Svala Thorisdottir Salman

Svala Thorisdottir Salman (July 28, 1945 – March 28, 1998), was an Icelandic painter. She was born in Reykjavík, Iceland but spent most of her life in Washington D.C.. She fought heroically for four and a half years before she lost the battle against breast cancer at only 52 years old. The last years of her life were her most productive as an artist.

Svala grew up in an artistic atmosphere. Her father, Thorir Baldvinsson, studied and worked in San Francisco as an architect in the 1920s. He was struck by polio and returned home during the depression. He brought with him the ideas of functionalism in architecture. Quite a number of buildings in Iceland bear his mark, Akureyri Art Museum being just one of them. When Svala decided to take the artistic road rather than finishing Reykjavik Junior College she got full support from her family and her mother's (Borghildur Jónsdóttir) close friend the artist Barbara Arnason. Svala left for England after two years at The Icelandic College of Art and Crafts. There she spent a year at the Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design before going to Oxford to study at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art(1965 – 1968). The Icelandic artist Karólína Lárusdóttir and Svala were contemporaries at both English institutions. They had not been long in Oxford when Karólína introduced Svala to Þorsteinn Gylfason. They became lifelong friends.

Svala's first solo exhibition was at Christ Church College in June 1968. New College purchased two of her paintings. In November that same year her countrymen got a chance to see her work at a solo exhibition in Unuhús in Reykjavík. She set up a studio in Klúbburinn, a place best known as a dance club. It housed a gallery for a while and Svala took part in a group exhibition there in September 1969. Among people she got to know and made drawings of at Klúbburinn were the members of Trúbrot who were working on their first album. The then Prime Minister Bjarni Benediktsson also found his way to Kúbburinn. He had chosen the young artist to do a portrait the Reykjavík City Council had commissioned of him as a former mayor. Svala was so overwhelmed by the task that she fainted at one of the sittings. Bjarni perished along with his wife and grandson in a fire at Thingvellir on July 10 1970. The portrait appeared in the photograph sent the world over of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev at their meeting in Höfði 1986. Later Svala was to paint portraits of the politicians Geir Hallgrímsson and Senator George McGovern, among other distinguished individuals.

In Oxford Svala had met the West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar John Ritch. They married in February 1970. Before leaving the US Military and joining the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1972 John served as an infantry captain on the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Svala travelled to Asia and spent some months in Seoul, South Korea. There she discovered a type of rice paper the Koreans use mainly for isolation purposes. She found it ideal for her own art. In January 1971 she showed 18 Asia oriented drawings on rice paper in a solo exhibition in the Nordic House in Reykjavík. At a press conference with the Icelandic local media Svala emphasised that she was still a young and unformed artist, looking forward to honing her craft and finding her own style.

In April 1973 when Svala had lived for two years in Washington DC the World Bank Art Society held an exhibition of forty of Svala's paintings. According to the catalogue the paintings were on loan from the private collection of Michael J. Gillette, a World Bank official. "It is not as easy to trace her later exhibitions in Washington. Before the end of 1980 she had held three exhibitions of her own, and taken part in some with others. She preserved a printed and illustrated invitation to an exhibition of paintings and drawings at Spectrum Gallery in Georgetown. The exhibition lasted from September 11th to 30th, but the invitation does not tell us the year. From other exhibitions we have lists of works, but no other information." One of these was held at the home of Sharon and Gar Alperovitz on December 7 1980. Svala had a great day. "It was so nice because people really studied the paintings and didn't just stand around chatting,". She "sold many paintings and received orders for more. She also held exhibitions in other countries without bothering to retain any written information about them. Among them were one in Seoul and another in Paris,"

Svala and John divorced in 1978. Svala met her second husband, Melhem D. Salman, through his mother Zahia Salman, a Lebanese women's leader. "Melhem had just left the Lebanese foreign service, where he had been economic counsellor at the embassy in Washington and a member of the Lebanese delegation to the United Nations. He resigned on the grounds of the civil war in Lebanon." " He completed his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University and joined the World bank as an economist and Advisor for External Affairs. In 1982 Svala held a joint exhibition with two Arab American artists at the ALIF Gallery in Washington. A year later the son Daoud was born and Svala's artistic activity slowed down. But what she did "showed that she had changed her style quite markedly, both in colours and forms. Her exposure to the culture of the Middle East was, undoubtedly, one reason for this change. In Korea she had submitted to the influence of the Far East. In her paintings of 1983 – 1993 we see her response to the Middle East, the ancient culture of Egypt as well as Islamic culture."

When Svala was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1993 the malignant growth had already spread. One treatment after another dominated the last four and a half years of her life. Her determination to see Daoud grow up to become a teenager sustained her. Doctors said she lived at least two years longer than was to be expected.

Melhem, whose sister Nour Salman is a well known writer on Sufism, detected a certain affinity between Svala's art and the Islamic mysticism. She became a member of the Center for Sufism Reoriented in Washington. The teachings of the Indian Avatar Meher Baba appealed to her particularly and she did his portrait. After she was taken ill Sufistic images and symbols became prominent in her paintings. Angels can be found and she painted the open gate in many variations. "The gates or doors open into another world. In one of the paintings she paints herself in the image of a butterfly in the doorway." Members of the Center supported Svala in her illness along with Melhem and Daoud, family and friends. Posthumously her paintings were exhibited at the Washington Home and Community Hospice where she had passed away shortly before 2am on March 28 1998. A year later, from February 20 to March 7 1999, a big exhibition of her work was held in her memory at Gerðarsafn, Kópavogur Iceland.

Exhibitions

• Church College, Oxford, 1968
• Unuhús, Reykjavík, 1968
• Klúbburinn, Reykjavík, 1969 - group show
• Norræna Húsið, Reykjavík, 1971
• World Bank Art Society, Washington DC, 1973
• Gallery Spectrum, Washington DC
• Home of Sharon and Gar Alperovitz, Washington DC, 1980
• ALIF Gallery, Washington DC, 1982 - group show
• Washington Home and Community Hospice, Washington DC, 1998
• Gerðarsafn, Kópavogi, 1999

Portraits

• Ástríður Andersen (Private collection)
• Bjarni Benediktsson (Reykjavík Art Museum)
• Geir Hallgrímsson (Private collection)
• George McGovern (Senator George McGovern Collection at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota)
• Hans Georg Andersen (Private collection)
• Thorir Baldvinsson (Museum Húsavík)
• Thorsteinn Gylfason (Private collection)

References

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