AREEJ RAJAB

Bahraini born and raised, Areej Rajab was an artist at birth and remains one to this day. She recalls watching with wonder as her aunt, the classical water-colourist Sameeha Rajab, worked away at the canvas. At three, with her aunt as both inspiration and tutor, Rajab began to learn about colour, materials, techniques and application. She began a love affair with colour that, as an adult, shows no signs of waning.

Rajab studied Business and General Management at the University of Bahrain, and had three children before she made the decision to pursue her lifelong passion. That passion took her, family in tow, to the London College of Art where her true talent revealed itself fully, perhaps for the first time.

Today, Rajab’s work touches the hearts of collectors and enthusiast from all four corners of the globe. She has exhibited extensively throughout the Middle East including at Bahrain’s Ministry of Culture and the Gulf Hotel, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well as across the UK. She works as an art teacher, tutoring a wide range of pupils, from absolute beginners through to the professionally trained, from the young to the old.

All my life I’ve been asked ‘what does your art mean’, ‘why do you make it’, ‘what are you trying to say’. In the past I have tried to answer these questions, but I’ve never been able to find words to articulate it with any real level of accuracy. I’m not able to express what, for me, cannot be spoken. These days people still ask, but I no longer attempt to answer.

What I can say is that my work comes from emotion and I use colour as my primary means of expressing that. To me each colour has a unique character and I feel as if emotion flows through me as I apply these colours to my canvas. I am driven to make art – I have to. It’s as if I have no choice in the matter. Creating art work offers me a release of tremendous energy. It’s almost a relief to put brush to canvas, it gives me a sense of freedom I can find nowhere else. My mind opens and sometimes I feel like I am just the vessel through which creativity passes – a conduit for the power of art.

Inspiration for me doesn’t come from the art world. I love art and have studied movements closely. I have spent hundreds of hours learning about the techniques of the Iraqi and European Masters, for example, but what has gone before and what is happening in the art world around me has little influence and how and why I make art. Passing conversations, the parallel between light and shade, a child’s laughter, flowers as they begin to bloom – I see these things and I am suddenly compelled to begin painting. Perhaps the subtleties of life are my inspiration, somehow it’s just not my place to say.