In a small garden next to his house in the West Bank town of Nablus, artist Ahmad Muhammad Yasin sits with his paints contemplating his next creation.
But rather than the normal canvas you’d expect, he’s working on a large, and very old, cactus plant.
And on these plants he depicts scenes of suffering by his Palestinian people with remarkable — and haunting — clarity.
He talks me through the five works he’s already completed. “In the first, there is an old woman screaming; she screams against the situation on the ground,” he tells me, referring to the decades-long struggle between Palestinians and Israel.
Ahmad’s choice of canvas is full of meaning. In Arabic, the word for cactus — saber — is the same as the word for patience. For Palestinians, the plant has always been a symbol of patience, particularly so in the wake of what they call the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in 1948.
Very carefully, he starts to clean the cactus spines with a wet cloth, and then sets off on his artistic journey.
“Painting under the sun for a long time isn’t easy,” the 21-year old tells me.
