Sudanese Artist Hamid Ayoub Has Come A Long Way

Sudan Fri 05-03-2010

Sudanese Artist Hamid Ayoub Has Come A Long Way
By Phil Jenkins

If you find yourself in the upstairs lobby of the Ottawa Little Theatre (founded 1913, longest running community theatre in Canada), you won't fail to notice a selection of paintings from the good members of the Ottawa Art Association (reconstituted 1951, slogan "An original painting in every home").

Art by Hamid Ayoub

If you deke left at the top of the stairs and scan the canvases on the outside wall, you will find one that is a humming splash of colour with silhouetted figures in it.

This is the story of how that painting ended up there. You might want to fetch a world map or a globe.

The artist, Hamid Ayoub, is 43 years old, and was born in the western part of the currently troubled nation of Sudan (roughly three millennia old, largest country in Africa).

One of nine children, he managed to get into college and came out the other side in 1991 with an arts degree, an active distrust of a repressive government, and no wish to do military service and be sent south.

By moving around, he stayed out of uniform, meanwhile staying heavily involved with an underground artists' group. Denied the use of his degree, and sensing the door about to close on his freedom, he joined a group of cattlemen, wearing their nomadic uniform, and walked across the western border into Chad (gained independence from France in 1960).

Artist Hamid Ayoub Left behind him were his wife Hanadi and his two children, Haythem (means "lion") and Rawaa (means "more than beautiful") 10 months and two years old respectively, waiting and hoping for word of reunion.
From Chad, appreciating that distance equals security, Hamid continued westward into Niger (also free of the French in 1960). While teaching Arabic in the little villages, he heard of a wondrous possibility.

Left: Hamid Ayoub discusses his work and life with visitors to the February at the opening of his solo exhibition at the Gloucester Gallery.

Niger was sending artists to the 2001 Francophone games in a place called Canada, "the safest country to be." There was a cultural side-order with the games (like the Olympics) and somehow, with hardly enough French to fill a pot, he "captured" a place among 33 delegates heading to the Americas.

One day he was in one hot capital, Niamey, the next in a warm one, Ottawa, with a painting hanging in our National Gallery in a special exhibit and a daily gig at the Museum of Civilization doing real-time paintings for the public and avoiding French-speaking reporters. Miraculous.

When the games ended, Hamid had dug out enough to know that he should head for 200 Catherine St. and apply for refugee status. That done, he walked to the Sally Ann on George and got a bed for five weeks, then a crash room in Hintonburg.

While under the Army's hospitality, he would sketch the other residents ("very interesting faces") and ingratiated himself enough that he was taken on as a housekeeper. He now had a little income and a little shelter; time to start painting again.

As with all the arts, painters are unto themselves, a tribe shall we say of the soul, rather than of geography and Hamid step by step, canvas by canvas, worked his way into the Ottawa tribe, which includes the regular remedial painting classes for the itinerant at Options Bytown and Centre 454, and later in Artemesia, in a nine-month program at Ottawa University, at the Ottawa School of Art and among the venerable Ottawa Art Association.

Which is how he came to have a painting on the wall of the Ottawa Little Theatre.

Hamid Ayoub

In March of 2007, the colour came back strong into Hamid's life when he met his wife and now much larger children at the Ottawa airport. "I had been away from them seven winters."

They moved into Bayshore, which is becoming a sort of Little Sahara, and Hamid has occupied their basement as a studio. There among the furnace ducting and his children's fledgling mini-canvases he sits under a workshop portable light, a full-time artist filling his canvas palettes with flourescent colours and transforming them with brush and palette knife into African scenes, semi-abstract villages and groups of women in the bright grass. "I believe art should leave you happy.

It should celebrate the beauty of diversity." Among the plethora of canvases leaned against every vertical, there are several that travelled with him, rolled tight in paper, out of Sudan down all those miles. They too have come a long way.

A little while ago, wishing to improve his English, the better to teach and to read in the art world, Hamid enrolled in People, Words & Change, a volunteer literacy organization based in Heartwood House off Rideau.

He has already exhibited there and will do so again in the summer, and it is there that I met him, an enrolled Canadian and a man of colours, spilt onto our wintry landscape and slowly, willfully spreading outward, making the future brighter.

Phil Jenkins is an Ottawa writer.

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