Jad Saab: Painting the Inner Child, One Memory at a Time
Jad Saab is a Lebanese self-taught oil painter whose work explores the delicate relationship between consciousness, memory, and the inner child. Before fully turning toward painting, he began his creative journey in the structured world of interior design, where he earned his degree and worked professionally. Over time, however, he felt a stronger pull toward art, not as decoration or technique alone, but as a way of expressing what language could not reach.
A formative childhood moment shaped his understanding of art’s psychological depth. When he was referred to a psychologist by his school, he was handed a pencil and asked to draw his family. What seemed at first like a simple exercise became a revelation: the drawing exposed hidden feelings, subconscious signs, and emotional truths he had not yet understood. Since then, painting has become for Jad a way of returning to what lies beneath the surface, the fears, dreams, questions, and lost fragments that adulthood often silences.
At the heart of Jad’s practice is the figure of the inner child, whom he calls Jiko: a guardian of lost dreams, pure impulses, and emotional truths. His canvases often move between nostalgia and mystery, between the visible and the hidden. Houses, treehouses, old cars, expressive faces, and dreamlike spaces appear in his work not as literal subjects, but as emotional containers. They hold traces of childhood, memory, longing, and self-discovery.
At Kulturnest, we perceive Jad’s work as an intimate visual dialogue between the adult self and the child within. There is often a sense of theatricality in his compositions: a house becomes a psychological world, a face becomes a landscape of feeling, and an old car becomes a vessel of memory and movement. His use of warm reds, oranges, greens, blues, and shadowed contrasts gives the works both intensity and vulnerability.
What makes Jad’s work compelling is this tension between control and surrender. His paintings feel guided by intuition, but also by reflection. They ask questions rather than offer conclusions. They carry something unfinished, almost deliberately childlike, as though the painting itself refuses to become too polished because it still wants to preserve the first impulse, the spontaneous mark, the unfiltered gesture. In that space, Jad’s practice becomes a quiet rebellion against the noise and rigidity of adulthood, a return to wonder, fear, memory, and emotional honesty.
Through this conversation, Kulturnest invites readers to enter Jad Saab’s world: a world where painting becomes a bridge between consciousness and the subconscious, between the adult and the child, between what is seen and what still waits to be understood.
Interview
Kulturnest: Can you introduce yourself through your artistic journey rather than your biography? What key moments or shifts have shaped your practice?
Jad Saab: My artistic journey began when I was a child and visited a psychologist. She gave me a blank sheet of paper and asked me to draw my family. At first, I thought it was just a simple art exercise, but when I finished and later looked back, I realised it revealed so much - hidden feelings and secrets. There were signs in the drawing that she recognised, things from my subconscious that I had not even known were there.
From that moment, I fell in love with how, through drawing, I could analyse these inner thoughts that I had not been able to see. As I grew older, I wanted to continue using art to discover myself, to get closer to who I am. I decided that, through painting, I would express and uncover what I truly love, what I fear, and what lies beneath the surface.
Kulturnest: How would you describe your artistic language - your mediums, techniques, and way of working? What draws you to these forms of expression?
Jad Saab: If I were to describe my artistic language, it is nostalgic. It makes me time-travel, either to the past or the future. It makes me ask myself many questions: why this colour, why this look, why this sadness, why this ambiguity?
It makes me reflect on many things that accompany me day by day in my life. I do not have a clear idea of how it will end. I begin slowly, and sometimes I leave it for a long time, returning to it when I feel the moment is right, or when I feel the painting is calling me to work on it again.
Kulturnest: What themes, questions, or inner tensions are currently driving your work? Are there ideas you find yourself returning to?
Jad Saab: Right now, my work is driven by a constant need to understand what is happening beneath the surface, emotionally and psychologically. What drives me to paint more is this desire to discover myself - how to connect with my subconscious, to let it live, to talk to me, to communicate.
The only way I feel I can truly understand it - what I need or what I am facing - is through a canvas. Through the canvas, I can connect to my subconscious and try to understand more. Once the painting is done, I analyse what is happening: why I chose this painting, why I chose these colours.
Another thing I keep going back to is the dialogue between me and the painting itself. There is always this question: Am I controlling the work, or is the work guiding me? That uncertainty is crucial to me. It reflects a bigger question I live with: how much of who we are is conscious, and how much is hidden somewhere deeper, only appearing in fragments?
Kulturnest: Can you walk us through your creative process - from the first impulse to the final piece? What part of this process feels most essential to you?
Jad Saab: My process begins when I feel a certain emotional or internal tension that I cannot fully explain. Before I even begin sketching, I spend time looking for images - photographs I have taken, or sometimes images that do not belong to me - ones I do not even fully know why I am drawn to. I take inspiration from these images and try to project them onto my canvas.
Then I begin to sketch, using my imagination. The idea emerges from a question I have been wrestling with, something I have not fully grasped. I reflect on what mattered to me as a child - what I dreamed of, what I loved - and from those memories, I bring out certain symbols, like a treehouse or an old car.
Then I try to find some images, photographs I have taken, and I ask myself: why did I choose this? Why did I shoot it this way? From there, I add layers, guided by this reflection. I ask myself what the treehouse might mean, how I can give it mystery, and how to express something deeper.
For example, I decided to divide the treehouse into two levels: one representing my subconscious, the upper level, where a small child inside is trying to connect with the adult Jad, and the lower level representing conscious awareness. That is how I began to build the idea in my mind - what I want to express and what the concept is.
The best part of the entire process is when I start to see the painting come together, giving me the exact feeling I wanted to convey. I do not like it to be fully finished. I like it to show that a child was working on it, so I can remind myself that this child helped guide me, that these small, spontaneous strokes were his, helping the adult Jad - me - find his way. I love this part of the process.
Kulturnest: How does your context - whether in Lebanon or as part of a wider artistic environment - impact your work? What challenges and opportunities does it create?
Jad Saab: The situation does not allow for stability. In this country, it is difficult to continue as an artist, as if the circumstances and conditions here limit that expression or that art. But at the same time, this instability is also what pushes the artist or painter to creatively innovate in their work and express their ideas more deeply.
Because I am in a country like Lebanon, and because of the many problems that exist, I am always trying to adjust myself, to improve, and to grow, because I see how many challenges we have. As a result, this gives me the chance to observe myself more and work on myself more.
In addition, because of the diversity in this country, it forces me, as a person and as an artist, to ask myself many questions and to distinguish what supports my opinion, what supports my idea and my spirit, and what does not.
Despite all these problems, because Lebanon is such a beautiful and unique country, I love being one of those people who try to raise its name and show how much creativity it has. There is so much creativity and beauty here. It is a very special country, with very special people.
Kulturnest: Looking ahead, what directions are you exploring or questioning in your practice? What would you like to evolve or preserve?
Jad Saab: What I am discovering is the power of art and colour in expressing certain ideas, and how it is a mysterious language that the unconscious uses to express thoughts that are not present in our conscious mind, but deep inside every person.
What I want to keep in my paintings is the mystery, as if there is a force inside them - like there is a question, or something is happening. At the same time, I want to keep this strike, as if my younger self is drawing with me.
