Fatima Abou Gahas

Biography

The wall painting of a reception room in Fatima Abou Gahas’s house, by one description, took less than two weeks, although a room of that kind usually took a month or two. She outlined the design herself and marked where each colour should go, while the other women filled it in with paint.

She was born in 1920 in Rijal Almaa, in Asir Province in south-western Arabia.

From early childhood she was taught Al-Qatt Al-Asiri by her mother, Amna bint Mohammed bin Hadi, who was also known for her wall painting in Rijal Almaa. Fatima was eight when she began to work on her own. She had no formal education. Widowed young, she made wall painting her livelihood and raised four children. She went on practising it for more than seventy years. Al-Qatt Al-Asiri is a women’s art of decorating interior walls, above all in reception rooms known as majlis. Its basis is geometric patterns, symbolic motifs and bands of bright colour. In Abou Gahas’s practice the main design was first outlined in black, and only then were colours added. The French researcher Thierry Mauger, who visited her at home and stayed in her village for more than four months, writes that instead of a modern brush she worked with a feather from a sheep’s tail. By his account, she did not paint on paper or wooden boards until he himself asked her to paint a board. Families invited her to decorate the reception rooms of new houses in Rijal and nearby places. Walls painted by her can also be found in the lobby of the Qasr Abha hotel. In 1985 a painting from her own house was moved to the museum of Rijal village, in the Al Alwan palace.

A few years before her death she ran a workshop for women at Qasr Bader, a house later preserved as a private museum. Fatima Faye Al-Almaai, who later established a museum and training project for Asiri art, said that she had learned the art from Abou Gahas and credited her with helping to preserve it. The historian Ibrahim Maghawi, in his book about Rijal (2010), called her until recently the only recognised heir to this tradition. I think this remark should be read with caution: other accounts name her mother and her pupils beside her.

In 1997 (1418 AH) Abou Gahas received the Abha Award for national service. In 2007 she was chosen at the Janadriyah festival, the national heritage and culture festival, as the most prominent figure of the country’s folk heritage. When Al-Qatt Al-Asiri was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017, she was described as the art form’s most distinguished practitioner. One of her wall paintings is in the collection of Ithra.

She died in 2010, at about ninety years of age.