Aita-Fighter

2 images in this album  [slideshow]  [login]    Gallery: Arofish stencil graffiti    Album: The Scrawls of War - Graffiti from IRAQ, PALESTINE and LEBANON    Album: Lebanon   I had to think quite hard about doing this one. Having apparently been taken on as graffiti-artist-in-residence of this smashed village (Aita al-Shaab) I was asked by people there to paint the faces of 9 local martyrs -fighting men who were killed in the recent war. In the end I decided that whatever the politics, these are people who died defending their homes and families against a foreign invader, and they deserve tribute for that. The other stickler was how I could possibly do justice to such a project. This is on a slightly different level from lampooning the U.S. president, after all. I didn’t have enough time left in country to draw all nine properly, so I thought I’d better not draw any. Instead, for the first time, I worked from blown-up photographs, taken from a poster which commemorates the men. There weren’t the facilities in Aita, so I came back to Beirut and printed them commercially, laminated them and cut the stencils back down in Aita. Some of the photos were old and blurred, and after spraying I had to touch them up quite a lot with a brush, in front of a fairly tough crowd (“hey, I knew that man – you haven’t quite got the eyes, and there’s something not right about his mouth…) Eventually I managed to bring it up to a standard of general approval. I painted a simple yellow and green border (popular colours in this region) and a later in the day a local guy with some signwriting ability painted the names. I was pretty uneasy throughout the whole experience, which concluded with a visit to some of the families of the fighters, and afterwards I felt completely drained. I won’t even get started on how it makes you feel to walk around this shattered place, and to know that the best and only thing you can do for anyone here is to paint the faces of dead men on the wall. aita-fighter1 aita-fighter2  Gallery: Arofish stencil graffiti    Album: The Scrawls of War - Graffiti from IRAQ, PALESTINE and LEBANON    Album: Lebanon   Powered by Gallery v1.4.4-pl4