A Gripping Conversation with Fatma Shanan

Fatma Shanan is a Druze painter from Israel. She is known for her figurative oil paintings of scenes of Druze villages and is inspired by 19th and 20th-century realism. Shanan is the winner of the 2016 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art awarded by the Tel Aviv Museum, where she had a solo exhibition during the summer of 2017. She has exhibited solo at DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM Gallery, Berlin (2021, 2019), and at the Armory show in New York City (2020). Shanan's work participated in group shows and art fairs at venues such as Art Colonge (2021); Artgenève, Switzerland (2020); The Museum for Islamic Art, Jerusalem (2020); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2019); the Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv (2019); and Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris (2018) among others. Shanan received several other awards and scholarships for her artistic achievements, such as Israel's Ministry of Culture award for Plastic Art (2021); Israel's Ministry of Culture (2017, 2014). Shanan participated in residency programs at Fountainhead Miami (2021), Residency Unlimited, New York (2018), and Artport Tel Aviv (2016-2017). I had the pleasure of asking Fatma what purpose art served in her life, how she adapted during the pandemic artistically, and so much more.

UZOMAH: How do you come up with themes for your art?

FATMA: My paintings are characterized by looking at scenes that include myself or participants from different circles in my life. The physical and mental space in the society I grew up in led me to these issues since childhood when I had to create my own personal defined space. The topics I deal with in my artworks are engaged with my personal biography and with things I've seen and read inspired by my own experience in the world. From my personal experience, I strive to reach the universal, and sometimes vice versa. as in Walt Whitman's words, a great inspirational source for me, "for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."

In addition, many of my works begin with written words, in my recent works mostly around the poems of the American poet Walt Whitman, which gave words to my previous personal feelings. My works seek to explore and develop a notion, both visually and conceptually. In recent years I find myself increasingly engaged in nature, inspired by Whitman, who dealt with the vast nature as a space in which human freedom in its purest form resides, a space that only when a person is free from societal distractions and structures he can know himself. This is a topic I've frequently been researching in my recent works.

U: How has formal education helped your artistic process?

F: I studied painting at Oranim Academic College and with painter Eli Shamir. Something from each of my teachers has remained with me.

The group of artists with whom I studied certainly is not homogeneous and in no way follows or emulates the style of this or that teacher, and from this experience, I've learned to adhere to my own artistic path.

I see painting as a relationship, as an attempt to understand the world, and from this understanding - to acknowledge the limitations of my abilities and, therefore, persevere in the attempt. Painting is created out of doubt and not out of knowledge - painting is the way to learn about the world, not the way to imitate or copy it. That endless attempt to deconstruct my world is behind each one of my paintings.

U: Your use of your own body to both define and open spaces has become something for which you are known. How did that come about artistically?

F: Painting myself and my body in my works was a natural evolution of my exploration of body-space relations. Like anything in my paintings, my body is never isolated from context. It is always thought about with its environment.

Inspired by the writings of Whitman, which I've mentioned, in my recent paintings, there are representations of myself, surrounded by branches and flowers that sometimes appear to grow out of my body's various positions - thus, the limits between the figure and the nature are rather blurred, literally and allegorically. In the preparatory works for my paintings, I use my body's movement and its extension to examine the connection between the social/mental rules and the physical embodiment.

U: What purpose does art serve in your life?

F: I strive to create meaningful compositions that are not imitations of reality. Again, painting for me is a system in and of itself, a way of understanding my world, of being from a distance.

U: Who are some of your artistic influences?

F: As I mentioned, many of my works are influenced by my personal experiences in the world, as well as by texts I read that direct my ideas. All of my paintings are inherently related to the performative preparatory work that preceded them and is based on pre-staged scenes. In my early works, especially around my childhood village, Julis, in northern Israel, and in my recent works, especially around the connection with nature.

