Pride of Saudi homes

Saudi women have traditionally painted the drawing rooms of their dwellings in bright colours. There are now efforts to preserve the old art form and train the younger generation. M A Siraj writes about the Majlis paintings of Saudi Arabia.

Majlis in Arabic is ‘a place for seating’. In a more formal sense, it refers to any kind of meeting place where people sit and discuss community affairs.

The Asir highlands of Saudi Arabia, which extend from the outskirts of the holy city of Makkah till the borders of Yemen, over the north-western part of the Arabian Peninsula, have always harboured communities that have practiced a rich variety of art. One among these is the Majlis paintings done by Asiri women.

Over the centuries, the women have painted the majlis (i.e., drawing rooms) of their dwellings with bright, natural colours, depicting a diverse array of geometrical and floral patterns.

A feminine touch

Old adobe homes and stone houses in the villages of Asir still retain the colourful Majalis (plural of Majlis in Arabic) and one can find them in the winding lanes of stepped mountains.

But few women practice them today.

Moreover, the modern Saudi Arabia is more conservative in social norms and more women seem to be veiling themselves, hence it is inconceivable for women painters to go to others’ homes to paint their Majlis. Newfound affluence has modernised Saudi homes and spelled the doom for the art.

But a tribe of aficionados are trying to preserve it in museums and are passing on the skill to the younger generation.

Majalis were traditionally painted by women with patterns consisting of lines, branch-like figures, plethora of triangles and squares.

Within triangles and squares, the artists would express their individuality with miniature motifs. Each Majlis that displayed the individual artist’s own style was a mark of pride for the family’s women and a source of surprise and enjoyment for the visitors and guests.

Curios and showpieces for shelves to be displayed in the Majlis would also be painted with similar motifs.

The art started suffering a decline nearly 40 years ago when new wealth gradually transformed the lifestyle of Asiri people.

They moved into new, modern homes, mostly apartments, and the focus shifted from individuality to comforts. It was around this time that artists like Haleema bint Abdullah took up the cause of preserving this art.

She and her husband opened Al Shat Museum in Al-Shat village in a stone house near the remains of their family’s traditional abode.

Haleema, primarily, wanted to preserve the art for her descendants to have a glimpse of their past. She had fondly remembered how her mother had decorated the Majlis in her ancestral home when she was a child. She would name each triangle in the design for a particular daughter.

According to Dr Sharon Parker, a specialist in Middle Eastern art, some of the large triangles in Majlis paintings represent mountains, zigzag lines denote flow of water or lightning, and small triangles stand for females, generally daughters.

Older paintings commonly used green and brown colours.

Modern colours were introduced with the arrival of paints in the market. But colours of yore were procured from natural sources like stones and trees.

For instance, red came from meshiga stone. Light brown was extracted from the sap of somgha tree in the spring. The same tree would be the source of a dark brown juice during summer and winter.

Several stones, on being crushed, would give red colour. But Halima has now several colours to experiment with as the market offers a wide variety.

The Majlis paintings in homes also served as an index of the family’s wealth and social status. Richer and more connected the family, complex would be the designs, and the colours, brighter.

If they were not affluent, women would express themselves with basic simple, straight lines in repetition in red, brown or green.

Wealth of traditions

Chronicler Ibrahim Maghawi, who documented some work by Majlis painters in his book Rojol, Memory of an Arab Village, says more elaborate designs appeared, especially among upper class women who had more time to spare.

Maghawi and his uncle Mohammed Torshi Al-Sagheer have been pursuing a project to preserve their 1,000-year-old village of Rijal Almaa as a tourist destination.

To begin with, Torshi has converted his long abandoned, fortress-like stone compound into a museum and has created a few new structures to attract visitors for viewing old world splendour.

Maghawi’s wife Fathima Faya has even organised a co-operative of about 20 women to take forward the movement to preserve the charming art.

These women paint the old patterns on the canvases to hang on walls. They even paint the traditional metal plates to be turned into wind chimes.

Painting the Majlis in traditional colours and patterns was considered an essential element of home décor. Women would use brushes made of goat hair.

If women in a particular household were not up to the task, they would engage other women skilled in the art to do that for them. Fathima, who painted the Majlis in the house of her daughter and son-in-law, recalls that normally women painters would take a month or two to paint a Majlis depending on the intricacy of designs.

She recalls her mother Amina telling her that painter-women would be paid in terms of asal (honey) or saman (ghee), as modern currency was still not a valid tender in the remote villages of Asir Highlands till some 70 years ago.

Fathima has passed on the art to a string of younger women at a workshop organised by her daughter Salha.

Now these trained painters are commissioned by wealthy businessmen and hotels to paint their lobbies in traditional styles. Saudi Arabia has even set up an Artists’ Village at Muftaha in Asir mountains, which hosts 30 artists at a time. Artists have incorporated the Majlis paintings into their canvases.

King Fahad Cultural Centre has included Majlis painting as a genre of art for artists to be trained.

According to the Centre’s Director Abdullah Shaher, last year 15 women were trained in its studios and they were able to organise two exhibitions of their paintings.

Says Hisham Mortada, author of several books on Environmental Architecture at King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah: “I do not consider Majlis paintings Arabic or Islamic as it was very regional and doesn’t represent historic Arabic art that can be found in palaces or buildings constructed during the Islamic Caliphate or State.”