a portal to the liminal space of twilight, between day and night, and to the spirit of the place that is also the ‘Universal Spirit of the World.’”
Walid remained in the United Kingdom. He built himself a print workshop in Weybridge, in Surrey, south of London. He and Penny had two children, and from a second wife, whom he married in the early 2000s (without having divorced Penny, as permitted in Islam), he became father to two more children. He still visited Umm al-Fahm regularly, and each time he came, he would bring a camera, and take photos – many, many photos.
”He documented everything. He loved to walk, and wherever he walked, he did, click, click, click,” Said told me. “You see the old people, the children, weddings, customs. Everything.” This also included trees, caves, underbrush, and delicately shaded scenes of the heavens. Said says that Walid took some 10,000 photographs of Umm al-Fahm and Wadi Ara between 1972 and his death, in 2019, all of which were donated at his death to the photo archive of the Umm al-Fahm Gallery of Art.
Writes Galia Bar Or: “In his landscape painting… Walid’s interest lay not with the landscape but rather with the relationship between the sky and the earth, the storm brewing in the air, the change and flow of space and time, and the moment of grace when the light from the heavens touches the ground.”
In a film about Walid made by Mahmoud Abu Bakr in 1978-79, he is heard observing how, “A good artist is a real and responding person, who cares about his surroundings.” In his case, though, he also notes how he was “no longer interested in the details,” but rather in the inner
beauty “beyond shape and color.”
Having difficulty reconciling Walid’s almost organic connection to the natural terrain of his hometown with his decision to create his art from a studio in London, I asked his two brothers to explain the paradox. When I visit Farid in Umm al-Fahm last summer, he said with certainty that, “if he had remained here, he wouldn’t have done that [work]…. It came from a place of nostalgia. Of longing. His longing for this place led him to photograph in the village: the places where he played, where he spent most of his time as a child, led him to photograph these scenes, to take them to Europe, and to deal with and print them there.”
Said echoes this, explaining that Walid needed “to commemorate the place where he grew up, to preserve its old people, the plots of land with their figs and their olives… because he knew that someday these things and these people would no longer be here. … The olive tree that he painted would no longer be here because someone would have built a house on it.
In fact, what Galia Bar Or considers his finest Umm al-Fahm prints were made after a hometown visit in 1985, following a hiatus of more than three years, when Walid was confronted with the rapid urbanization, and indiscriminate destruction of the landscape, the city was undergoing. He set aside a hope he had been nurturing, of returning to Umm al-Fahm and building a house, and went back to London disappointed. But also, writes Bar Or, he returned “charged with a creative force, a strong drive to record the memory, to express the forces of change and the destruction of nature, to process the sense of loss.”
He created a series of prints that Gal Or characterizes as his among “the most powerful he ever made,” following which he made the decision to give up art. This seems to have been encouraged by his meeting and becoming involved with the Turkish-Cypriot Sufi teacher Muhammad Nazim Al-Haqqani, leader of the Sufi-Naqshbandi movement, who made London the base of operations of that religiouso sub-order in 1974.
In 1986, Walid traveled with Sheikh Nazim to Baghdad. This provided him with an opportunity to visit the tomb of his ancestor Abdul Qadir Gilani, the 12th-century Sufi preacher for whom Walid’s father was named. He began to study Sufi teachings in depth, and by 1989, Walid was ordained as a sheikh. He now spent two days teaching younger initiates, and he also gave counseling to other members of the Nazimi community in London.
According to Emile Abu Shakra, Walid’s 47-year-old son, who lives in London, he and his younger sister were under “intense pressure to accept the sheikh and his teachings.” It went, he explained in an email exchange, “way beyond an expectation that I’d be pious.” But Emile, who describes himself as a believing Muslim, said that “to this day, I don’t know the specific reason my father stopped working - I don’t think it had anything to do with him seeing a contradiction between his art and his faith.”
According to Walid’s brother Said, the decision to devote himself fully to religious activity was Walid’s alone: “His sheikh actually said to him: Walid, God gave you a passion to paint. It’s a gift. Keep painting. But Walid saw in Sufism a way of life. He didn’t see it as [merely] an addition to his life, he saw it as the path.”
In 2009, Walid returned to Umm al-Fahm, joining his family beside what they understood was their mother’s deathbed. On that occasion, Maryam requested of him that he return to doing art, even as continued to study Sufism. Said recalls her saying to his brother, “Art is God’s gift. It is important to all of us, to the close family and to society as a whole.”
Walid did return, briefly, to creating art. In January, 2012, his career was celebrated with a retrospective exhibition that was divided between the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of the Tel Aviv Museum and the Umm al-Fahm Gallery. It was accompanied by a major catalog, edited by Farid Abu Shakra. In preparation for that, Walid’s brothers brought him to the Gottesman Etching Center at Kibbutz Cabri, where he made prints both from plates he had brought from London, but also from newly made works.
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In 2019, it was Walid who was terminally ill. Said traveled to London to visit with him, but he also came with a practical mission to accomplish. He had discovered that the Umm al-Fahm Gallery held 80 of Walid’s prints that remained unsigned. “Artworks of Walid that aren’t signed aren’t worth anything,” says Said, who carried all 80 of them with him.
“I go there, and he’s very sick, but he wants to give us hope, and he says, ‘I’m not sick. I’m going to recover.’ And I say to him, you aren’t going to recover. Before you die, you have to sign these. Although I didn’t say it quite like that.”
Walid has two young children from his second wife, and Said made him understand that he was thinking about their financial security. Walid indicated silently that he understood. But still, several more days went by, the end of Said’s visit was approaching, and Walid did not raise the subject again.
Says Said: “By the eve of my departure, I had lost hope. I went to bed, and just as I was starting to doze off, I hear a voice: ‘Said! Said! Are you awake? I say, yes, of course. ‘Do you want to have tea? I’ll set the table.’”
Said went to grab his camera, and the two sat the kitchen table with the prints. “Eighty prints is a lot of money. He numbered them, and he signed each one. When he was alive, they were worth $1,500 each. Now they would be $2,500 or $3,000. And when I sell one, I send the money to the family.”
While the artist signed each work, he also talked about what he had in mind when he made it, recalls Said, who filmed the entire process: “Why had he made this one? What did it remind him of? Why did he draw this man? What did he do here, what did he do there?”
It must have gone on all night, I say to Said.
“Five hours. He didn’t get up once, not even to pee. He was sick. But he sat there like a hero. We stayed up til 2, and then I went to sleep. The next day, I returned to Israel. You have no idea how happy I was, happy not only that he signed the pieces, but also that I had filmed him talking about each one. When I came back, Walid died, and I’m going to make a film about him.”
Walid Abu-Shakra passed away on March 4, 2019, at age 73. Subsequently, the Umm al-Fahm gallery added the words “in memory of Walid Abu Shakra” to its name. The contents of his studio in London were transported to Israel, and a facsimile has been set up on the ground floor of the gallery. A short, understated film about Walid and his work is also screened.
helloo, thank you for all of this - where can I find the article or writings from Galia Bar Or?