Wahbi Al-Hariri - From Spain To China

From Spain To China

During the last ten years of his life, his spiritual drive and classical artistic talent, coupled with the extraordinary participation of his wife, Widad Marachi—and the earnest encouragements of numerous friends, scholars, and dignitaries throughout the world—inspired him to travel from Spain to China to identify and document the most significant historic mosques of the world. Despite a four-year battle with cancer, he was able to produce in record time a body of work that features over forty historic mosques. The collection known as The Spiritual Edifices of Islam, was completed with the assistance of his son Mokhless Al-Hariri, and embodies the final evolution of his distinctive classical yet contemporary style.

  • Lisa Kaaki, in her 2002 article in ArabNews, writes of her meeting with Al-Hariri:

The truth is that the artist could rely on perfect sketches representing not only the exact proportions but also all the architectural details, such as columns and cornices necessary for completing the drawings later.

Read more about this topic:  Wahbi Al-Hariri

Famous quotes containing the words spain and/or china:

    England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct way to India.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In a country where misery and want were the foundation of the social structure, famine was periodic, death from starvation common, disease pervasive, thievery normal, and graft and corruption taken for granted, the elimination of these conditions in Communist China is so striking that negative aspects of the new rule fade in relative importance.
    Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)