Mela

My name is Moktar El Agili. I sign my paintings with the pseudonym "Mela" which is a contraction of my name. I was born in 1940 and spent my first 20 years in Tunisia. Thanks to a scholarship from the government, I left to France to attend the University in Paris. Upon graduation, I joined a weekly magazine based in Paris as a reporter on North African affairs. Then I moved to a north American company where I was given the challenge to develop and grow their business in the Middle East. I lived in Beirut, Cairo, Cyprus, Racine in the USA and finally settled in London where I retired. I wrote a book about my life (so far) and then happily went to painting.

During most of my early life, from grammar school to university and well after, I was interested mainly in math, engineering, cosmology, chemistry and generally in all those things, where accuracy, precision and hard facts are the substance. It was only when my career as a business executive started to wind down,  that I discovered literature, Jazz and Art. It was by painting in particular that I felt most attracted. I started watching painting sessions on TV and took a few courses. But the real spark happended when I started watching our friend Gernot Kissel painting from live. Gernot was a German expressionist painter. Looking at him, fully immersed in his colours, brushes and palettes, breathing heavily, looking from time to time, with lust at his subjet/model, walking forward to his easel and throwing his rapid successive strokes on the canvas, producing a scratchy noise.

It is my pleasure, today, to show a few of my works, starting with flowers, through Artsper, impressed to find myself among many talented painters from all over the world. I feel so fortunate.

Tunisia