For more than forty years, Jordanian visual artist Mohammad Al-Turki has practiced art as an ongoing search for place, color, light, and memory.
Throughout this long journey, he hasn't treated the canvas as a copy of reality, but as a space where he reinterprets what the eye sees, transforming everyday details into an artistic composition carrying the distinct character and spirit of a place.
Old Amman stands at the forefront of the subjects that have settled into his practice, with its stone, markets, alleyways, storefronts, doors, windows, and human faces.
Al-Turki told Al-Ghad: "My relationship with art began early, and color was my first entry point into the world of painting, before that relationship developed over the years into a way of looking at life and place."
He affirmed that Amman, for him, isn't just a city whose landmarks he paints, but a complete memory, finding in downtown Amman, Rainbow Street (Arts Street), and its old neighborhoods details capable of giving him fresh ideas.
He added that place carries people's memory, and that details that seem ordinary in everyday life can become highly valuable once they change or disappear, which is why he tries to preserve them through the canvas.
He doesn't transcribe a place literally, but reworks it according to his own feeling and vision, keeping its features clear, but within an artistic treatment that gives it new life.
His practice is built on a blending of realism and impressionism; he preserves a scene's identity and core features, while giving color and light room to express themselves.
In his works depicting Old Amman, a stone facade transforms into a sculptural mass, an arch into a linear rhythm, a window into a point of light, while alleyways become visual paths guiding the eye through the painting.
Color holds a central place in his practice, particularly in his oil and acrylic works. For him, color isn't a decorative element, but a means of building the work and defining depth, mass, and space.
It gives stone its gradations, reveals light, deepens shadows, and creates relationships between elements that make the painting both cohesive and open at once.
Light, meanwhile, he sees as a constantly shifting element that continuously reshapes place. The same stone facade can look different between morning and evening, and shadow has the power to give a building depth and movement.
From these shifts, Al-Turki draws much of his inspiration, trying to capture a fleeting visual moment and turn it into a fixed presence within the painting.
His practice isn't limited to architecture; nature, women, horses, and human scenes also feature in his work. Each subject carries its own language: horses give him movement and rhythm, nature gives him breadth of color and light, while women lend the composition a human and symbolic dimension.
His artistic roots trace back to Iraq, where he studied art and earned a diploma in fine arts, studying at the Institute of Fine Arts, before continuing his career in the visual arts.
He also worked as a lecturer for several years and as a visual arts teacher, blending artistic practice with teaching and passing on experience throughout his career.
Over more than four decades, Al-Turki has taken part in numerous local and regional exhibitions and art gatherings, and is a founding member of the Balqa Society for Visual Arts, a member of the Jordanian Artists Association, and a member of the World Art Center, Iraq branch.
He believes that long years in art don't mean reaching the end of the road, but open new questions for the artist. Every painting, to him, is a different experience, and every return to a place can reveal details that weren't visible before. That's why Old Amman has remained a renewable source, despite the city's changes and shifting features.
In closing, Al-Turki affirmed that a painting, for him, remains an open space for exploration, and that no matter how much experience an artist has, there's always more to discover. He said: "After more than forty years in visual art, I still return to color, place, and light as though seeing them for the first time. A painting doesn't end when it's finished; it begins when a viewer stands before it and finds in it something of their own memory and feeling. I still believe place will remain an inexhaustible source for the artist, and that Amman, with all the history, architecture, and life it holds, is always capable of giving me a new idea and a new painting."
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Ahmad Al-Shawabkeh
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