THE ongoing Souk Okaz festival in Taif surprised visitors with a painting competition last week - called “A Poem on Painting” - as the event is primarily associated with literature and theater. In this year's festival, artists turned to literature for inspiration, and in the small anthology of poems and paintings exhibited here raised questions about the intricate relationship between poetry and art. Is poetry simply an objective verbal description of an artwork or does the poet interpret the meaning within a painting? Could you reconstruct a painting from the poem without actually seeing it? Why does the poet dwell on some features of the painting and ignore other aspects? These and other questions were the focus of this hybrid exhibition. The general manager of the Souk, Dr. Juraidy Al-Mansoury, spoke to Saudi Gazette and stressed the deep connection art and poetry share in reality, with artists taking ideas from poem and poets deriving inspiration from art. The competition itself attracted over 60 artists, though only two pieces of artwork won the prize and the prize amount of 100,000 Saudi riyals. “Visual arts is an international language which reflects the participants and their tastes,” remarked Faisal Al-Khudaidi, the chief of the arts and culture committee at the event. “For the second year, this competition was open to international competition to reflect the predated culture.” The competition's rules and conditions were distributed outside of the Kingdom as well with the explicit instruction that the artwork should be inspired directly from a poem which was to be attached to the artwork. The unusual competition and exhibition attracted a variety of visitors. One of them was Gusai Luay Ganita, a 20-year-old expatriate, who commented that one of the paintings featuring a Bedouin lady seemed to inspire the poem rather than the other way round. One participant was a member of the plastic art committee at the Souk was Mohammed Al-Thagafi, who mentioned that his painting was inspired by Mohammed Jabur Al-Harby's love sonnet and depicted a red rose for love and black and white sides to indicate both the purity and the problems facing lovers. The committee judging the contest consisted of Dr. Mohammed Saleh Al-Rosais, Dr. Ahmed Mater Aseery and Dr. Mohammed Hamad Hilal. They chose two paintings of Saudi artists Taha Saban and Abdul Rahman Kheder, who shared the prize amount. Both artists originally submitted two paintings.
