Hu Allah

Hu Allah. He is God.

I have never studied calligraphy formally, but when I sat down to paint this, I knew that Hu had to be enormous. In my head, He is a word too big for any canvas to contain. So I let it sprawl, bold and free, in my own style and larger than the canvas could hold.

And then Allah, in Kufic script, painted in colours so close to the background that it almost disappears into it. That was deliberate. Because the Quran says that Allah is closer to us than our jugular vein. Wa nahnu aqrabu ilayhi min habli al-wareed. He is not separate from us, not distant, not somewhere we have to travel to find. He is woven into us. The background is us. And He is right there, inside it, inseparable.