The Art of Lahib Jaddo

I. Artist Statement

I relate to the universe around me visually so I paint to understand my inner worlds.

I have lived half my life in the old world, the Middle East, and half of it in this new world. My work is a reflection of that mix. I don’t define myself or my art as being one or the other. I am a mix of both worlds as is my work.

II. Biography

"My art is deeply rooted in my cultural heritage and family history."

My ancestry is 3/4 Turkumani and 1/4 Armenian. Both are people native to the Middle East. My parents were raised in northern Iraq around the second World War when poverty and simplicity were matters of fact. My father had more ambition than to be a shepherd and tend the land so he left his home town of Tel-Afar to get an education and worked in the big city of Baghdad as an engineer. My mother refused to marry her cousin (which was the norm) and left her home town of Kirkuk to go to college in Baghdad and became a school teacher. Fortunately for me, their union was one where education ruled over tradition.

My earliest memories connected to my parent's home towns are very visual. Images of horse-drawn carriages, courtyard houses, mound cities on hills with people still living in them, alleys with sewage running through the middle of the street, etc… All typically Third World, but seemingly medieval surroundings to the child of the "big city" that I was.

I remember sitting in my grandmother's courtyard house, in a room full of strangers, all relatives. They were members of the extended family paying their respects to us. I remember holding my breath (most were farmers with a different standard of hygiene). I remember drinking (and gagging on) fresh, warm sheep's milk. My mother pointed out to my sister and me a bride of thirteen, laden with gold necklaces and earrings, clothed with the brightest dresses in yellow and white in the style of the villagers. Although the girl was betrothed to her cousin who was only a few years older than her (and that was definitely a blessing), I realized that the beautiful bride had no choice on what direction her life would take. That was determined by her family. But the image of her lavishly adorned, naïve beauty has stayed with me to this day.

"My art was soon to become a virtual connection and re-creation of the beauty from which I felt separated."

Other memories of visual beauty include Mom’s collection of Persian carpets. She covered the floors of our Baghdad home with their colors and designs. I suppose she was trying to compensate visually for the lack of central heating. She also filled the garden with rainbows of color, hopefully distracting one from the occasional smoke-filled sky, a result of the most recent political overthrow. Since those years of the mid-sixties, my family has been uprooted and had to leave Baghdad to settle in Beirut, Lebanon, which, at the end of the sixties was a more peaceful place that Iraq. It was a much more Western culture.

In Beirut, Mom got interested in painting and started me on my formal art training by taking me to classes with her. My father encouraged me to pursue a degree in architecture, which I did. But by the mid-seventies Beirut turned into a war zone where the sight of torn humanity and modern weaponry was everywhere. In 1977 I decided to marry an Arab man, start my life as an adult and follow my husband to the "New World". I finished my architecture degree in Troy, New York.

At the age of thirty I realized that I did not really want to be an architect. That was my father's dream. What I had always wanted to do was paint. So I went back to school for a Master of Fine Arts degree. And dedicated my life to painting. By then I was through with that first husband and living in Texas with my two children. I felt a million miles away from that family village in northern Iraq, but my art was soon to become a virtual connection and re-creation of the beauty from which I felt separated.

The essence of my work is to create paintings derived from my perception of life, colored with the selective memory of beauty. When I paint a thirteen-year-old bride, I recall the beauty of the scene, but realize the absurdity of a thirteen-year-old bride. I am trying to create the magic of then, but liberating the girl.

Nadia, my daughter, has become the model to tell my stories,the heroine of freedom and escape. She has no concept of what it is like not to be free. She is a typical American teenager who wants to be an adult, but can't afford to yet. Other figures that I have painted in the past seem to have become western role models for her present character in the paintings. The women who have shown the way to equality.

With my art, I try to extract the beauty, but leave behind the bondage."

In the end, life and art mingle, extracting and preserving the beauty and strength from a human situation. A quest for freedom and human dignity presented with imagery. A journey to a better life without sacrificing the beauty of the past. Perhaps this goal is rooted in being Turkumani, a people without a country. People who have been forced to create their own world with their own arts, language, carpets (portable, cultural artifacts and objects of beauty), etc. As a people they've always been forced to make space for themselves in the world. In essence, that is a prerequisite of freedom.

But like most of the Old World, Turkumanis are a patriarchal culture and  women in such cultures are not born free, not in the American sense of culture freedom. They have always been restricted by social institutions. This is the past of the Old World that I have rejected. With my art, I try to extract the beauty, but leave behind the bondage.

I feel a disconnectedness with that part of the world because of distance, time and an inability to travel to that part of the world very often. But having grown up in the Middle East, I will always retain a love for its magical beauty. An awe and wonder that was kindled in a child's eyes and burns brightly on the artist's canvas.

"My paintings are a celebration of choice.
Of choosing hope over resignation and beauty above all."