​Hello creative beings,

What kind of paper should I use? What kind of journal is best for art journaling? Can I use a 'normal' notebook? My honest answer: It doesn't matter!
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I know this answer seems unhelpful, but if you think about it, it's liberating. It frees you from having to buy an expensive notebook, or searching for something special (unless you want to). It also frees you from the 'fear' of 'ruining' a 'lovely' notebook with your art and words. It means you can just go for it.

Play. Try. Experiment. Have fun. Learn. 
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Choose a journal that you are happy to art journal in, or write in. Choose one that fits your bag if you like to create art on the go. Choose something big if you like vast, open spaces to play in. Choose something tiny if you like the challenge of tight spaces and creating delicate art. Or refuse to choose - like me - and have many different sizes and styles so can have the option to do what you feel like doing at any given moment. 
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Like being a gypsy, a global citizen. You can go anywhere and wherever you go, all is good. You can create art, draw, paint and write because it's all about you, your mind, and not your tools of where you are.
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Why limit your experience? Different paper and different journals have take you down different paths. New journeys to venture into - how wonderful is that?
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I Am What I Art is about exactly that. A life journey through art. Discovering and rediscovering yourself, your surroundings, people, life. Finding the smallest ways to give value and quality and joy to the moments of your day.

P.S just in case you are still wondering about journals and paper. Below are a few tips and ideas.

xxx
Fadwa 
I Am What I Art

I'm lying in my bed. He is already naked. He pours his body over me slowly. It's not just a body, I'm thinking.

As he gets closer, I smell his hair. A different smell on his neck. Something new in his chest, his underarms, his stomach, his groin, his feet.

Why do I nuzzle my nose in all these places and more? To read him. To rediscover. This body, all its smells and all it can be - so base, so divine - contains all the elements of decay since birth. Yet it learns how to be eternal as it gets more wrinkled.

The flesh disintegrates, making the skin like crystal water flowing over essence and soul.

Now I can see all the shiny pebbles below.
All that soft silkiness of him.
Reflections of sun.
Slivers of moon.
Bits of wonder.
​Bits of darkness still; I kiss them away.
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Fadwa 
I Am What I Art
Oil pastel faces (with something to say) in my art journal

And why do we still even ask this question?
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Hello creative beings,

Some time ago I started a series of artwork called Chaos of the Body. In this part of the world (Dubai) with a metropolitan audience, some feel these images are too sexy. Others tell me I am courageous to create and post them. And others think they are offensive - or, my favourite Arabic word to hate "Ayeb" which means shameful. 
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This collection started off as a tribute to my maternal grandmother who died of breast cancer. The meaning behind the work changed and evolved to include all women who passed on, and those who survived and thrived beyond the cancer.
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As I created more and more of these women, and they began to populate my studio, I realized they are a tribute to all women. They are a vision; a statement about women's bodies and how they are viewed by others and even more by ourselves.
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Every morning I look at my body in the mirror. Some might already find this statement shocking, sensationalist, egotistical, provocative. In truth, it is none of that. 
I’m not looking for flaws.
I’m not searching for ten affirmations to repeat to myself ten times a day. (I'm sick of the word affirmations, anyway).
I’m not looking to condone or abuse. I’m look at my body and I can’t think it’s embarrassing, ugly, or even beautiful - by whose standards, anyway?
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I look at my body to see all of me. To be grateful. To remember that this body is also my mind and my spirit. The whole connected package. Rather, the one. Not a package, but the single form that is everything. 
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I look at it and I realize I would be nothing without it. I could do nothing without it. How can I listen to those who say I should be ashamed of it? 
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This artwork is not about perfection. Or beauty. Or sex. They are about everything it is to be woman. My pieces are about taking charge of your own body. About freeing your mind from all the taboos connected to a body you did not choose but in which you will live for the next few decades. About this tangible form which will give you so much strength, joy, movement, pleasure, and pain. About how you connect with your own body, and how you choose to treat it and think of it. 
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This body will teach you much if you let it. 
It will take you places, if you stop thinking about it as a monument or a temple or a place where taboo terrorists hide. If you stop using it as a tool to manipulate yourself and others, or to damn, hate, belittle yourself and others. Once you simply let go of all negatives and positives about your body. It’s a tool for living a life that will fulfill you, if you stop thinking of it as something separate. 
Once you realize it is what it is. This is not your body. This is you. 

