“I love these ducks. We had these in England. They don’t like swimming very much; they prefer to stay on land.
Jemila Yosri has a particular way of describing the subjects of her paintings and sculpture. At times, they are photographs, both the real and the romanticized. At others, they are memories colored with nostalgia, desires and hopes given life on canvas. But these subjects are always familiar, the outlook always personal.
With painters in both sides of her family, Yosri herself started painting as a child. She was seven or eight years old when she received her first payment – made in strawberries – for some painting work she did for a neighbor.
When Yosri first arrived to Cairo in the early 1980s, her paintings were mostly about England. “I was homesick, said Yosri, and so she created the landscapes she missed. One painting depicts a walk through Farthing Wood. The eerie woods carrying rumors of ghosts were actually a favorite haunt for the painter.
Now her pictures are mostly about Egypt. “There are pictures everywhere, says Yosri, immediately enumerating scenes in Khan El-Khalili and Maadi markets.
Talk to the artist though, and her work reveals an amalgam of the many homes she’s inhabited – England, France and Egypt.
She paints French roses, and Egyptian larkspur. The ducks, her Egyptian landscape, are also from a home in England; donkeys and goats from villages in Egypt remind her of those once raised on a farm, and a cat featured in many of her paintings and sculptures was her own Mishmish.
The arthritic man selling fruits and vegetables at a stall in Maadi is real; she points to the garden of a pastel fence from behind which he fetches her fresh parsley.
Pausing over another painting, her husband Mohsen Yosri recalls how the jaunt of the camel carrying large fronds of palm produces enchanting swishes.
Her works depict women involved in small businesses while also taking care of children, keeping an eye over those that sleep, or carrying the younger ones.
Yosri’s anthropology work on children’s education in Egypt informs her paintings, and she has stories to tell about her subjects – about young girls that go to Quran school on Fridays, and women who must be homemakers and contribute labor.
Sometimes the fellaha women nursing babies on canvas carry the hopes of an English mother. When her own daughter had trouble conceiving, Yosri went through a phase of painting babies and children. “I wish I could paint a baby for her, she says.
Her strikingly original double-portraits are entitled “comings and goings.
One depicts a scene of a group of women carrying their belongings or wares; in the companion watercolor you see the women’s backs – a simultaneous snapshot from the reverse angle.
Part of Yosri’s collection appeals to the orientalist – women clad in veils, shrouded in mystery, serving the shisha. Yosri, who is fascinated with the finery worn by these women, paints these portraits by wearing the veil herself to show how the material falls.
She describes these characters whom she paints in close-up portraits as “women from Sinai, at a remove from the intimacy with which she speaks of “the girl that has to cook for the entire family. I feel so sorry for her.
But perhaps characters that she is closer to are those with whom she depicts from a distance, providing an account of their surroundings – a fisherman in his boat on the Nile under a particular bridge in Maadi, her garden in England with tomatoes, tiles, and her boots, and those ducks that she likes, and that don’t like swimming very much.
Yosri’s artwork’s currently on display at the Gezira Sporting Club from midday until 9 pm through Oct. 12.
