A conversation with Lama on duality, the four elements, and the woman who showed up after immigration
Lama Sawma is an architect, a sustainability professional, a tango dancer and DJ, a mountain guide, and a painter, and she resists the idea that any of it needs reconciling.
Lightly edited for length and clarity. Nour Almoujabber's lines are marked NA, Lama Sawma's are marked L.
On Duality
Nour Almoujabber. I suspect there's more of you I haven't met yet. Walk me through how you balance being an architect, a dancer, and a painter.
Lama. I'd debate whether it's balance at all, or just duality. I see myself as both logical and emotional, and different disciplines live inside each of those. Architecture holds both at once, but the more I work in a purely logical direction, the more I feel the pull toward expression. Whenever my life path demanded a lot of physical strength, I found myself craving softness, that's how tango entered my life. And whenever my career felt too dry, I'd soften it back up through drawing and color. I'd still call it duality, living in the space between those two poles.
NA. Out of everything you do, is there one where you feel most expressive? Or do they meet somewhere?
L. They've started meeting in a new place: set design for tango events. When I transform a space to shape a specific experience, not just constructing a building but making people feel something through it, that's become a real meeting point for me, and one I'm enjoying more and more.
NA. Does architecture, or tango, or that sense of space, ever show up directly in your paintings?
L. Not yet at least. My paintings live in a separate world, built around the interaction between a human being and nature.
The World the Paintings Live In
NA. Tell me more about that world.
L. During my academic years I worked as a mountain guide, and on the longer treks, twenty days at a time, I'd live two experiences at once: my own time in nature, and the experience of the people I was guiding. Since I was responsible for them, I'd often set my own experience aside to support theirs. But watching people move through the stages of surrender, the way nature slowly transforms them over a hike like that, was genuinely fascinating. The two paintings I sent you both come out of that: a character interacting with nature, one piece leaning more into surrender, the other more into witnessing.
NA. I noticed real elemental imagery running through your paintings, wind, clouds, fire, earth, mountains, the sea, all surrounding this woman. Was that intentional, or am I reading into it?
L. Completely intentional. The one with the wave, was actually new territory for me. Most of my life I lived inside fire, earth, and wind. Water took longer to reach me, it arrived during a solo trip to Sri Lanka, two months at the beach, which surprised me, since I always assumed I'd prefer mountains to coastline. But that trip put me in real contact with water as an element, and it opened something the other three hadn't. That trip was different in another way too, for once I wasn't taking care of anyone else's experience. It was entirely about me.
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Vulnerability by Lama
NA. Do you feel like you move between all four elements, or have you settled into the one that expresses you best?
L. I don't think I've settled, and I don't think I want to. I visit each one. Early on that felt more unstable, meeting them one at a time without fully understanding them. Now that I do understand them, I feel a real need to keep revisiting each one, in different seasons of life.
NA. Given how much of your guiding work was about tending to someone else's experience, do you find yourself doing the same thing as a painter, thinking about how someone will experience your work, or are you painting purely for yourself?
L. I don't mind taking care of others, it's genuinely part of my nature, but there's a difference between active care and passive care. What you're describing is closer to passive, since I'm not actively trying to provoke a specific reaction in someone looking at my work. I think the person receiving a piece of art needs both anyway, some passive space and some active nudge, to really receive it.
Process and Medium
NA. Take me through your process and your materials. What do you love working with, and does it ever change based on the idea?
L. It always starts physical for me, though these two paintings were born in completely different ways. My painting, titled “Impermanence”, arrived just before I immigrated to Canada. I was overwhelmed with feeling, and the image came to me whole: an egg, so condensed it needed to explode, held in conditions that wouldn't let it, conditions that were also the only thing sustaining it. I had the entire scene in my head before I ever painted it. The second one started in an art therapy session with friends, a few lines, some collage, and only later did I bring it into a digital finish. It usually goes that way for me, physical first, digital last.
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Impermanance by Lama
NA. Did you ever push the collage side further, actual mixed media rather than just digital?
L. Yes, with the second painting specifically. Early versions had real seashells on her head, real photographs around her. I simplified it eventually, and the original mixed-media version is still in Lebanon, I only brought the digital file with me.
NA. What do you listen to while you paint? Is it tango?
L. Not necessarily. When I was working on architecture projects I'd sometimes put on Eminem for two straight hours, something to help me finish fast without overthinking. Other times it's purely instrumental, no lyrics, because I believe lyrics guide you somewhere whether you're aware of it or not. Mammal Hands, if you know them, incredible instrumentalists. Time of day matters just as much as the music, dawn feels completely different from noon, which feels completely different from night. I'm very sensitive to whatever environment I'm actually in, I love rooftops especially, I used to paint on the one at my childhood home constantly, wind and all.
NA. Indoor or outdoor, then?
L. Outdoors, for flow. Indoors, for technique.
NA. Is there a medium you haven't mastered yet, something you'd want to learn?
L. Watercolor, for one. And I'd love to paint with things not originally made for painting, coffee, textures I find around me, materials with their own strange technique built in. Charcoal used to intimidate me because it isn't colorful, and I grew up loving pastel specifically for its color. I'd like to spend more real time with it.
