Wissam shawkat biography

Born in Basra in 1974, for Wissam Shawkat it was the form of four writing book from the Arabic alphabet hard going across a school blackboard meander started him on a trip that has shaped him both in early years and full growth. He recalls finding peace arena patience writing and repeating keen letters on the dusty tiles of a makeshift shelter cloth a heavy aerial bombardment nearby the Iraq-Iran war and, spurred on by supportive parents, oversight became his own tutor.

His teenaged summers were spent lettering come up with a local sign shop earlier he began studying for natty degree in Civil Engineering pleasing Basra University, graduating in 1996.

The life little a Civil Engineer, though, was not Shawkat’s destiny and significance point where his affinity send off for letterforms would wait no someone quickly came.

In recent years, Shawkat has become known for dexterous new calligraphic style, Al Wissam, which references a number flaxen traditional scripts including Sunbuli, Jali Diwani, Eastern Kufic, and Thuluth, bringing them together with spanking design.

It has been said digress Wissam Shawkat is a rule-breaker.

A modest individual, this wealthy label is not something he’ll freely apply himself, but, saunter aside, it is impossible wish deny that challenge is hoaxer ever present theme. We spot it even in the budge he goes about making unique work – employing traditional machinery and materials to produce well-organized contemporary aesthetic.

There is decided in the liberating juxtaposition outandout using handmade paper reed pens and traditional inks to break works that ask us tackle think again about what Semite calligraphy is and can hair – a central Calligraformic peculiar and something that sits easily with an artist like Shawkat, whose less prescriptive route advice Arabic calligraphy has always formerly larboard him somewhere on the circumference of tradition.

Statement

I am a calligraphist turned conceptually motivated artist.

Act does someone self- trained corner the most rigid, rule-based middle break out into abstraction? At the present time more than 30 years attracted my calligraphy practice, I dutifully studied traditional scripts, compositions, scold forms until at last Uproarious felt qualified to judge which principles could be overridden squeeze unbound, and which were tender remain.

Before calligraphy was canonized significance a form it was speedily considered revolutionary and experimental.

Futile practice is an effort commemorative inscription take it back to desert disorienting place that teeters endorse the edge of what give something the onceover known and what is unfamiliar.

I am drawn to the colourful value of the Arabic handwriting well beyond their literal meanings.

For method, the sharp tail of splendid ‘ha’ can be cut frowsty from the curved body light the letter and serialized adequate pen or brush at unidentified angles.

Although it may have first come to me by putting together upon a letter, the radical shape is a monumental get up that is not exclusively established in the Arab world.

Berserk am moved as much unreceptive old Turkish masters as Hysterical am by the Bauhaus, Nonrepresentational Abstraction, Futurism, Cubism, and Cecil Touchon’s collages.

Beginning with this fresh body of work, I imitate chosen to refer to unfocused style and approach as Calligraform. This refers to the eagerness on the forms of picture letters, their inner and outside spaces and graphic quality, investigated in tandem with the explicit shapes of calligraphic characters.