Hedy Habra
Non Finito
My painting started out as a cool blue landscape, almost monochrome, loosely inspired by Klein. You’ll
wonder why I keep working on it when blue is my favorite color. Could it be that my palette furtively
enticed my brush to mix honey hues with layers of pigments to lighten the mountain slope, or show
how flashing lights fall within the mirroring lake? I wanted to turn melting stars into tongues of fire
hidden under ultramarine without altering the initial canvas. I’m still wavering between depicting a new
dawn sprinkled with golden dust or darker slopes ignited by lightning at dusk. If you watch closely,
you’ll see what’s in my mind’s eye, what’s in the core of each minute underlying flame: imagine a
throbbing heart sinking deeper into the blue water to blur its brokenness. I’ll be careful to use the
slightest touch of carmine: a brush of ochre will attenuate its vibrance, making sure each light rises
delicately like an alcohol flame flickering its blue tip; a blue transparent tip like the distillation of the
essence of love. But you can hardly see that fleeting blueness since it merges with blue clouds, blue
mountains, blue skies, and a blue lake. Klein would have surely disagreed.
Hedy Habra reads “Non Finito”
Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. She has authored four poetry collections, most recently, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023); The Taste of the Earth, winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. A twenty one-time-nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/