A conversation with Noémie on color, permission, and being a work in progress
I had the pleasure to chat with Noémie Naoumi and ask her about her beginnings, her artworks, her style, and her inspiration. Between Paris and Beirut, the artist shares her art and her stories.
On Beginnings
Nour Almoujabber. How did you start painting? Was there a specific moment, or did it just creep up on you?
Noémie Naoumi. Apparently, I was very talented as a child, that's the story I always heard, not something I remember myself. When I was two and a half, in the first year of maternal school in Lebanon, I made a drawing that was so good, they handed it out for all the other kids to color in. My mom kept the original, she was proud that my drawing was the one that got “bread,” that got chosen. But honestly, when I try to find the actual beginning, there isn't one. It has always been here. The same way I walked, I played, I drew. That's as far back as I can go.
NA. Do you remember what it was you drew?
NN. It was for Christmas, a crèche [En: Nativity scene]. We were all trying to make one, but mine was the one that got picked. And I remember that after that, I didn't stop. It became an obsession, to draw, to color. Very early on.
NA. Were your parents supportive of that obsession?
NN. Both of my parents did a lot of encouraging, they were incredibly supportive.
NA. Was there a specific moment that captures that support?
NN. I'll never forget this. I was a tween […] and I was afraid of something I wanted to draw. It was dark, a little violent. I went to my mom and asked her about it, and she just said: you can draw anything you want, as long as it's on paper. I love that she accepted my dark side and let me put it there instead of anywhere else. It became my outlet. Later, when I started making more explicit work, she even displayed one of my sculptures, of penises, in our living room. Some guests got uncomfortable, so she eventually took it back down. But I'm grateful that even my grandmother, when she saw me molding them, just laughed. She said, “They're too thin, they won't do anything,” and made a whole joke out of it. I told her I was actually copying a Keith Haring piece, I was doing a project about plagiarism, by committing plagiarism, to make a point about it.
Self Portrait with Juan (Keith Haring, 1988)
My mom's side of the family was very funny about the whole thing, so I never grew up with shame around my work. My dad's side is more conservative, but even there, it was encouraging in its own way.
On Women, and Being One
NA. Is there a reason you gravitated toward drawing women, and femininity, so much?
NN. A lot of people used to tell me to draw a little boy instead, for stories, because people would supposedly relate to that more, and because boys, apparently, wouldn't read a story about a girl. I never thought about who would be reading, or who would be looking. I was thinking about myself. I'm a woman, and drawing women was a quest to understand myself. I was also fascinated by men, I made a lot of phallic imagery, phallic objects, but I prefer drawing women. There's more of me in it. It's more curved, more beautiful to look at, honestly. I prefer the lines in a woman to draw, but I really like the edges in a man just as much, so...
NA. It's a balance and a contrast.
NN. Drawing something and being drawn to it personally are two very different things for me.
On Being Arab, The Big Umbrella
NA. Did that pursuit of femininity and self-expression ever come into conflict with your Arab identity?
NN. It's such a strange question for me, identity. I never experienced it as a constraint, but I think that's specifically because I had support. A couple of weeks ago, at a show, a young woman came up to me and asked how I found the courage to make the work I make. For me it was never really a question of courage, because I had it covered from the start. I really believe that what protects people, more than anything, is the nuclear family. If you have that support, you become almost unreachable.
NA. You're more likely to fight the bullying.
NN. It's always been that way. Think about Oscar Wilde and people like him in Europe, generations ago, the ones who were protected were the ones who had family, or an elite circle, behind them. I believe that whatever we do, if we have support, family, a circle, anything, we can do it better. That's part of why I wanted to keep doing this work publicly: maybe it paves the way for someone else. If I can do it, you can try it too, and I'll be the support you didn't have. […] Being Arab, for me, was never one single thing. It's complicated, I grew up in a household where we spoke more French, watched French television. I didn't grow up with Lebanese TV; I had to catch up on the common pop culture that everyone else around me already had. That doesn't make me less Arab. There's a whole category of Lebanese people who are trilingual, bilingual, plugged into different worlds, they're still Arab. I don't see it as one rigid thing. I see it as a big umbrella, with a lot of very different people standing under it. People ask me, sometimes, if my use of color is a European influence. It isn't. My real influence was literally the makeup on my mother's and grandmother's faces. I don't think we're a rigid identity. I think we're sponges, we absorb from whatever's around us, directly or indirectly, especially now, with everything so accessible online.
Click to purchase this artwork
SSes by Noémie Naoumi
On Color As a Language
NA. You mentioned color earlier, tell me more about how it became part of your language.
