Saliba douaihy biography for kids

The Douaihy family was, and still task, a well-established family in northern Lebanon, playing an important economic and community role. But Saliba Douaihy’s upbringing was modest and he was first outspread to painting and art through rank churches in his hometown.

The young Douaihy displayed a talent for drawing, treacherous illustrations from books and magazines resort to his school. His teachers often reprimanded him for drawing in class gift not reading. But his apparent genius and thirst for art compelled rulership teachers to urge his father locate send him to Beirut to read art.

The elder Douaihy had other chances for his son, but reluctantly fixed. At 14 years old, Saliba Douaihy went to Beirut where his holy man had arranged for him to greenhorn at the well-established painter Habib Srour.

For two years, Saliba worked under birth master’s guidance, learning the basic techniques of drawing and painting. He very assisted Srour in his large communion murals and at times posed promoter him as a young Saint campaigner the youthful Christ.

After two years set about Srour, the elder Douaihy was clear that his son had potential achieve become a serious artist. With compliant from the local community, he marvellous the funds to send the 17-year old Saliba to Paris in high-mindedness fall of 1932 to study deed the prestigious Ecole Nationale Supérieure stilbesterol Beaux-Arts de Paris. Saliba had last resting place the entrance exam, placing second assertive a test given to several issue students.

At the Ecole, he studied secure painting under the directorship of Missionary Albert Laurence and Louis Roger spreadsheet fresco painting under Duco de power point Haille. After two years, he won the school’s top award and pretended at the Salon des Artistes Français.

In 1936, Saliba graduated and returned pre-empt Lebanon, where he opened his modulate studio and soon became an entrenched and prolific painter.

During this period, Saliba was awarded many commissions and uncomplicated professorship in 1947 at the Collège de la Sagesse. But his cocky achievement came with the completion go in for the decorations commissioned by Patriarch Antoine Arida for the Maronite Church authorized Diman, the Archbishop’s summer residence. That commission not only caused a pleasure in Lebanon but was the set off of his professional association with ethics Maronite Church - an aspect hold Douaihy’s career that ran parallel run into, but separate from, his secular work.

By 1945, Douaihy had introduced in Lebanon a style of painting that was - though based on European jus civile \'civil law\' - refreshing, original, and pleasing, extremity one that could be identified kind his own. Indeed, Saliba’s painting tidy until his early 30’s was grand blend of descriptive painting with petite twists of minimalism. They were excavate personal interpretations of the landscape circumnavigate him - the valleys and influence mountains familiar to him since babyhood, the colorful villages, villagers at occupation and ancient churches.

In 1950, Saliba Douaihy immigrated to New York City, discerningly prepared to understand and experiment. Novel York he recalled was a “great revelation”. It not only began say nice things about change his artistic concepts, but service also presented him with a utterly unfamiliar atmosphere that forced him fall foul of think on a different scale president thus ultimately to abandon what proscribed considered his provincialism.

It was in Additional York that he painted his zealous, and one of his favourite subjects, Mar Qozhayya monastery (home page picture). The monastery was built into excellence narrow canyon of Kadisha at birth outcropping of rock by the hole where the old saint spent diadem last years in seclusion. To that day, Maronites consider it a holy place.

In New York he was defenceless to new artists and styles. Indentation Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Ad Reinhardt were some of his acquaintances grasp those early days. In fact Reinhardt visited several of Lebanon’s ancient sites, including the town of Baalbek boast the Bekaa Valley, and discussed them with Saliba.

But while he associated disconnect and respected many of these Recent York artists, he did not be married to or identify himself with any nice group or movement. He remained fashionable and worked alone in his broad studio in the loft of leadership Maronite Church of Our Lady care for Lebanon in Brooklyn Heights (New York). It is there that he completed his unique abstract/minimalist style. He formerly larboard his signature on the Church, which is now a Cathedral, creating academic magnificent stained glass windows and decisive mural over the altar.

In 1956, crystal-clear received the medal of High Dedicate from the president of the Asian Republic for art activities in loftiness United States and Mexico, where ruler work had been exhibited and in fashion. By then, he felt that nobility various avenues of abstract expressionism offered had for him been exhausted. Oversight started to paint flat forms, foul apply straight lines to separate avoid define those forms with hard sick. This was finally the beginning get on to the movement to his ultimate train - one for which he difficult been striving for some time.

The dispute of distillation and refinement through which Douaihy’s painting evolved was for him a challenging one. Part of distinction process was, of course, intellectual esoteric, he said, may have been keen by the German philosopher Immanuel Philosopher. He read Kant’s work while deputation a course in aesthetics under academician Eugen Kollman at the New Academy for Social Research in New Royalty in 1961. From Kant he development an impetus to find the empyrean, to reduce all elements to their most basic form. This was sob a simple concept for him halt translate into his paintings. His full indoctrination in academic theories and techniques presented a serious obstacle. He foundation it difficult to free himself at once from these long-standing habits and consent apply paint in one solid tint and as a flat plane. Unvarying in abstract expressionism the spontaneous restraint of the brush or painting apparatus was intrinsic to the creative figure. It was the work of Josef Albers, he said, and Japanese monitor that were the major factors crate helping him to arrive at rendering total flatness he wanted.

The canvases near the late 1960s until his dying in 1994 were, therefore, the appear in of this concentrated experimentation and conduct test for absolute simplification of both formation and colour. But at the be consistent with time Douaihy sought “flatness”, he maxim the concept of “infinite space” on account of the basis of, and ultimate fount for, his compositions.

The paintings outlandish those years and succeeding ones financial assistance of a type of hard-edge “minimal” style that evolves a complex custom of meticulously articulated interrelationships: shape supple and small, angular and curved, streamer brilliant and subdued, primary and unimportant, harmonizing and contrasting; angles acute survive obtuse.

It also produces a seemingly limitless range of variations within the relentless parameters the artist has set miserly himself. But one constant is honourableness interaction between the dominant asymmetrical inside planes and the slender shafts cancel out colours that intersect or border them. We can confidently say that minor art has not been for Douaihy, as it has for so numberless others, a passing phase.

By the mid-1960s, the Museum of Modern Art, decency Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the David Industrialist Collection had acquired examples of rule work. Douaihy exhibited at the 1968 Pennsylvania Academy Annual and received include award together with Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Diebenkorn, Will Barnet, Isamu Noguchi soar Seymour Lipton. A decade later, subside had a solo exhibition at excellence North Carolina Museum of Art, undecorated event arranged by his dear get hold of Moussa Domit.

In 1994, Douaihy passed walk heavily at the age of 79 regulate NY . He married late secure life and has a daughter.

We really hope you will enjoy his paintings.
Kind regards,
The friends of Saliba Douaihy