Inside Artist Samia Halaby’s Colourful Studio
BAZAAR Art enters artist Samia Halaby’s ethereal studio in New York City’s Tribeca, brimming with colourful spirals and bold geometric shapes
While nothing compares to visiting renowned Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s enchanting studio in person, digital platforms have not only replaced in some ways, but also expanded and enhanced creative
conversations across continents.
Amidst the quarantine, Samia has harnessed her strength in technology (a self-taught programmer herself ) both in utilising social media and experimenting with her abstract artistic creations to bring the community to her studio through the web. Just as difficult this transition to the digital realm was for artists and art lovers alike, Samia has embraced this aspect, becoming instrumental in sharing her work through an intense digital programming schedule.
Despite the quarantine circumstances, I caught Samia in her Tribeca studio just before I was returning to Dubai. Amidst the quiet and humid Manhattan day in the heat of quarantine, Samia’s studio was bursting and cascading with as much light from the widely-opened windows as her surrounding paintings. The bold geometric shapes within her effervescent artworks become themselves windows into another world of abstraction.
Samia Halaby. A Squirell Flying. 2020
A freshly brewed tea was waiting for me on the table, the perfect elixir to absorb the jubilant surroundings where colours, shading and shadows ricocheted across the room and manifested perfectly onto her paintings.
The colourful spirals within her canvases danced their way into the floors, seeping onto the walls, kitchen cabinets, notebooks and computers – even on her handmade, patterned clothing. Contagious strokes in entropy were multiplying in gorgeous fashion, their numbers clearly not accustomed to the social distancing!
Confident and always colourfully dressed with a self-made New Yorker originality, Samia has embraced her time during this quarantine and it seems just when I visited her studio in late August is when new elements within her painting practice were strongly brewing, catching her on an intense painting streak after a short hiatus in the early quarantine months.
But just as isolation came and welcomed her, Samia wasn’t left alone. Instead her entry to the outside world transformed online. The artist interrupted her digital days with brief walks to the NYC pier, absorbing the quietness and stillness of the mornings, and capturing the sunrise and sunset’s colours reflected onto the skyline and within the movement of people.
Hardly able to keep a consistent routine with her demanding work schedule, Samia’s days in the studio have been so unpredictable but yet propelled by her love for painting that always occupies her mind – whether she’s busily working on her canvases, writing in the morning, sending out emails, or preparing for a presentation.
Samia Halaby. Grey Scribble. 2019.
Her eyes glisten after sharing she just made one of her best paintings ten days ago, finding this as a manifestation of her recent painterly transition. “The change in my painting is not sudden,” she says. “It’s like a slow growth. Just as a tree or plant doesn’t suddenly bloom, the bloom comes seemingly sudden. But when you start to notice it in full detail, the feeling gestates, it becomes new ideas that emanated from a process of visual thought – materialised through little work on paper, an investigation, doodles, the things I see, or through the photographs I take.”
What’s next? Rekindling with and upgrading her computer programming and performing. She was recently propelled to reinvestigate her electronic work from speaking at Emirati researcher Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi’s online majlis earlier this March. Beside her desk, Samia is dusting off an old Amiga computer she used in the ’80s and ’90s, as she prepares for a live performance later that week collaborating with music and image in her Kinetic Painting Group. Easily adapting to the latest technologies, she has been learning how to transfer material to her new computer.
“I am trying to proceed with optimism while taking note of the growing aesthetic pleasure of returning to programming,” she shares. “The computer is just another tool that enhances my painting practice. It’s not so much different than brush and acrylic, but instead the same creative process.”
Image Courtesy of Samia Halaby
From the Autumn 2020 Issue of Harper’s Bazaar Art