Quiet Morning 2009

Sliman Mansour painted "Quiet Morning," and the way he’s built up this scene makes me feel like I'm right there with her, sharing that quiet moment. The warm, earthy tones and the delicate brushwork give everything a kind of gentle glow. There’s the woman's face, calm but also deep with feeling, and the olive tree behind her, all wrapped up in barbed wire. I wonder what Mansour was thinking about when he painted it. I can imagine him carefully building up layers of paint, trying to capture the feeling of the morning. I keep coming back to the way he painted the barbed wire, almost like it’s part of the tree, but also a symbol of something else, maybe a kind of pain. The way Mansour handles the paint—thin in some places, thicker in others, it all adds up to this sense of… I don’t know, resilience? It reminds me of other painters who are trying to capture something real and raw. They all help each other, don't they? And I feel like artists like Mansour are opening up spaces for us to really think and feel.