Hu (هو) — the Word Behind the Collection
Every collection begins somewhere. Mine began with a single syllable.
Name a body of work for a single small word and the word becomes a question - one I can see forming when someone reads the collection's name for the first time. What does Hu mean?
It is the smallest word in my vocabulary as a painter, and the largest. Two letters in Arabic - the ha and the waw, هو - the pronoun He. Its depths in the tradition deserve more care than I can give them here; a fuller piece on the word's meaning may come in good time, written with the scholarship it deserves. Today, the story I can tell completely: how a single small word came to name a body of work.
How the collection began
The Hu Collection began in 2019 with two canvases painted side by side - Al-Rahman, the Most Merciful, and Al-Karim, the Most Generous. I thought I was painting a series about the 99 Names of Allah, and in one sense I was: each painting since has grown from a Name, its calligraphy layered into the surface, its meaning worked into the imagery.
Then came 2020. For many people the lockdown was a time of fear and loss, and I hold that gently when I say that for my painting it was, unexpectedly, a gift. The world went quiet; the 'should dos' that usually derail a studio practice fell away; and I spent more time painting in those months than I had in years. I moved from canvas to wood panel - it takes collage and transfer beautifully, lets me scrape paint back, layer pastel and paint stick over acrylic, and finish with a wax coat for added depth. And in that quiet, the series found its name and its intention: an exploration of the Divine order in the universe amidst an uncertain, chaotic material world.
Al-Rahman (The Most Merciful), 2019 — acrylic on canvas. One of the first two paintings of the collection.
But when the time came to name the body of work, none of the Names I was painting felt like the name of the whole. What felt true was the small word that kept appearing in the paintings themselves - in cream, in crimson, in olive green: Hu. The collection took its name from inside its own surfaces.
The collection came late to its name, the way I came late to painting - that longer story, of how a homeopath found herself holding a brush at 45, is here.
The paintings that carry the word
A few of the paintings hold the word itself in their surfaces. The title painting - Hu, painted in 2020, now in a private collection - carries it three times: whole in olive green at the centre, in deep crimson below, and in pale yellow slipping past the panel's edge. A detail of that crimson calligraphy now fronts the collection's page on this website. And a serendipity I only saw while writing this post: beneath the crimson Hu, ghosted in faint blue, is Al-Nur - The Light - the very Name my painting Light Upon Light was made for. I did not plan the echo. Some things in a painting wait years to introduce themselves.
HU, 2020 — acrylic on panel (Private Collection)
Eternal carries the word too - it is the painting at the head of this post. Eternal has found its home with a collector now, but I chose it deliberately: on the Hu Collection page, down the heart of the centre column, four paintings hang one beneath the other - Coming Home, with its Kaaba; Light Upon Light; Perpetual, with its goodly tree; and Eternal, where the word comes to rest. I did not plan that line when the paintings were made. I found it when I finally hung them together, the way you find a sentence you did not know you had written.
Living with the word
A painting built around a single sacred word might hang in a mosque, a study, a hallway. The word does not mind where it hangs. What I have noticed - in my own home, and in what collectors write to me - is quieter than that: a painting carrying Hu changes the room's centre of gravity a little. You pass it on an ordinary morning, and for a breath, something in you remembers. That is all the work I ever ask a painting to do.
This post is the first in a series on the Names and the words inside the paintings - one Name at a time, one painting at a time. If you would like to see the collection the word gave its name to, it lives in the Hu Collection.
From my studio in Amman - thank you for reading.
