By Haajar Boutafi
By Haajar Boutafi
Morocco World News
Fez, August 6, 2012
When Chaibia Talal dreamed of sails spinning around under a blue sky and strangers approaching her, offering her papers and pencils, she could easily decode its content. As the following day started, she bought a blue painting – the type of painting that is usually used to paint walls – and used her hands to paint whatever came into her mind. Later, she was offered simple watercolors and brushes and could realize, at last, her dream.
Chaibia was a Moroccan painter who was born in Chtouka close to the region of Doukkala, about 200 km (124 miles) south of Rabat. She became a wife, a mother, and then a widow at a very young age. She assumed the responsibility for her child in a solid manner. She worked hard in the morning as a housemaid of different families and painted tableaus at night in her small house.
Destiny opened her wide arms for her when Pierre Gaudibert, the French critic came to visit her son, Talal, who was known for his professional paintings too and turned out to discover her own marvelous paintings. Soon, with his financial and moral support, Chaibia could organize her exhibition in Casablanca – her first station towards success.
What most people do not know is that Chaibia influenced the field of painting positively, creating a different school of painting where simplicity and originality are the main pillars. Her works were compared to some of the great painters of her time, though she was taken in the sixties as a painter who lacked originality and strived for imitating the western type of painting which culminated in a search for fame. Her works soon became a reference and a new issue in the field of painting as she started expressing her naïve feelings through the women she portrayed in her tableaus.
Chaibia taught the professional painters who spent years and years learning how to paint, that painting is a feeling interpreted through a brush and mixture of colors from here in there into a piece of art ready to stand under the magnifier of the critics, yet unable to unveil the hidden feelings and emotions its original painter put in it.
Painting is an art of the self, no matter how the other judges it according to his/her complicated understanding of it; it remains mysterious to them but a true state of feelings to the original painter.
© 2012 Morocco World News. All Rights Reserved
