Solara Sabah

Poet and Canadian Translator

Canada - 2008

Mohammed Bin lamin an artist who is residing in his concealed and private world. Ethan chorin An American writer described him as “unique artist”.

Although Bin lamin never attained any formal school to learn art nor any Institute of Arts, but he is up to date in his art and very bright about his own culture. Through experimental research spanned for over fifteen years, Bin lamin was able to create very important new technique with special appropriate materials for his paints (this technique is still unknown in the world so as Bin lamin at the edge of the Sahara in Libya).

His works look as if it is a legacy for a great civilization that is vague. Firm structures animals or organisms that look spiritual and shy. He called them  “Yellow Beings”, which almost you can feel their warm breath, they looked as if they have just emerged from old caves to walk in and surprised by its first step, or sometimes they look as if they run away from scorched land.

Bin lamin’s characters in this art are creatures that inhabited his world with their own privacy and identity, the light emanates from them, glowing and dancing surrounding with the rhythm of the blue night.

In “Opera of Spoons “ bin lamin painted the gaze faces in the spoon using the foam that left over the spoons after stirring the coffee. Bin lamin in his works is digging to create a lasting images of inner being and place, in others words his art represent the unspoken language of our eternal dreams.

From Book (Translating Libya – The Modern Libyan Short Story)

By Ethan Chorin

Writer and American Translator

(Mellow Yellow)   7. 5 X 15 Cm . Mixed Medi

A few weeks after I arrived back in Washington, Lamia El-Makki (author of 'Tripoli Story') sent me a link to the website of Libyan artist Mohammad Bin Lamin.  I’d seen various pieces of Libyan art, some good, some not so good; all, like Libyan literature, somewhat haunting. Bin Lamin's work, however, was singular. I was struck in particular by a group of paintings under the heading (Yellow Being). They were both outlandish and colorful, sort of a cross between Dali and Rothco, flavored with desert and sun. One piece, depicting a creature walking with a staff, his hair wild, I imagined to be the kindly alter-ego of the evil Marabout in 'The Yellow Rock'. When I asked Bin Lamin where his Yellow Beings come from, he was open to suggestion: 'They are spiritual beings,' he offered, 'somehow bound up with the miracle of existence. Perhaps they are leaves which have fallen from an old tree that is no longer there, or people who have yellowed with maturity.' Bin Lamin insisted the Yellow Beings were 'not Libyan in particular', but in Bin Lamin and his work I thought I saw something quintessentially Libyan. If Bin Lamin were a writer, I'd no doubt have included his stories here.

Perhaps the Yellow Beings do indeed have some magic about them, for a month after I returned to the States; Bin Lamin inadvertently solved our last remaining problem when he asked if I would look over a few stories by a friend. At that point, Basem and I had basically given up on finding that one story with reference to the ‘most beautiful place in all of Libya’. I thought I had come close when the septuagenarian owner of a newly-opened used bookstore in Tripoli’s Old City told me knew someone in the area who wrote short stories, but it was not to be. With its timely and detailed descriptions of Darnah and its environs, Abdalla Ali Al-Ghazal’s ‘The Mute’ would constitute the final piece of our geographic jigsaw puzzle.