Shadi Al-Atallah

The curiosity towards painting human bodies came to me during the last year of my undergraduate studies. I was pursuing illustration at the time and was feeling a deep sense of detachment and dissatisfaction. I had recurring nightmares of a rollercoaster that would take me from freezing cold ice to a burning hot inferno, repeatedly, finally landing me into a lukewarm dark lake interspersed with various body parts and limbs. I often awoke from these dreams with a feeling that my heart had come to a stop, over and over. These fears began permeating my body, my stomach, chest, muscles, head were embodying these fears. In the back of an ambulance, the EMT asks me if I had taken any drugs before going to bed, the heart rate monitor read ‘180’. He is in disbelief when I say that I hadn’t.

The points I felt the most detached from my own body were the points it was yelling for attention, it was as if my fears were seeping out, asking to be noticed.

In one of my lowest points, a moment when it felt like my anxieties were eating me alive, I laid a piece of canvas on the floor of my bedroom, and I began to paint with what acrylic paint I had around. I was so consumed with my physical feelings that I couldn’t think of painting anything other than a body. It was as if I had entered a trance. When I stepped back, I looked at the canvas and it was my body, but warped and fragmented. I felt a light run through me, a feeling of relief. It was as if my body was thanking me for acknowledging it.