THE drudgery of the workaday life in Jeddah often has a tendency to bury the city's beauty beneath a malaise of crowds, noise and pollution. The role of the artist -- one of the roles, anyway -- is to renew that vision of beauty and allow us to see with clarity a physical, intellectual or even ephemeral truth. Two former residents of Jeddah who have since relocated to Dubai, Jarenporn, or JP, and Ekke Betsch, put their paintings and photographs on display at Dubai's International Art Center in Jumeirah in June, bringing into focus, in many cases, the beauty of Jeddah that the municipality must strive to preserve. JP is a Thai artist of Chinese descent who studied water color in her native Thailand, but it was in Jeddah, she says, that “everything fell into place. I found Jeddah so special and unique. And I was lucky because there were so many interesting people around.” Her first show was organized by Susan Elliot at Arabian Homes, and JP took up a sideline of teaching art to children. She also took to planting herself on street corners in downtown Jeddah's residential neighborhoods and sketching the old buildings there. Rather than any animosity, JP attracted only good-natured curiosity and, she says, a good deal of pride on the part of property owners who were happy that their buildings had attracted such attention. Her husband, Ekke, manages a multinational company and refers to himself as “an amateur photographer,” one, however, who has spent most of his life documenting his travels around the world. In the Dubai show, called “Ekke Doors & JP Retro,” many of his photos are of the visually exquisite doors and doorways that pepper Balad like individual entryways into each story in “1001 Arabian Nights.” He documents the gently curving alleyways and ancient streets where once only camels and their handlers trod and which now serve as passageways for cars and vans. As if to marry modern technology with the centuries old architecture, Ekke has begun to delve into digital photography and the manipulable tools that it offers photographers. The manipulation sometimes serves to create entirely new images with unique color schemes and, in others, it works to enhance the textural qualities of the original image, again bringing into focus aspects of old Jeddah that are easily overlooked once one begins to call Jeddah home. This is not the art that is going to be written about in intellectual art journals or sought after by cutting edge galleries in New York or Paris. In many ways, it follows the traditions of Arab art. It is pictorial, occasionally narrative, and unabashedly decorative. It is, however, a statement that conveys fully the depth and breadth of the beauty that is Jeddah. __
