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As Bahrain enters its second year of combatting the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the country’s leading artists has depicted the battle between the virus and its vaccine in the arena of fantasy.
Bahraini artist and creative Khalid Abdulla Al-Muharraqi has created a diptych of hybrid digital-oil paintings, capturing the current pandemic with an unique, yet poignant, paradigm while homage to his lineage of ‘line-craft.’
The first of the two paintings, titled Modern Day Vampires, portrays the pandemic as a bat draining the world of its life force, its fangs sinking into China, where the virus outbreak first started, as its wings envelop the entire planet.
The second painting, titled Modern Day Superheroes, is the antithesis of the first – a protector donning a mask and cape-esque lab coat over his regular garb leaping into the air, a vaccine in one hand and the struggling neck of the pandemic beast in the other, both beings locked in a battle to the death.
“I wanted to show the yin and the yang,” the 48-year-old artist explained in an interview with GulfWeekly. “I started these at a time where there was a lot of mystery and fear surrounding the pandemic. Basically, it started with a bat which is draining humanity from the planet. The moon and the night are on its back, which represent its perfect hunting grounds.
“However, the sun is also coming up on the other side of the piece, which is destructive to bats, and this represents how humanity is responding to the pandemic.
“I go into more detail on this in the second painting, where I wanted to show doctors as superheroes and angels, relying on the vaccine to eliminate this beast, which takes on a slightly different form, a mutation if you will, in the second piece.”
Khalid, who proudly traces his lineage to his father Abdullah Al-Muharraqi’s artistic acumen, followed in his father’s footsteps from a young age, with an eye on merging the traditional and the digital.
Abdullah’s name is practically synonymous with the artistic movement in Bahrain and the Gulf, both in terms of volume and breadth of his work, painting portraits of royals across the region and sketching daily cartoons for the Press, including our sister publication Akhbar al Khaleej, just to name a modicum of his substantial portfolio.
From early on, Khalid aspired to trace his own artistic footsteps in reverence to his father yet along his own path, marrying the age-old techniques of painting and sculpture with the emerging fields of digital art and photography.
He studied photography and interior design at the Art Institute of Houston, having already built a solid foundation of paint, cameras and sculpture.
This is where he first fell in love with the idea of using computers to create his concepts and through the years, has developed blended mediums for his creative output.
“These pieces started out as digital paintings, which are done by hand on a screen,” the artist added.
“One needs to have just as steady a hand with digital as with analogue art, and a solid understanding of colour theory and using the right brushes for the right effect.
“After I created these digitally, they were printed on canvas. Then using my oil brushes, I have been adding touches of paint to add depth, texture and richness to the pieces.
“I have always seen artists, including my father, mixing mediums, oils and watercolours, pencils – whatever tools they had, and this is the modern day version of that.”
While much of his day-to-day art lies in the digital world as the founder of Muharraqi Studios known for its computer-generated art and architectural visualisation, Khalid’s artistic pursuits help him stay in touch with both legs of his legacy.
His notable visualisation work includes the Bahrain World Trade Centre, the famous Durrat Al-Bahrain resort and the stadium for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.
“The key is mastery, and that, I feel, is something artists these days should spend more time doing,” he added. “For each of the disciplines I integrate into my work, I have spent five or more years mastering and perfecting my technique in them.
“Of course, as I grow as an artist, the new skills I learn complement techniques I have already mastered but the key is focus, and that is the biggest piece of advice I can offer to up and coming artists. Focus on one aspect, whether it’s oil painting, digital art or 3D modelling, master it completely and then move on to another discipline.”
Khalid’s artistic acumen and discipline was highlighted at the 23rd meeting of the GCC culture ministers in Oman in 2019, where he was one of a handful of artists from the region honoured with a medal recognising his numerous creative achievements and contributions.
Taking a page from his father’s book, Khalid continues to create art for all segments of society – pivotal portraits privy to notable figures across the kingdom while also creating art for the masses, like his logo and marketing designs, the most recent of which can be seen in the centenary anniversary celebration of Bahrain’s national police force.
And re-casting the current pandemic as a modern day battle between the light and the dark keeps him firmly in touch with today’s world.
For more details, follow @khalid_muharraqi on Instagram.
