Amman — In the work of visual artist and poet Mohammad Al-Amiri, the painting doesn't stop at the boundaries of the image, and the poem doesn't end at the boundaries of language. There is an open creative space where the eye, the hand, and memory come together, where place turns into material for reflection, and nature becomes a visual and poetic vocabulary, while the human figure remains present as the essence of the story.
اضافة اعلان
Since his beginnings in Al-Ghazawiya in the Northern Jordan Valley, Al-Amiri has carved his path between poetry and visual art, building a practice with a notable presence in the Jordanian and Arab cultural and artistic scene.
Speaking to Al Ghad, Al-Amiri explains that his relationship with art didn't begin as a professional choice but arose from an early need to draw and write, accompanied by reading, which his father encouraged him toward, and by what he experienced growing up in an agricultural environment rich with scenes and stories.
In his grandfather's guesthouse, where stories were passed among people, part of his early awareness took shape, before those details, over time, became elements in his creative project.
Al-Amiri doesn't view poetry and visual art as two separate fields, but sees them as two languages that intersect in the moment of creation.
From this understanding came his projects combining poetry and drawing, including "Desert Jazz" with poet Amjad Nasser, "The Butterfly's Burden" with Mahmoud Darwish, and "As If It Were Night" with Taher Riyad, alongside the exhibition "Poetic Spaces" at the Royal Cultural Center in the early 1990s.
This vision shows in his approach to painting; he isn't preoccupied with transferring a scene as the eye sees it, so much as searching for the trace the scene leaves within. That's why the tree, the river, the garden, the soil, and the light appear in his poetic and visual work as signs carrying more than their direct meaning, opening a space for interpretation before the viewer.
Al-Amiri believes an artwork doesn't always emerge from a fully formed idea; the hand takes part in discovering the work as it's being made, and color can lead toward a direction that wasn't present at the start. This aspect of his practice is reflected in his book Thinking with Both Hands (Al-Tafkeer bil-Yadayn), in which he addresses his relationship with the act of painting and his concept of the artwork.
After years of experience in teaching and cultural and artistic work, Al-Amiri took on roles within the Ministry of Culture, heading the Directorate of Arts and Theatre and the Institute of Fine Arts. He also contributed to editing a number of cultural and artistic magazines, chaired the Jordanian Association of Visual Artists, and took part in judging panels, exhibitions, and artistic projects both inside Jordan and abroad.
Yet this institutional path never distanced him from the core of his practice, and drawing and writing remained his broader space for testing questions.
His international engagements, including his experience in China and the "Storytellers of Cities" project with the Goethe Institute, added new visual experiences to his practice, while his original connection to the Jordan Valley remained present in the background of his work.
In poetry, Al-Amiri has published several collections, including The Ascension of Anxiety (Mi'raj Al-Qalaq), Losses of the Being (Khasarat Al-Ka'in), The Garden's Shirt (Qamees Al-Hadiqa), The Eraser of Perfume (Mihat Al-Attar), and Grass Upon Him (Alayhi Al-Ashab), alongside works in memoir, fiction, and art criticism. He has received Arab and international awards and recognitions, and his works have been featured in prominent exhibitions and art institutions.
But the value of his practice cannot be reduced to a count of books, exhibitions, or awards; what ties its stages together is that continuous search for a language spacious enough to hold both image and word. For Al-Amiri, color can carry poetic meaning, and a poem can give the eye another way of seeing.
Al-Amiri closes his conversation with Al Ghad by affirming that his artistic practice was never a search for separation between poetry and visual art, but for the space where the two meet. In his work, the word can open a path for the eye toward the image, and color can give the poem another dimension of vision.
From this space, he continues his creative project, believing that art is not merely a recovery of what we see, but an attempt to discover what place and people leave behind in memory, and what a painting and a poem can say about it.
Resource: Al-Ghad. Reporting: Ahmad Al-Shawabkeh
