That thing she shares through her art.
‘The Yellow House’ acrylic on canvas 2023 enquire directly to the artist Shop art by Zeina Kara Ali – 5 artworks for sale on Bluethumb.
Zeina Kara-Ali is a woman who knows what she wants. She’s a planner. She has made it her business to be educated, well-informed and methodical in her creative practise. She thrives on sharing the beauty of life – and from Zeina’s perspective beauty is available to us everywhere.
She holds up her trusted informant, a vintage-green notebook that she takes with her everywhere. She speaks of the treasures it holds; art prize deadlines, the dimensions of her work, recipes for mixing colours, sketches, random thoughts… It is her creative Gospel.
“It’s anything I don’t want to forget” she tells me. Evidently, there is a lot Zeina wishes to remember, yet I find myself waiting for something else to reveal itself from inside that book. Something is missing from its pages.
Zeina has lived an artful life. She left her native Lebanon and settled in Ghana Africa for two decades where she was both a student and teacher of art, working from her own studio and volunteering her time to run workshops for women and orphans. The colours of her cultural experiences permeate her work. Vivid, lucid and expansive, the colours pulse from within her work like tectonic plates, slowly shifting and merging into one another over time, creating an entirely new landscape. Coursing through Zeina’s adventurers’ veins has always been the heart of an artist who gains great satisfaction for sharing beauty through all her creative endeavours whether – it’s an event or an oeuvre.
Zeina’s face is aglow as she looks away wistfully, “I like to see people happy about something I’m doing…I feel that I am able to share beauty and I enjoy doing it. I get great satisfaction from achieving a vision and people admiring what I’ve done.”
Indeed, when I ask Zeina about the piece titled “The Yellow House” and why she has indicated it is her favourite, she grins and admits, “Because it’s the first one I sold, and all my friends commented on its beauty.”
Zeina is proud, I see, that people saw the beauty in the yellow house that she did. I’m interested, “Who might live in the yellow house, Zeina?”
“When I was twenty I left Lebanon. I lived in Ghana, and from Ghana I came to Australia. I was very happy in Ghana and I am happy in Australia. But I always miss my home country, my mothers’ home. My mother’s home is similar to the yellow house. I miss my childhood there. I miss everything about it. Even though my city in Lebanon is a very small city and a very poor city. I miss the food there, I miss the places, I miss my mum’s home. I didn’t really live there long. I am always like a visitor in my own country.”
Having an understanding of how creative expression of memory effects story – and us, my next question is one that I often ask artists, and Zeina has lead my right to it.
“Can you share with me your earliest memory?”
“In Lebanon?”…It was always about my parents’ home, me and my sisters walking to school or eating sitting around the fire watching tv…” And, she cries into her hands that lightly cover her face.
The cork has popped.
Zeina’s artworks are the imagination of far more than just the things she writes in her notebook that she doesn’t want to forget. Her art is the imagination of the things in her life she wishes to remember. Zeina calls it beauty, that thing she shares through her art. It’s not, although it is beautiful. What Zeina shares is something far greater.
She shares love.