Hala Fares: spanning between journalism, painting

CAIRO - 3 August 2017: For those who know her, Hala Fares is a journalist at the French edition of the state run Al- Ahram; Al-Ahram Hebdo. But since 2012 she started painting and is slowly carving her name in the artistic world. “It all started with a painting on Facebook on a friend’s timeline,” said Hala. She searched about the painting to learn that it belongs to Farida Darwish, a known painter that gives private workshops in her own atelier.

Fares pursued her passion and took her courses with Darwish. Bit by bit she mastered her techniques and materials and started to produce her paintings, “The workshops were diversified, many other artists came and taught us different techniques, use of different materials, which gave us as students confidence to achieve our potential,” Hala told Egypt Today.

Her first exhibition was in 2016 in cooperation with many artists who learned from Farida Darwish as well. She showed six paintings at that time. Between now and then she and 3 other artists rented an apartment to transform it into an atelier. They called it “Al Mashfa,” loosely means the “healing place.” And it really is, said Hala. They go whenever they can and want…they paint, listen to music, vent and produce whatever they feel like.

The result was just amazing; last May the four ladies made a huge exhibition at Al Hanager Center at the Opera House. The exhibition had no title and Hala had 36 paintings among the 140 displayed.

Among the pictures that caught my eyes in the exhibition was the one of the wave. It felt so alive to the point I thought it was a copy of a picture, or after seeing the movie Point Break, where the story revolves around a surfer, but Hala did not see that movie, “it was all the imagination. I love the sea and I can sit by it for hours”. The painting in question is an ocean wave; a huge, round and more of a surfing wave. She never surfed, but still she caught the glimpse…the right glimpse when the wave turns and manifests itself…a brilliant picture where nature shows man that he is still small in comparison to a wave that occurs thousands of times daily since the creation of earth…Hala showed that.
“It is never too late to pursue your passion... whatever it is.”