Art: Walid Sad
REAR VIEW MIRROR
About the author:
John L. Stanizzi is author of the full-length collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. Stanizzi has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, in the Journal of Italian Translations Bonafinni, and Poetarium Silva. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. He has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He Stanizzi is the coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, and a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, named by the New England Association of Teachers of English, Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
Art: Walid Sad
In the artist’s words:
New York-based artist Walid Sad was born in Algeria and grew up in Paris where he studied at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and L’atelier Chardon Savard. Inspired by one’s personal journey through life, Sad’s paintings represent the inevitable transition from childhood to adulthood with all the challenges that might come from it.
Sad’s work is a meditation on life, Concerned with the translation of the inexpressible onto canvas, these ephemeral moments are captured through brushstrokes and palette knife, where each feels is transposed onto a canvas, embodying curiosity, excitement, and anxiety as those are the sentiments of Walid.
Focused on the relations between Body Motion and Emotion, Walid’s emotional abstractions illustrate the elements of motor executions and observation of movements, the analysis based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) is focused on expressing profound emotions throughout action painting.
Walid believes that characterized movements whose execution enhances each of the basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness, and sadness and therefore could be used for emotion regulation. In two-part, the first part focuses on demonstrating the result of small-scale work
and what the consequences are ( Small-scale canvas tend to create anxiety as it requires a more controlled movement).
The second part is to solve the anxiety created, scaling up to a wider and bigger platform. The perception of a moment in life field with a wide range of emotions expressed through predominant vertical painting gestures as a representation of the relationships and encounters between individuals whether physical or emotional (As meeting a person for the first time you’d observe them vertically and not horizontal).