Jamil Molaeb

 2012oil on canvas205x158 cm ©Jamil Molaeb

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Jamil Molaeb (1948) born in Baissour, Lebanon. Molaeb started his artistic career in the seventies, after training under renowned artists such as Chafic Abboud and Paul Guiragossian at the Fine Arts Institute of the Lebanese University.Craving further discoveries and exposure to the world, he spent a year studying in Algeria and, in 1984, enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at New York’s Pratt Institute, to later obtain a doctorate in artistic education from Ohio State University.Back in his native country in 1989, Molaeb started teaching art at the Lebanese University and the Lebanese American University of Beirut. He kept on exhibiting canvases inspired as much by Western art history as by ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian art. Not one to be confined within a single style, Molaeb easily switches from village scenes to minimalist compositions with squares of bright colours. When he paints a landscape, it is to celebrate the nature that surrounds him through the reproduction of the sensations and emotions it inspires him.His Paintings are being exhibited since early 90s in Gallery Jannine Rebeize,Beirut as well as world wide mentioning Ministry of Tourism Algeria, Alif Gallery Washington USA, Pratt Institute Brooklyn, Contemporary Arab Art in NewYork. Bradford Art Gallery and Museum UK. Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, Gallery 200,Columbus, Ohio, Bradford U.K. Latakia,Syria ''Europ art 99'' Geneve Switzerland. Street Art 2001 Strasbourg France. Biennale Sharjah. Christies Dubai, Sotheby's Doha Qatar, Olympia Grand Hall London.Molaeb is a curious mixture of a thinker and mystic. He shows throughout his abstract work his interest in the Druze cabalistic tradition and the way it conflates notions of boundless space with divine light.He taught art in many institutions and universities since 1976 and held more than twenty-six individual exhibitions and participated in more than fifty local and international exhibitions and sculpture symposia. He is a dedicated art teacher and has more than a dozen written or illustrated works.Molaeb traveled widely and painted extensively in all the countries that he visited. However, his Village has been a main subject in his life; the various aspects of its daily life, its social environment and entrenched traditions. His aim is to reach universality through the specificity of his own village. Molaeb still feels the connection to the ancient cultures that passed by Lebanon, saying that in every painting he do he feels the force of ancient Sumerian, Babylonian and Phoenician people helping.He build his own Museum -Jamil Molaeb Museum in Baissour - where it will be the safe home of his art work.