xxx
Fadwa 
I Am What I Art

P.S. To see more Chaos of the Body artwork, click here

​Materials & Art Tips

​   It took me a while to go for painting on large canvases.
You know, the usual culprits: Am I wasting material? Can I fill the space? 
   Well, I have one tip for you; go for it anyway.
   There's no way you will ever know what you can do or learn how to do what you want to do,
if you don't do! 
   You can try going bigger on flip chart paper, canvas paper, large painting pads. By the way,
when you buy pre-stretched canvas, get good quality. It makes a difference to the final results.
The cotton, the priming.
Also make sure there's a gap between the canvas and the frame so that when you draw and paint, the borders of the frame don't end up leaving obvious lines in your work.

Practice Tips Play!
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Try out different materials - inks, water colours, pastels, pens, chalk, charcoal, lipstick, eyeliner .. I don't care. Just try. Work them together. Alone. Turn your painting around and look at it - really look. 

Make time to create art - like you make time for the gym. This is a workout for your soul, people! Plus, creating art as a Deliberate Practice allows you to:

• Identify the tasks or knowledge just out of your reach
• Strive to upgrade your performance
• Monitor your progress
• Revise accordingly

(Advise from a book called "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking" by Susan Cain") 

Faces Collection

​"I don't know," I said. "Is she black? Is she white? Minority; majority? What is she feeling? What is she thinking? Does it matter to me? Should it? Does she want to hear my story, too?"
There's a lot of beating hearts out there.
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You know how when your whole face cries? You know why you're crying but you don't always like to admit it, even to yourself. It's just that life can be so beautiful and it can be so painful.
Sometimes you are blessed and lucky and you cry for others. In the midst of the pain of one atrocity, you can forget there are so many more atrocities happening around the world. And you can forget there is still beauty.
Every day we begin again. But, For some reason we insist on carrying yesterday's luggage. And the luggage of all the days before. Our back hurts. We cry. Yet we decide it's more heroic to keep the weight on our shoulders. We dream about flying as our feet sink deeper into the earth and our wings turn to stone.
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I love painting these faces with my fingers because it's like caressing their cheeks. Telling them I understand, even if I haven't been through what they've been through. I touch them. I don't wipe away their tears; I let them fall because they need to fall. Their pain needs to be acknowledged. 
I love the asymmetry and irregularity of the lines and shapes. The unpredictability. The unevenness. The texture. The imperfection. The unpredictable way in which the ink falls. The controlled lack of control.
Kind of like sadness. 

Painted on flip chart paper.

There are some things we parents don't tell our children.
Because we hope that they will have a different experience. A better experience. Or at the very least, that they will enjoy their experience before hitting that same wall we hit - in our desire not to spoil that experience and whatever joyful memories it creates for them.
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We think perhaps they will not fall into this or that hole. They'll find a better way to get out than we did.
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So we remain silent. 
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But humanity seems to revolve in a handful of similar circles that change appearance but rarely change content.
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Should we not remain silent and thus ruin their chances of growing and learning? 

Oil pastel faces in my #artjournal 
#iamwhatiart #author #art #writing #artist #fadwaalqasem #gypsyspirit#kids #parenting #love #lifejourney 

Lots of Love
​Fadwa

The question of identity has always haunted me.
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Born a woman. Palestinian. Muslim. None of which I had a choice in. Although I choose not to conform to the most popular or stereotypical definitions of these words, I am still judged by them. Pigeon holed and treated accordingly. 
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I also carry their weight on my shoulders because of the injustices that plagued all three. 
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But I am more. So much more than these three words. I am every woman. Every man. I am every child. Every religion and non religion. I am every nationality that that suffered at the hands of an injustice and cruelty. 
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In the end, the identity I want to hold on to most is that of my humanity. And that's no easy feat.
oil pastel faces in my art journal.

​I Am What I Art.
Lots of love
​Fadwa

Three things I yearn for as an artist (and as a person):

1. To be more fearless and daring. In my choice of subjects. In my choice of how I present my subjects. In my choice of materials. In pushing my own boundaries. In being more wild and free of conformity.
2. To get closer to closing the gaps. Between me in my mind and me in my life. Between the art I see in my imagination and the art i create.
3. To be free from the effects of compliments and criticism. To be able to take in both with interest and open-mindedness that searches for value in both and discards all else.

What do you yearn for as an artist (person) - other than world peace :-)

Lots of love
Fadwa