Feature: Sudan visual artist uses arts as therapy for patients

Sudanese visual artist Rashid Diab does not regard fine arts as something exercised by artists, but also as a lifestyle, a tool to change the community and a therapy for diseases, especially for children.

Diab, founder of Rashid Diab Arts Center in Khartoum, in cooperation with a group of Sudanese artists, initiated the idea of using arts for treatment of children's diseases like autism.

"We have big projects relating to the category of children including training via arts, civilizational behavior, raising kids through arts and treating children of mental and physical disabilities by arts," Diab said.

Diab said that many children are being influenced by arts training, particularly those suffering from autism.

"They could communicate through arts such as drawing and painting with their peers," he said.

The center, with the concerned specialists, has contributed to the treatment of many children through arts, which became a useful therapy once used in a scientific and systematic manner, he added.

Musa'b, a seven year old child, said that the center has availed him the opportunity to learn important drawing skills.

"I have learned much at the center. Now I can draw many shapes and I have become competent in using the colors to express a specific idea," Musa'b said.

Shaima Abbas, a thirteen year old child, said that drawing, which was just a hobby before she came to the center, might become a career as she grow more professional.

"Drawing is an expression of things inside the human being and that colors are kinds of expression. I have also learned that the shapes represent a real reflection of a set of feelings," she said.

Rashid Diab Arts Center in Khartoum was established in 2007 as the first arts center in Sudan. It organizes regular activities such as an eight years old weekly forum.

The center is also concerned with documentation of the visual arts activities in Sudan, where it has collected many works for generations of Sudanese visual artists that have been published in a book about fine arts in the country and was printed by the Arab League.

"The center tends to upgrade the artistic taste of the Sudanese audience and inform with the Sudanese arts," Diab concluded. Endit