ARTS-LEBANON: Calamity Turns a Taxi Driver into an Artist

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Reem Haddad

BEIRUT, May 14 2002 (IPS) - For this taxi driver life began with a heart attack at 55. Forced to stay home after what had seemed like a lifetime on the roads, Elias Badawi discovered the artist in him.

Badawi, now 72, began to string golden threads together into icons. Those icons – figures of Madonna, of Jesus, of saints, have made Badawi a celebrity. His icons adorn the walls of many Lebanese homes.

“I don’t know how I do it,” says Badawi. “I’ve tried to explain it to my family but I can’t. I just do it.”

His family is amazed at the artist who emerged among them. Neither art nor handiwork has ever been a trait of the Badawi family. His wife speaks of a trance her husband gets into. “He doesn’t hear anything or anybody,” she says. “He goes into another world.”

It all began in 1985 when Badawi suffered a massive heart attack while driving his taxi. After open heart surgery, Badawi was told he could not

drive a taxi any more. But those were difficult days. The Lebanese civil war was still raging , and Badawi needed an income. Never particularly religious, he began to pray.

And then he recalled a trip to Russia in 1955 as member of a Lebanese football team. He remembered the moment he stood mesmerised before an icon in a church. “It was the most beautiful icon I had ever seen,” he says. “It was in a style only made in Russia.”

Badawi got the urge to create such icons and gift them to the surgeons who had operated on him. To his family’s surprise, he went out and bought some blocks of wood, golden threads, coloured glass bits and other material. He began work on his first icon on a small table in the kitchen of their two-bedroom flat.

“I didn’t know how I was going to make it,” he recalls.” I just knew that I could.”

For hours, Badawi worked on the icon and then on a second one. “I couldn’t stop,” he says. “There was shelling all around us those days.

But I heard nothing and felt nothing. I just knew I had to keep working.”

He worked away for weeks. Sometimes he would find he had been working through the night when his wife turned up in the kitchen in the morning.

Finally, the two icons were done. Badawi decided to show them to his brother, a priest, before presenting them to his physicians.

His brother, Father Nicholas, was stunned. He kept the icons, and asked Badawi to make more. Months later, Badawi had completed 35 icons. Father

Nicholas decided to display them at an exhibition in his church. “I became so nervous,” Badawi says. “I began to tremble with anxiety. What would people say?”

People who came to the exhibition hugged him. Bids poured in to buy the icons. Badawi, who had not thought of selling his work, was bewildered.

Friends stepped in and priced the icons. “And that’s how it happened,” he recalls. “Suddenly this became my profession.”

Years passed, and Badawi acquired a reputation. Celebrities, local and from outside, came to his exhibitions. All along he was encouraged by his brother Nicholas.

But in 1990 tragedy struck the family. Father Nicholas was killed by a stray bullet as he walked home one day. Badawi turned even more fervently to his icons. “It was my one comfort,” he says.

Today his ‘workshop’ is that same table in the kitchen. A rusting biscuit box holds his tools. He keeps his golden threads and coloured glass in the kitchen drawers. “That’s all I need,” he says.

Badawi lives day after day in his world of icons. He goes on “until my wife taps me on the shoulder and makes me eat.” His doctor advised him to cut down his working hours, but Badawi cannot. “It’s in me,” he says. “I can’t stop.”

Some years ago Badawi tried to teach his skills to his two sons. But when he tried to explain the technique, he fell silent. “I couldn’t do it,” he says. “I myself don’t know what I’m going to do until I sit down and do it.”

Badawi regrets he cannot pass his skills to the young. But, he says, “it’s nice to know that I will leave my icons behind.”