Mahmoud Zayed

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Mahoumd Zayed is a self-taught Palestinian artist born in 1950 in Damascus who currently lives and works in Ottawa, Canada. He graduated from faculty of pharmacy in 1975 and has been working as a journalist since 1973. He worked as an editor in Alofok weekly magazine from 1984 until 1990. He participated in various international group exhibitions in Canada, Italy, Egypt, Tunisia, UAE, France and more.

Artist’s Statement

Painting is my opium, my weed, my sedative, and my weapon. It helps me to see far and beyond, love more and feel more. It is my craziness and my wisdom. It unites me with nature, animals and human beings. It takes me far into the deep sea of unconsciousness              

Where I meet with the hidden and cannot be told.

Painting is my light, my prayer, and my sacred temple. It opens the way to the way. Painting is my Garden of Eden where I am Adam and Eve, the serpent and the creator. It is my hell and paradise. It is my prayer and my song. It is my music and scream, my peace and war. It is my tool to understand life and death. It helps me survive and find beauty in ugliness and meaning in meaningless.

Painting makes me a mystic, a dancing Gypsy, worshiper, and a prophet. It is my dream and my nightmare. It is my language and my wings.

It is my freedom and prison.

Painting is my wings. It takes me to the future and to the past.

Painting is my long journey to the deep well of my soul.

Painting is my alchemy and my magic, my inner biography and my diary.

Painting is a flood coming from unknown source, from deep archived memory.

I paint to sleep, wake up, and to tell myself my story.

I paint what I know and what I don’t fathom.

I paint from the border of hallucination and reality.

I paint to live, to run away from death.

 My painting is a war against all wars. It is continuous war with my colors and my brushes, with my ideas and the medium, with my feelings and with my style, and no peace in the horizon.

It is an unfinished revolution, my scream in the face of a cruel and absurd world, my dictionary and my guiding star in my journey to the unattainable.