NN. I really felt this when I made my first comic book. Color became an essential language, because in a comic you have text, image, and a combination of the two, and sometimes something else entirely, which is where the subconscious gets to speak freely. For me, that space was color. A comic is very constructed: you write a scenario, get it validated by a publisher, do the découpage, the pencils, and only then the color. So, from the beginning I decided a few colors would carry deliberate meaning, orange for illness, a certain cold green for hospitals. But everything else came from wherever my subconscious wanted to take it. It was a space of total freedom, and I think it ended up being the truest expression in the whole book. When I finished it and looked at the palette, I thought: this is ice-creamy. There's a word in Arabic, دلع [pronounced dele’], that doesn't really translate. It means sweet, but not sickly. The exact line between sweet and too sweet. My colors landed there, a little marshmallow, a little unicorn, but not too much. I think that gave the book a certain feeling that's rarely talked about: the edge right before disgust, before you'd want to look away. I wanted that, because the subject was illness, and it's a hard one. Color was my way of inviting people in, while still letting them feel, if they needed to, that it was almost too much.
On Ritual and Inspiration
NA. When you mentioned you were attracted to dark things, or that there was some darkness in your style, when you're painting, do you get inspired by other media, let's say music, podcasts, books, that have the same feel to your paintings?
NN. Usually one of two things. Either I have a series playing in the background that I already know by heart, I like the comfort of a familiar sound, or I put on instrumental music, no lyrics, with a jazzy feel. I love a pianist named Nitai Hershkovits. He's Israeli, but he's pro-Palestinian, not a Zionist, I went to his concert in Paris a few years ago with my cousins and it was a revelation. My whole body was moving, not dancing exactly, reacting. I later discovered another jazz artist, Julian Lage, who does something similar to me. Both of them take away my control a little bit, and when I want to write or draw, I go to them for exactly that. They let in the parts of you that don't look good, the finger that twitches, the toe that moves wrong, the reaction instead of the performance. I think people control themselves so they'll look good when they dance. I like it more when it's not good, when it's just true. When that part of me gets moved, I draw and I write, because it's an invitation to freedom, and I think when we're free in expression, everything opens up. The beauty, the dark, the emptiness too.
NA. Have you ever looked at a painting and thought, I wish I'd made that?
NN. Three times, really. The first was when I finally discovered Huguette Caland's work, a Lebanese painter and artist I didn't grow up knowing, which I regret enormously. Her portfolio was so varied, and every time I see a new piece of hers, I think: I either did something like this, or I wanted to. It's funny, because now we're actually working on a project together, I'm drawing a portrait of her for a book. Full circle.
Self Portrait, Bribes de Corps (Huguette Caland, 1973)
NN. The second was a painting by Dr. Atl, he led the Mexican muralist movement alongside Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and directed Mexico's Fine Arts institute. He painted his muse, Nahui Olin, one of the great faces of that whole revolution, everyone painted her. I stood in front of that painting for almost half an hour and cried. There's a tiny touch of green in the shadow of her face, and I remembered something my cousin, also an artist, once taught me, how contrasted color creates depth in shading. Everything about that painting was perfect. I felt it in my bones.
Nahui Olin (Dr. Atl, c. 1922)
NN. The third is a Kandinsky, a light blue painting that used to hang at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Every time I went, I'd think, I wish I had made this. They've since moved it for another exhibition, so I can't go sit with it anymore, which makes it a slightly sad one.
![]()
Bleu de Ciel (Wassily Kadinsky, 1940)
The Client Test
NA. If you walked into your own exhibition as a collector, not as yourself, which piece would you buy?
NN. I have a little secret about this. In my process, I work almost entirely by improvisation, I don't decide in advance what I'm going to make. I draw frenetically, and at some point, I feel like I've caught something. When that happens, I name that piece Numéro Zéro [En: Number Zero]. Everything that follows, one, two, three, four, becomes a series. But the Numéro Zéro itself, I never sell. It's the most precious thing I make, because it's the purest improvisation, before any intention to build a series even exists. Last year, under financial pressure, I broke that rule exactly once. Three people wanted it, one offered to pay full price, over a thousand, another was trying to figure out how to afford it, and the third was one of my best friends, who fought hardest for it. I gave it to her at half price, and honestly, it was one of the best things I've ever made. I was happy it ended up there, because I still get to see it. [...] So no, not a single piece of mine hangs in my own home. I don't put my prints up where I live. What I hang instead is my inspiration, the artists I admire too much to not have around me. My own work only lives in a few spots in my atelier. I'd rather collect and preserve the early pieces than live surrounded by my own name.
On Being Human
NA. Do you have a quote, or a belief, that you keep coming back to?
NN. There's an interview with Anaïs Nin I think about a lot. Someone was trying to corner her over something she'd once said, trying to shame her for it, and she just answered, yes, I said it, I thought it, and since then I've changed my mind. I love that so much. To me, that's the counterweight to what I can't stand in activism today, this idea of moral purity, that you have to have already arrived, fully formed, at the correct opinion. I think that rigidity is its own kind of fascism. Real change, around body image, around new questions we're only just starting to sit with as a society, takes years of exposure and conversation and getting it wrong. I'll say it plainly: I've worked on my own biases around body image and I still catch myself associating weight with health in ways I don't fully agree with. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. We're not finished. We're not supposed to be.
Prints of Noémie Naoumi's work are available now on arabiyon.art.
0 comentarios