Tamam Al-Akhal was one of the first Palestinian women artists to receive formal art training, and she is considered as one of the pioneers of modern Palestinian fine arts. Her realist work, expressive and impressionistic, focuses on subjects like the Mediterranean Sea, which reminds her of her hometown Jaffa and the local traditional markets and the architecture of Palestinian buildings. She uses vivid colours, with a sense of longing and nostalgia for the land, the people and the place that she was expelled from during the Israeli occupation, the Nakba of 1948.
T. Al-Akhal was born in Jaffa, a place that deeply influenced her. Her paintings offer a rare testimony on surviving the events and consequences of the Nakba. She has been at the forefront of recounting Palestinian history, and has taken part in building a Palestinian artistic vision and vocabulary. Showing Palestinian history with brushes and colours, she captures the struggles of the Palestinian people. Her work illustrates an iconic representation of experiences and sensations based on the tragedy of the Palestinian national narrative. Her early paintings, however, were touched by the daily events prior to the Nakba, that happened during her childhood. As she experienced people’s joy, she used crayons and watercolours to capture those moments.
