By Anastasia Warner
Newsprint
Mercy HS
1st Place
Division 4, News Writing
Personality Profile
Senior Mayssa Fakih gets out of her aunt’s car on a busy Beirut street to approach a woman with a baby on the side of the road. She tries to discreetly snap a picture on her cell phone camera, but the woman catches her.
She demands to know who Fakih is — CNN, Fox News? An American journalist taking their picture to exploit them? In Arabic, Fakih assures the woman that she isn’t with the news or trying to exploit her and her baby; she just wants to hear their story and share it with others through her artwork.
Last summer, Fakih’s annual trip to visit family in Lebanon became a source of inspiration for her art. Fakih shot photographs of people she saw along the road, capturing them in a candid way.
However, it wasn’t authentic enough for her, and she knew she needed to approach them to hear their stories and ask permission to use her first photo and take more. These people, ignored by many, became the subjects of her senior painting portfolio, with struggle as its central theme.
“I feel like my empathy for people in the Middle East and their struggles comes from my dad and his stories,” said Fakih. “The people on the streets could have easily been me and my family. I could have been born in that neighborhood.”
Besides her family background, Fakih’s personal experiences inspired her portfolio. “I noticed throughout my own life that when I struggled or had certain things happen, I thought, ‘This is the worst thing. Nothing good is going to come out of it,’” said Fakih.
From these points in her life, she learned a lesson that she admits seems cliché, but is now the foundation of her art: “Good things come out of hard times. I noticed that, [like] the things I struggled with, certain imperfections make life more meaningful.” She hopes that in painting struggle in different walks of life, she can allow others to relate to someone else’s experience.
She also aims to portray a silver lining in her work.
“Even if [I’m painting something] sad or serious or not necessarily a beautiful subject to talk about, I still want to incorporate beauty in it,” said Fakih. To the woman on the street, Fakih explained: “You have a baby with you, you love her, there’s beauty in that.”
From drawing everything in her house since she was 4 years old to re-fashioning the Mona Lisa in her own style in middle school, Fakih has always loved art more than anything but never thought she could make a career out of it.
“I always felt like that was out of reach, like it was too big a dream,” said Fakih. “I started to realize in high school that all I wanted to do was art, and I asked myself, ‘If all I want to do is art, all the time, why am I not going in to it?’ Because that’s always what I’ve been drawn to.”
At first, the prospect was admittedly uncertain. Fakih’s father owns a business, and her family from Lebanon believes that it’s important to pursue a trade where money is a guarantee.
“They came to America to survive,” said Fakih, “so that mentality was in me a little bit.”
However, Fakih began building her path to an art career when she first started at Mercy. After transferring from public school in the second semester of freshman year, she sculpted her schedule around art, taking every required credit early so that her senior course load could be dominated by art classes.
“I planned my life in that direction and didn’t even realize that I was doing that,” said Fakih. “Everything I wanted to do led to art.”
Fakih makes her paintings stand out with impressionism and unusual colors along with special brush techniques.
“I never want my paintings to look like photos,” she said. Brush strokes, she believes, convey more emotion, even if viewers don’t realize it consciously. “[Strokes emphasize] the form of a face, the form of a hand, the form of a smile — it shows things, detailed, in a different way than we see them in photos,” said Fakih.
In her portrait of a young Syrian refugee who sold gum in the streets of Beirut, she glued newspaper clippings about refugees to her canvas, while the girl’s face is vibrantly colored.
“I wanted her to stand out against everything that she went through,” said Fakih. “The color has a lot to do with it [symbolically]: she is happy, she is colorful, she is more than her struggles.”
This semester, Fakih is working in an internship at a local art gallery while also taking a photography class at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Fakih has submitted her portfolio of 11 paintings, several photographs, and a ceramics piece to five universities.
Fakih also submitted an eight-piece portfolio to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards this year, where she won a Regional Gold Key. Her work will now be judged in New York at the national level. She hopes to one day open a gallery of her own.
“No matter what I’m painting, it will [be about] sharing people’s stories,” Fakih said.