Bazaar magazine

A painting and a tale
A painting for each artist and a tale for each painting, a tale that we meet and listen to its colors.

The tale of this issue is narrated

by the plastic artist Mahmoud El-Maghraby:

When we make our first steps in life, every one makes his own world. This world stays unique and as unrepeatable as human being, unique in his personal properties and cannot be repeated. Amid this very private and unique world, things about us have meaning different for each one of us such as doors, holes in walls and smell of the place. Innocent eye of our childhood weave pictures for everything we see and stay in deep heart buried in subconscious until we call for them later. When these pictures are materialized they come out foggy in which the innocent look merges with reflections of reality full of sadness, disappointment and deception of mysterious future. This is exactly what the critique feels and not sees when he looks at my paintings that I make by Zincography. It is known that Zincography is the most difficult of all arts in application. It requires a lot of effort and persistence as wall as deep creative vision, In spite of its difficulty I find it enjoyable due to tools and materials used in it. Zincography depends on imagination, creation and deep vision of things. The artist finds in it a real mirror that reflects his intimate feelings and sensations as well as a way to contemplate hot issues about frames reality that is expressed by art works, which depend on geometry of shapes, lines and etching mind and body.

The process of Zincography is done on a metal plate of Zink by various tools such as acids, needle and of various shapes. After this process, the artist prepares his relief lines to make it ready for printing. Then he gets the printed copy with etched lines in relief when printing on paper due to the great pressure of the printing machine.

I loved this difficult are since my artistic start and made a great effort to reach at the end to the degree of creativity and possession of the required tools in a way enable me to express on Zinc plates and other solid metals my imagination, ideas and experiences in field and laboratory work to deduce new methods to produce the etched plate in order to play eventually on the rich folk rhythms.

I remember now my first exhibition held, when I was a sophomore in the faculty of fine Arts, at cultural palace in the public district of Rod El Farag north Cairo. This selection reflects my early belonging and royalty to this public district that is full of life, sadness and meanings.

All my later art works contain this public spirits that dominates the plates by its different expressions.

Returning to the plate of " our old house door we find the iron door is strongly represented by its unbearable weight and its pale colours as a deceptive symbol for safety and unsafely at the same time where it takes us to a blue sky very distant and yearn to salvation. It express strongly the aesthetic of the place in old public districts where I barely listen to music coming from for away of a charming song of fayrouz who sings: " the neighbor of the moon, doors… doors, something set, some friends, something with sugar and some one is waiting the absent to come back ".

Between threshold of old house entrance materialized here by our first steps in life and our house door the anger fire shines to threaten our own being so as the dream stays calm in this sky ornamented at the edges of the plate and fayrouz returns to sing for us: " Oh: the door on which my age engraved on it and I call it the door of the agony. "

The deep holes between the house threshold and the sky merge together to narrate to us a blend of imagination and mythes and Arabic letters come in its public picture full of meaning to give the plate this beautiful foggy scene where I hear again the voice of fayrouz: " in the door in deserted door and its people are forgotten, the land is full of houses, Oh: let it be ornamented by doors."

July 2005