The Art of Hospitality: Talking to Helen Eddé
Lebanese hospitality has not gone unnoticed by Helen Eddé.
“It’s amazing you know, even people who do not have a lot, they open their doors to you and invite you in,” she said over coffee at the family’s Beirut villa on Wednesday.
It is perhaps no surprise that such values sit well with the Brazilian-born wife of National Bloc leader Carlos Eddé, who has been able to portray himself as a man of principles.
Active in the March 14 coalition following the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, he quit the alliance following the Doha Accord, an agreement that he believed was a “setback for the Cedar Revolution.” He then ran for a Maronite seat in Kesrouan in the June parliamentary elections instead of in his usual district of Jbeil, specifically to compete with Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun. This was a “political decision, not an electoral one,” he said, and was based primarily on a desire to confront Aoun directly. But perhaps inevitably, the FPM stronghold went to Aoun.
The family relocated from Brazil to Lebanon about ten years ago. While Carlos made his political debut, taking over the leadership of the National Bloc following the death of his uncle Raymond Eddé, Helen instead took off in an entirely different direction: the arts.
After she retired from the advertising business, she began doing craftwork following the birth of her children. Helen began taking classes at the Maison des Artistes in Achrafieh nine years ago and learned to draw and paint.
Eddé uses her art to pay homage to the famous Lebanese hospitality in an exhibition that opens on December 14 at the Maison des Artistes, which will feature her paintings for a week, alongside works by several other artists. Eddé’s watercolors are all of relatively traditional Lebanese windows and doors, images she believes are visual symbols of the hospitality she greatly appreciates.
“From the first time I came to Lebanon, I fell in love with the traditional Lebanese houses… and maybe it is because Lebanese are so proud of their houses that they love to invite strangers and treat them with hospitality that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. Like most strangers coming to Lebanon, I was quickly drawn into their houses and their hearts, often through doors like the ones depicted here,” reads a note penned by Eddé at the beginning of
the 2010 calendar she created.
The pieces on display at the Maison des Artistes were originally painted to illustrate this calendar, aptly titled The Doors of Lebanon, which is now on sale for 30,000 LL ($20) at Clemenceau eatery Gruen, the Aida Cherfan art gallery in downtown Beirut, the Mouawad Museum and at jewelry designer Marie Munier’s Achrafieh store.
All the proceeds of both the calendar and exhibition go to the Help & Heal Foundation, which operates under the umbrella of the Bon Pasteur Organization and aids underprivileged children in Jdeideh by providing education, health care, entertainment and social activities.
Eddé began fundraising for Help & Heal three years ago after being introduced to it through her friend Maria Kattaneh, who runs the foundation. But despite rubbing shoulders with many of the country’s richest citizens thanks to her family’s social and political connections, Eddé dislikes asking for handouts.
“I can’t ask people for money; I find it very weird. I’m a zero at being a salesperson,” she told NOW, and so around this time last year she decided to instead raise money by creating pieces of art that can speak for, and indeed sell, themselves.
The result is a colorful calendar featuring quotes from Gibran Khalil Gibran in lieu of captions. It is a project that Eddé plans to undertake annually. Although the focus of the images and the artistic mediums she uses will vary, the theme will always center on Lebanon.
“It is in Lebanon that I discovered a part of me that was hidden and unfamiliar. I felt that I had to express the intense feelings associated with living in this country. It is here that I learned to draw and paint, and where I discovered pleasures that where unknown to me before,” Eddé said.
Maya Khourchid
Now Lebanon