MY SIGNATURE STYLE

It is normal that the drawing style of an artist is compared to someone else who is more well-known or famous. So I was often asked whether I drew the inspiration to develop my style from George Seurat, the famous French pointillist, or from Gustav Klimt for example.

No, not from them. I even didn't know them when I started. My favourite more modern painters are Salvador Dali and Vincent van Gogh, and to a certain extend Pablo Picasso.

When I started my first efforts at surreal pointillism, I thought about Dali's surreal painting style, about Picasso's deformed faces, but much more than that about our

Classical Tunisian Henna Painting

which comes natural to me because it was part of my childhood in Tunisia. Tunisian families are extensive. Every family celebrates a wedding of a close or distant relative or a neighbour every single summer. And every wedding has a special day for the ladies: the Henna Night. As a little boy I accompanied my mother to those Henna Nights. Every lady had painted her special festive design on hands and feet. .

I was living in Germany when I started serious painting with ink and feather pen. It all began with patterns on paper, then forms of pottery and people, and then the notion hit me that women often look like vases in traditional North African clothes.

After many emptied bottles of ink, and lots of paper which had ended up in the paper basket, in 1983, the relatively small painting "FATIMA'S HAND" combined all aspects and defined my drawing style which is my signature style to the day.