The sea and the sunny places near it were and are a permanent attraction for painters. What do painters look for most? Light, of course. There is a special light by the sea that cannot be explained but has always inspired painters.

In the south of Romania, there is a region called Dobrogea which is my favorite. This is the region that borders the Black Sea and any journey to the sea crosses it.

Dobrogea stretches from the Danube Delta, where the Danube empties into the Black Sea, to the neighboring country Bulgaria.

In the few trips I make in the summer to the sea, mostly in Bulgaria, I cross the roads of Dobrogea and that gives me great pleasure. I look forward to traveling the roads of Dobrogea with the same joy with which I look forward, every time, to meeting the sea!

I recently visited an exhibition called Dodrogea...

In Bucharest, there are two great museums dedicated to the peasants and the countryside, the Romanian Peasant Museum and the Village Museum, these themed museums also have exhibition rooms dedicated to other kinds of art.

This time I present an exhibition hosted by the Romanian Peasant Museum.

Dobrogea

First, let me show you where the museum and the exhibition is.

The Romanian Peasant Museum is now housed in the former headquarters of the Museum of Communism in Romania. In order to counter the communist memory, a wooden church several hundred years old was brought in and placed in the courtyard of the museum.

In this building, there are several exhibition halls.

In one of these exhibition halls, we found and visited the Dobrogea exhibition of the Syrian painter Ammar Alnahhas.

Ammar Alnahhas is a painter and sculptor from Syria, who studied at the University of Damascus and emigrated to Romania because of the war in his country.

To my shame, I didn't know about the Arab painters, nor did I think they existed. I have known about Ammar for a few years, because of a niece who bought several of his paintings.

I saw my niece's paintings, spectacular and very colorful paintings that at first glance I didn't like because I didn't know which influences and currents to attribute it to. I thought it was something copied from other painters.

Well, now I changed my mind after seeing the exhibition. I was impressed by the colors. They are so personal that you can immediately recognize the author.

Wild horses in the Danube Delta.

The exhibition is superb helped by an exceptional theme. Dobrogea means water, sun, the harmony between water and land, sand, and specific animals.

Fishing villages, boats, sand, and blue water. Cold colors but also a little orange, which is the warmest color.

The fishes

A place where water is everywhere and life is due to it. The fishes cannot be missing from the main elements of Dobrogea.

Lavender fields

Sunflowers are another element found in Dobrogea, stylized sunflowers, almost unrecognizable but so suggestively painted.

A group of three paintings, placed close to each other, show us an almost panoramic view of the landscape. again dominated by fields of lavender, horses, and sunflowers.

Sunflowers
like I've never seen painted before, and stylized houses swallowed by a sky mixed with the sea.

It is an exhibition where the colors on the walls steal your eyes. There are still many paintings to show and I will do it in the next post.