In paintings, Syrian artist shows the pain war has caused his country

posted on: May 6, 2015

WASHINGTON — The sad realities of Syria’s civil war permeate the paintings of Essa Neima, a 34-year-old Syrian national.

At a recent exhibit, his oil on acrylic works ranged from depictions of damaged church and mosque mosaics, to a broken icon of Mary and a refugee woman forced into servitude by the need to survive.

Most of the paintings were strewn with the deep red color of blood.

“It is like treasure … covered by blood because (of) what’s happening now, the sad events happening in Syria,” Neima told Catholic News Service in Washington, thousands of miles from his country, where conflict has killed nearly 200,000 people and dispersed about 10 million others, according to U.N. estimates.

Neima said the exhibit began with a dream he had in 2014, soon after learning that his friend, Dutch Jesuit Father Frans van der Lugt, 75, had been killed by extremists in Syria. The dream was filled with writing and a human eye, which Neima interpreted as signs he should inform people outside Syria of the toll that the war was taking on his country’s ethnically and culturally diverse communities.

Source: www.catholicsentinel.org