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"Helen Redman's Morocco series describes, with an exquisite hand and fresh, enchanted vision, a timeless, vibrant world of women. The paintings embody the artist’s candid, adventurous, observant and bold style. They are extraordinary acts of love: nonjudgmental, magical, devoid of exploitation, full of insight and respect. Years after the series was completed, its vitality is still palpable." - Jennifer Heath, Editor/Curator: The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces
Looking back at the Moroccan women in my paintings, I see alert, intelligent eyes mirroring mine, each of us curious about one another despite the language, race, class, religious and cultural differences that kept us in our places. Although I studied the Moroccan influence on Delacroix and Matisse in art history, it blew my artist's mind when I had the chance to live there in 1971. Here was a culture where every inch of everything was art! My eyeballs bounced with delight and confusion as visual frames juxtaposed veiled women, ornate architectural splendors and soft drink advertisements with Arabic script atop American trademarks.
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 Coup d'Oeil Marocain, 1971, pen, ink,
collage on paper with (handpainted mat), 22"x16"
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Zora & Coca Cola
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Fatima, Shell & Crush
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Under the Palm
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Zora in Pink Caftan
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Fatima at Work
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Sadia the Chef
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| As a woman artist who painted nudes and lived in liberal Boulder, Colorado during the era when the Civil Rights Movement was merging into the Feminist Movement, I entered an Islamic culture that segregated women to a degree I had never seen. Observing and sketching the Moroccan women in the French, Sephardic Jewish household of my in-laws became a major pre-occupation. I was only able to have Sadia, Fatima, Lilah, and Zora sit for me when they took a break from their domestic chores. They wore caftans, djellabas, and veiled or unveiled themselves for me as I quickly drew them using pen and ink on colored paper. We had no shared language, but the Anfa-Casablanca household of my in-laws gave us a context in which to relate to each other. Woman-to-woman, we entered a zone filled with appreciation and curiosity. They generously indulged their employer's American daughter-in-law and even played with my young children so I could work as an artist. |
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Fatima & Sprite
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Lilah in Blue Caftan
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Cactus Stop
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Fatima in Orange Caftan
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Fatima in Blue Caftan
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Lilah in Mausolee
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While I created the initial drawings during our three month stay in Morocco, the painted backgrounds were filled in later when we lived in the Southern French village of Gordes. It took a while and some distance to absorb what I had seen. I designed the compositions using travel souvenir references that included postcards, books, photos and Arabic scripted American trademarks. I often placed my subjects under arches and in tiled interiors of the mosques, creating whole new worlds for them beyond the household setting where I had actually drawn them.
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Fatima in Blue Veil
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Berber Woman
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Fatima Cut Out
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When I returned to my studio in Boulder, Colorado (1972) I created several large-scale mixed media paintings that included Moroccan jewelry, beads, buttons, sequins and threads sewn into canvas. My work has always emphasized color and pattern, but the decorative exuberance of Morocco would forever influence me. Many years later, my son Paul Barchilon (who was five when I began this series) would go on to use the sacred geometry, tessellations and systems of Islamic patterning in his own beautiful ceramic art, which can be seen on his website.
Everywhere I went, including the striking cities of Rabat, Fez, Tangier, Marrakech as well as desert and mountain sites in Berber country, I saw how color and pattern could fill and overflow any surface, expressing something that went beyond western notions of art. As I write these memories 40 years later, in homage to an artistic culture that deeply affected me, I realize my art was also reflecting women's liberation issues. The dichotomies of tradition and modernity, democracy and theocracy, anonymity and identity are still part of women's lives across the globe. More...
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