Nada Bennani
Artist from Morocco
01/02
"In my country, during this season, the weather is hot and we usually go to the beaches, which are not far from us. Now with the coronavirus, things are more complicated. So, I had a big envy to go there and refresh myself from the hotness and boredom I was feeling. Therefore, I decided to paint a beach that correspond a bit of one in Rabat, the capital of my country. The rocks are inspired from it. However, this paint have a characteristic important I wanted to show. We can see a big seashell. This was to emphasize the nature of our planet. Actually, it begin to feel better because of the decrease of the production of the greenhouse effect gases. This seashell was choose on purpose because it is reminding me one of my childhood dream: find this seashell and try to listen to the sound of the beach. In my opinion, this helps the paint to be more original, meaningful, and attractive thanks to our imagination. I was thinking about adding some people to make it more real, but at the end I decided to leave as it was to show our beautiful nature and remind people that actually, because of quarantine, the beach is empty. Finally, I decided to make a beautiful background, as we can see, with some purple and rose clouds related to the sunset."
02/02
"The second paint I realized during this quarantine was this one. It is inspired from my traditions. I decided to make one about it especially because we had to fast during Ramadan and I have not the opportunity to celebrate the Aaid (=عيد in Arabic) as usual. Actually, this paint shows the exact moment when I pour the homemade tea when we are finally able to eat. It is usually during the sunset. The clothes are not the traditional ones. I just paint them randomly because I wanted to emphasize the traditional things we use to cook and prepare our meal called “ftour” (I did not find the relative names in English because it is from our dialect). I decided to show the movement and the action we do by painting the hands and by trying to paint the reality as much as possible so people can try to understand a tradition. The blue background was used to emphasize what the hands are catching."