Western art history and mythology were inevitably additional great inspiration sources for my artworks from the modern, ancient and medieval periods. For example, the foreshortened perspective in 'Laying and Flowers' from 2021 and 'Green Background' from 2019 was influenced by Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ from 1480. Over the years, I was also significantly inspired by Surrealist works of female artists like Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, whose hybrid figures address a mind-body expansion. I was inspired by many modern artists, among them, Balthus, whose cat in Thérèse Dreaming (from 1938) detached from its domesticated place and went out to the top of the sevil (outdoor water fountain) in my work 'Fountain' from 2021, or from Ludovic Alleaume's Marie Madeleine pose from 1927 which appears similarly in my' Shoulders Flowers'. These are just a few examples, but the list is much longer…

U: Is the end result more important than the process? Or the process? Or are they equal?

F: The artistic process and the result are inseparable for me. The scenes I pre-direct are an integral, central part of the creative process and not just part of a practical process.

Similarly, my picturesque technical practice, including inseparable combination: the technique of the multiple stains and the concept in which I engage in my works, are intertwined. Each stroke of color is placed at a minor distance from the next, a practice based on my desire to combine matter and concept.

U: How does figurative art allow you to address art as a means of exploration?

F: The picturesque medium allows me direct contact and interaction with the canvas: the brush serves as an intermediary factor between my body and the creation. Working in this medium involves an integral spiral process that combines thought, eye and hand. The use of figurative painting also allows me to connect the body to the canvas: my paintings are all based on pre-staged scenes in which the body operates and acts. I document the performance, and the images serve as the basis for my paintings; performance and movement are embodied on the canvas using stains.

U: How does art express the emotions and senses one feels and uses in life?

F: In my eyes, the painting process is subjective and intimate. However, as soon as I release the result to the world, I am confident and content that it suddenly takes on new directions and interpretations that I have no control over, which I embrace. Since I use figurative painting, there is no doubt that the observers, in most cases, will seek a specific meaning in the artwork; I do want them to understand the personal meaning I've given to my works and how the works embody my inner feelings, but at the same time it is no less important that there will be complete freedom of external fluid interpretation. The external interpretation, however far from my personal artistic process, is more than welcome.

U: What are you currently working on?

F: I am currently working on the project for a solo exhibition that will go up next year (2023) in Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami. I am interested in expressing the relationship between myself and nature, especially around the ocean. This is a theme that continues the last exhibition I presented in Berlin, leaves of grass, at the DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM gallery. The previous exhibition was titled after the writings of the American poet Walt Whitman, which deals with the vast nature, whose only assimilation within it makes it possible to experience its power to its fullest. I now seek to create inspired nature in an unmediated manner, within the enormous American nature, especially in the ocean and its floor, which functions as a pivotal element in my research. Through diving and documentation, I explore how my own movement affects the movement of the ocean and how the movement of the ocean affects me, including all of the life taking place beneath. For me, this preparatory research relates to questions I ask in many of my artworks regarding the space around me and the interaction between me and the space.

U: How have you adapted during the pandemic artistically?

F: During two lockdown periods in Israel, everything was closed, and all public activity aside from essential services had stopped. You were allowed to go outside only for certain activities and only within a 100 meters radius from home. Police and soldiers were everywhere enforcing the restrictions, especially in areas of high infection rates.

I practically spent all my time in the studio. It was very interesting to explore how limited movement can change the way we create, reducing ourselves or our art scale. The main change that occurred regarding my art during that period was that I stopped working on large-scale works and started working on small canvases, as I needed them to be easily transportable so I'd easily carry them home with me during quarantine or under lockdown restrictions. In this context, it is important to note that the change in my paintings' scale was also inspired by the small-scale magical and mesmerizing artworks I've been exposed to the recent year in the "Surrealist Women" exhibition at the MoMa museum, NYC in 2020, which included works of female artists as mentioned above and also as Remedios Varo.

Please visit Fatma's site for more information about her artwork and future exhibits.

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