Visual artist Khalil Ghaith in front of his mural “Balfour Declaration” (Al Jazeera)

Amman -

 On a narrow street in Al-Baqaa Camp, the largest Palestinian refugee camp, and in his humble studio, visual artist Khalil Ghaith experiences the course of the long war on the Gaza Strip, concentrating on archiving war diaries, documenting their details with brush and colour.

Ghaith expresses an angry emotional load in his paintings about the series of massacres that were committed there and chronicles the heroism of the resistance fighters, mixing composition and caricature art.

Documenting the lives of refugees

For decades, Ghaith has continued to document daily the lives of refugees through paintings that sometimes keep up with the small details in the camp and draw from the details of the memory of their long asylum at other times.

Khalil - whom Al Jazeera Net met in his studio - says that "since he became aware of the beginnings of his talent, he has considered himself a fighter with his brushes and colors, considering painting a rifle," adding that "his main concern is conveying the suffering of refugees - and he is one of them - in his paintings and chronicling the long refugee journey of masses of refugees." Which began 75 years ago.

Imagined Palestine

Ghaith began his drawings of imagined Palestine, as he was “drawing from his father’s memory of his village (Annaba) and his narratives about it, transforming his father’s oral narratives into first paintings that contained many of the pitfalls of beginnings.

This is how most of his paintings depict the farmers of his village pulling their plows, women returning from the fields, and imagined heroes. His paintings also travel to the outskirts and streets of old Jerusalem, while coexisting with the refugees’ long exile to the Baqa’a camp in Jordan, where he grew up and grew up.

He held his first exhibition while he was in high school, but after that he wanted to move his paintings from the narrow galleries to the wide spaces of the street.

Similar to international paintings, a prominent mural adorns one of the narrow alleys in the Baqaa camp in Jordan, highlighting the suffering of Palestinian refugees and reflecting their dreams of returning to their homeland, Palestine.

Taking advantage of his studies and obtaining a Bachelor’s degree in Education, he sought to have children participate in his drawings and coloring, with the message that they should consider the paintings their own and not seek to destroy them, and that their dreams of the Palestine that they had drawn would also grow in them.

Street art and camp identity

Ghaith says, “I seek, through the use of street paintings or so-called graffiti art, to emphasize the identity of the camp, and to remind its visitors that in this camp people still insist on the right of return and hope for it one day, and that the paintings serve as a permanent reminder to the children of their identity and the land of their fathers.” And to keep the flame of the dream burning inside them.”

The keys to old houses are one of the recurring details in Ghaith’s paintings, which remind of the homes that the refugees left behind, reminding the descending generations in the camp of the dream of return. His paintings also contain numerous images of fighters, prisoners, and Palestinian nature as he imagined it before the Nakba.

Modernity is a luxury

Ghaith belongs to the realistic school of art, which is concerned with conveying reality, and he believes that “modernism and mysterious paintings are a luxury that does not serve the message he seeks to convey through his art, which is to serve his cause, his dreams, and the wishes of his people to return, whose catastrophe is still ongoing.”

Ghaith held several exhibitions in Jordan and abroad, and won the title of “Asylum Artist” from critics of his art and admirers of his paintings as well.

Ghaith hopes for a day when he returns to his village, ending a long refugee journey to create art on a liberated land and replace the title of artist of asylum with artist of return, as he says.

Khalil Ghaith in front of a mural of his work (Al Jazeera)

Portrait of Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Al Dahdouh (Al Jazeera)

A painting of the martyr photographer Samer Abu Daqqa (Al Jazeera)

The plastic artist paints one of the murals (Al Jazeera)

Painting “There is still life here” (Al Jazeera)

Painting "Bloody Gaza" (Al Jazeera)

Painting "The Envelope Soldier" (Al Jazeera)

Painting "Camp" (Al Jazeera)

Painting "Refugee" (Al Jazeera)

“Remaining” painting (Al Jazeera)

Source: Al Jazeera