Tuesday, September 28, 2010

No outside-marital contact for a Somali woman

Holland, Amsterdam,
28 Sept. 2010.

Living in Amsterdam, a melting pot of cultures and nationalities, and being an aficionado of portrait painting, I consider myself lucky...lucky with all the inspiration that a single sorty out of the house will provide me, people from every corner of the globe walking up and down the Spaarndammerstraat. Dressed in their tradional garb or in plain old blue jeans spanning over the well-shaped behind of a Turkish female behind,  a Somalia refugee lady with colorfull head covering or maybe an old Marrocan man, grey bearded and with his slippers and Djalebba, on the way to the mosque around the corner to pray to Allah...

A group of young immigrant school girls in the Albert Heyn supermarket queue in front of me, talking in a gibberish of Dutch and incomprehesible Arabic, giggling and sub-consciously redoing their neutral black-colored head scarves...

In this city my inspiration is everywhere, filling my head with color-rich images that need to get out at night with my acrylics paint flying wildly in my house and the result even wilder and more colorfull....

I know nothing about the dark-skinned lady in this painting though suspect she is Somali or maybe somewhere nearby in the horn of Africa, have never seen her in the company of another human being, never heard her conversing with the cassieres of the neighborhood's supermarkets or shops, quietly doing her shopping, shyly avoiding contact with the other city dwellers, self-consciously dropping her  eyes when walking by my door where I often watch the world go by....

A loney being in an otherwise lively city or else has been forbidden any outside-marital contact by a Allah-devout husband back home...

Acrylics on wood

No comments: