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Artwork note:
‘Friends of the Sky’ is a softly lyrical
abstract painting that teeters on the
brink of the non-figurative. It treats
landscape more as an atmospheric
dreamscape than as a depiction of the
real world. Typically, it employs a
family of hues – different shades of
blue – to create a unified, powerfully
evocative, color-induced mood.
At eye level, the sea gives viewers a
sense of being recast as a bird. There
is surprisingly little detail and a
disturbing ambiguity about the size of
the figures, yet visually we feel very
close to these compositions.
Moaleb divides his painting into two
panels separated by the glowing sunshine
reflected on the crest of the waves,
which veil a far away land. The blue
sky, spreading from edge to edge and top
to bottom, acts as a sounding board
against which the two birds gain their
resonance.
One particularly interesting aspect of
the painting is the ‘ready to takeoff’
movement of the bird perched on the
rock, suggesting the troubling feeling
of the unaccomplished: here, the artist
looks beyond the human realm and makes
us realize how small we are in
comparison to the vast universe. |
