ARTIST STATEMENT —
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During the past thirty years, I've produced four major series of paintings in which I explore the aesthetic dimensions of Amharic script, the major focus of my work (I briefly describe the four series below). Amharic, derived from the ancient language Ge'ez and a major modern language of Ethiopia, is one of the few written systems indigenous to Africa. Though Ethiopia has centuries-old traditions of two-dimensional art that include script, such as Coptic icon paintings underscored by written narratives; or magic scrolls that combine prayers with traditional motifs, written by natural healers to ward off evil, the script symbols themselves never evolved as a fine art form. As an art student at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa in the early 1970s, I began experimenting with the aesthetic dimensions of the more than 200 Amharic symbols. I am the first Ethiopian-born painter to lift the symbols out of their liturgical traditions and linguistic conventions and transform them into contemporary fine art. These script-images have now become recognized internationally as my 'artistic signature.'
Since my student years, American jazz has asserted a significant influence on my style of painting as well as on my perceptions of the language forms. Early on, I found a strong link between jazz rhythms, improvisations, and counterpoints, and the ways I was abstracting Amharic script. Like jazz music, the script provides a repertoire of dense, yet flexible, sensual elements that lend themselves well to visual improvisation. Painting to the sounds of jazz gives me a critical distance to the language symbols as word elements. I see them as abstracted notation: shapes I can manipulate, modify, and improvise. Jazz also influences my sense of composition: like flexible musical notes, the language symbols can be juxtaposed on canvas in nonverbal 'word-plays' to create a visual harmony of rhythm, contrast, and movement. Together with the script, color, texture, and space are my expressive instruments.
A brief description of my four major series illustrates the development of my aesthetics of script.
While completing an MFA at Howard University in Washington, DC (1978-80), and fascinated by graffiti and other street art I'd seen in New York, I began the first series Graffiti Magic (1980-1987). These paintings included combinations of both individual symbols and full words as a kind of protest art: I was exploring the script's bold, expressive power. The paintings had vibrant colors, but little texture or depth came into play on the canvas. With the second series Africa: The New Alphabet (1988-1994), I researched Ethiopian and other African cultures for histories and traditions I could interpret as visual narratives. I combined script symbols with other images, such as masks, woodcarvings, textile patterns, and traditional architectural forms, to create a new visual language based on pan-African motifs.
The third series Color of Words (1995-2003) brought dramatic shifts in my painting style as well as a renewed focus on the script itself. Disassembling the symbols into more intensely abstracted images, I discovered that their sculptural qualities and voluminous shapes brought texture and new spaces into my paintings. Now dominating my compositions, the script characters seemed to emerge from, as well as being painting onto, the canvas. At times, they seemed to pose in front of me, almost like nude models whose anatomy I had to carefully study and interpret; they were coming alive and moving far beyond any culturally specific boundaries.
With the works in my current series Words: From Spoken to Seen (2004-present), painting has become an intense process of 'dialoguing' with these 'live models,' with their surfaces and interiors, their 'skeletal' structures, with the ways they seem to move. Using acrylics, I elongate, distort, invert, dissect and recombine their shapes and volumes, even turning them inside-out to discover their moods, tempers, and personalities. I don't pre-sketch paintings; my process is inchoate and exploratory: an interplay of accident and intention, of mastery and uncertainty, of curiosity and discovery. Quick-drying acrylics allow me to easily build and destroy colors and figures on canvas: I blend wet brushstrokes with patches of dried acrylic 'skin' to create richly textured paintings with illusions of spatial depth. I use a wide-ranging palette, from bold primary colors to muted tones that look almost repellent on my palette, but that smoothly integrate into a composition; to black and white paintings with bare touches of color; to works in several tones of a single color.
Though the script-images in this series of paintings may resemble Amharic to some viewers, they're devoid of linguistic meaning and become transformed into pure visual images. I want my paintings to challenge the viewer to 'read' language as an aesthetic invention, as narrative compositions of colors and shapes that convey or mirror aspects of human life. On the canvas, my script is a word-play of visual metaphors that, though unspoken or unwritten, can be seen, smelled, tasted, listened to, savored, and read.
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