DR. RASHID DIAB

he self presentation follows  will give you the right idea about this cool artist, and the pictures below will make you to better underestand the reason we decide to insert his work in our review…“I was born 1957 and raised in Wad Medani, a small town on the banks of the Blue Nile in Sudan and even growing up I would think about my relationship with distance and space. Why do things have specific dimensions and a certain shape at a certain time? These questions became an obsession, with the only solution being to paint and continue to paint. I know that the desire to paint is something within me, part of my inner self, part of my subconscious. In 1978, after graduating from the Khartoum College of Fine and Applied Arts in Sudan, I went to Spain on a scholarship to further my studies in art. At this time I began to fully appreciate my diverse Sudanese heritage and since then I have maintained and developed an extensive vocabulary of images and patterns in my mind from Sudan’s cultural history. By 1991 I had completed Fine Arts Degrees in Painting and in Etching (separately) and obtained a Ph.D. for a thesis titled “Tradition and Modernity: Contemporary Sudanese Art” from the Complutense University of Madrid. Following the awarding of my Ph.D. I taught Fine Art at the same university until returning to Sudan in 2000. Art, for me, is ultimately the connection between human beings. It is also what sustains cultures and indicates the material aspects of civilisations and so, as human beings, we are responsible for maintaining and developing our cultural history. This is the belief that I wish to communicate and the dream that I am now endeavouring to make real, by creating my own world at the Rashidiab Arts Centre in Khartoum. The centre has a unique sense of colour and space and its designs are born from my innermost thoughts and feelings. My strongest three themes are the Nile, the desert and women. To me, the Nile is the eternity of existence, the desert is space and silence, and women represent my feelings towards the women in my life. My notion of time is the instant at which these three subjects come together; a singular moment at which these thoughts unify. The point at which this connection is made in my mind is manifested as one of my abstract paintings. However, I consider my work not just as a mere coincidence of time or an incarnation of some moment. It is actually a reflection of the human being as a conclusion, a material result of the species, which I try to express”