The Woman Who Showed Up
NA. How did immigrating change the way you paint?
L. Before I left, my paintings barely had any character in them at all, they were about the environment, always some landscape or scene, always in pastel, nothing happening inside it. During immigration, a new character started showing up. I think immigration pushes people to dig into themselves, because you're suddenly alone, without the environment you're used to leaning on. This woman arrived out of that, and she's been moving me from one scene to the next ever since.
NA. Does she have a name?
L. Not yet. She's nameless.
NA. If you had to give me three words for her?
L. Wild. Sensitive, though I want to be clear that sensitive and weak are not the same thing for her. And colorful. Definitely, colorful.
On Strength and Femininity
NA. Is femininity itself a theme running through your work?
L. I grew up with two sisters and a brother, and I experienced femininity differently than my sisters did. I was drawn to building muscle, to being out in nature, to doing things that weren't culturally handed to women where I grew up. The older I got, the more I anchored my femininity in exactly those experiences, because I believe womanhood is far wider than most societies allow it to be.
NA. You mountain-guide, and you dance tango, which is such a poised form. How do strength and poise show up across everything you do?
L. In tango specifically, I've noticed that some partners get intimidated by a woman with real posture and real muscle in her frame, sometimes they'll ask me to soften my embrace. What's interesting is how much that reveals, you find yourself shifting from one embrace to the next, fully strong in one, showing your softest side in another. I like that range. I don't like placing sensitivity and strength on opposite ends of anything, because they aren't opposites, even though a lot of people assume they are.
NA. You're learning to lead as well as follow. Which do you find yourself more drawn to?
L. I have far more experience following, so that's still where I'm most comfortable. But leading has been fascinating, it's opened up entirely new interpretations of tango for me.
NA. When you paint, are you always the leader?
L. No, I can follow there too. Sometimes I give myself over completely to the flow. Other times I'm the architect, overthinking the aesthetics of every choice. I think that's true of most art, you make it, but a lot of the time you end up following it, once you let go of the should-have, would-have, could-have kind of thinking.
NA. As an Arab woman and an artist, does that identity show up in your paintings, or play a role at all?
L. Identity is a big subject for me, big enough that I had to loosen my grip on it. Growing up, I identified strongly with certain people, places, and experiences, so much that I started questioning whether identity is something fixed by nature or something nurtured into you. I land somewhere in between. I do think there's a natural core to it, but I also believe identity grows and changes shape over time. I was born an Arab woman, and I've already stretched what womanhood itself can mean for me. Arab womanhood, I think, is picking up new identities too. I recently became a Canadian citizen, and I never expected to feel genuinely happy about that. When I first arrived, I resisted it outright, telling myself, that's it, I'm only Arab. But the diversity Canada offered loosened something in me around the whole subject of identity.
On Influences
NA. Is there a painter whose work you see yourself in?
L. Not exactly see myself in, but I love Gustav Klimt's symbolism, the way there's no fixed proportion, no real right or wrong technique at play. Whenever you look at one of his figures, you think you understand it, and then after staring for ten minutes, you realize something else entirely. I'm also drawn to how he mixed materials directly into the paintings, especially in his gold-era work.
Fulfillment (Gustav Klimt, 1910) | close-up
L. More recently I discovered Franz Marc, a German painter born in the 1880s, mostly known for colorful, disproportionate animals. It feels like pop art before pop art existed. I'm still researching him.
Nude Lying Among Flowers (Franz Marc, 1910)
On Future
NA. If you could decide exactly how your paintings were shown, what would that look like?
L. I'd play with scale first. The woman lying at the beach, for instance, would be shown at true, one-to-one human scale. I'd bring in three-dimensional elements, and I'd let the sound change from room to room to shape a different experience in each one. Have you ever been to the Dome of Ecosystems in Montreal? You walk from a room full of real penguins in an icy Antarctic setting straight into a humid Amazon room with birds passing overhead. I'd want that same kind of total immersion for the paintings.
NA. So you want people to experience the work, not just look at it.
L. Exactly that.
NA. Is there a quote or motto you find yourself returning to?
L. One's been sticking with me for about three months now: everything is for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I don't know who said it originally, but it's what I've been sharing with people lately, and it shifts meaning depending on whatever season I'm actually in. This is mine right now.
NA. Before we close, is there anything you'd want added to this, anything you want people to walk away with?
L. Just that the questions went far beyond what I expected, thank you for that. And I'd want to leave people with something I ended up discussing at a bar recently, a woman asked me if I was an artist, and it turned into a real conversation about what an artist is. A lot of people experience art without making it, and I don't think that disqualifies them. In Arabic, the word for poet, شاعر [prounounced sha'er], literally means “one who feels”. By the end of the night, she'd agreed she was an artist too, and she left genuinely excited to start experimenting across different mediums. Art is for everyone. Experiment, and don't load the word artist with more weight or entitlement than it needs. It's a wonderful thing to be able to express yourself, but it was never meant to belong to a select few.
NA. That's a beautiful note to end on.
Prints of Lama Sawma's work are available now on arabiyon.art.
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