‘Despite challenges, the Saudi Arabia art movement is growing fast’
Like all girls from privileged Saudi families, Halla bint Khalid grew up with everyone at school and elsewhere predicting her future - doctor or teacher. But Halla was creatively minded and it was clear that she would be an artist when, as a child, she painted her first sunflower. This one was a Van Gogh in the making. Today, at 47, the mother-of-five, is a popular storyteller with a surfeit of Arabic and English children's bestsellers to her name (Adventures of a Paperweight, Everywhere and Hiccups etc). "If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet," author Toni Morrison had famously advised, "you must be the one to write it." As she tells it, Halla was driven to write her own children's books when she couldn't find any worthwhile on the shelves to read her kids. At heart, however, she's an artist whose powerful, witty and quirky works oscillate between her Saudi heritage, gender gap and a concern for the marginalised and social outcasts. How does she reconcile all this? "There is beauty everywhere and in everyone if we look without prejudice," she tells WKND, in a chat from Riyadh where she's based. "Halla's art stands out for its sincerity and physical beauty," says gallerist Stephan Stoyanov of Art Agency who represents her. "Gender topics are in vogue nowadays but, in her work, there is both sadness and humour and, above all, bravery."