{"id":3104,"date":"2018-11-28T14:38:20","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T19:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=3104"},"modified":"2018-12-18T15:25:53","modified_gmt":"2018-12-18T20:25:53","slug":"snapshots-of-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=3104","title":{"rendered":"Snapshots of struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Anastasia Warner
\n<\/strong>Newsprint
\nMercy HS
\n1st Place
\nDivision 4, News Writing
\nPersonality Profile<\/p>\n

Senior Mayssa Fakih gets out of her aunt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

She demands to know who Fakih is \u2014 CNN, Fox News? An American journalist taking their picture to exploit them? In Arabic, Fakih assures the woman that she isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Fakih\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

However, it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like my empathy for people in the Middle East and their struggles comes from my dad and his stories,\u201d said Fakih. \u201cThe people on the streets could have easily been me and my family. I could have been born in that neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides her family background, Fakih\u2019s personal experiences inspired her portfolio. \u201cI noticed throughout my own life that when I struggled or had certain things happen, I thought, \u2018This is the worst thing. Nothing good is going to come out of it,\u2019\u201d said Fakih.<\/p>\n

From these points in her life, she learned a lesson that she admits seems clich\u00e9, but is now the foundation of her art: \u201cGood things come out of hard times. I noticed that, [like] the things I struggled with, certain imperfections make life more meaningful.\u201d She hopes that in painting struggle in different walks of life, she can allow others to relate to someone else\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She also aims to portray a silver lining in her work.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if [I\u2019m painting something] sad or serious or not necessarily a beautiful subject to talk about, I still want to incorporate beauty in it,\u201d said Fakih. To the woman on the street, Fakih explained: \u201cYou have a baby with you, you love her, there\u2019s beauty in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always felt like that was out of reach, like it was too big a dream,\u201d said Fakih. \u201cI started to realize in high school that all I wanted to do was art, and I asked myself, \u2018If all I want to do is art, all the time, why am I not going in to it?\u2019 Because that\u2019s always what I\u2019ve been drawn to.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first, the prospect was admittedly uncertain. Fakih\u2019s father owns a business, and her family from Lebanon believes that it\u2019s important to pursue a trade where money is a guarantee.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey came to America to survive,\u201d said Fakih, \u201cso that mentality was in me a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI planned my life in that direction and didn\u2019t even realize that I was doing that,\u201d said Fakih. \u201cEverything I wanted to do led to art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fakih makes her paintings stand out with impressionism and unusual colors along with special brush techniques.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never want my paintings to look like photos,\u201d she said. Brush strokes, she believes, convey more emotion, even if viewers don\u2019t realize it consciously. \u201c[Strokes emphasize] the form of a face, the form of a hand, the form of a smile \u2014 it shows things, detailed, in a different way than we see them in photos,\u201d said Fakih.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s face is vibrantly colored.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted her to stand out against everything that she went through,\u201d said Fakih. \u201cThe color has a lot to do with it [symbolically]: she is happy, she is colorful, she is more than her struggles.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter what I\u2019m painting, it will [be about] sharing people\u2019s stories,\u201d Fakih said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Anastasia Warner Newsprint Mercy HS 1st Place Division 4, News Writing Personality Profile Senior Mayssa Fakih gets out of her aunt\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,63],"tags":[151,23],"class_list":["post-3104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-nw","category-personalityprofile-nw","tag-2017-18","tag-division4","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jaimie Bozack","author_link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?author=7"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6K0n6-O4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}