Life

Hasan Dhaimish's jazz paintings shown in Lancashire, decades after a shortwave radio on a Benghazi rooftop tuned him to Motown

Illustrative · Photograph: Bankhallbretherton / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0

In 1969, a fourteen-year-old in Benghazi caught Smokey Robinson on a shortwave radio and never let go. Hasan Dhaimish became one of Libya's sharpest political cartoonists — his alter-ego Al-Satoor carved caricatures of Gaddafi-era politicians for decades — but a parallel body of work, vivid paintings of Billie Holiday and the blues, stayed mostly private. His son Sherif exhibited them at Pendle Heritage Centre in Lancashire from 23 March to 2 April under the title "Breezin." Hasan arrived in Burnley in 1977 as an asylum-seeker, married, studied art at the University of Bradford, and taught graphics and photography at Nelson and Colne College. One painting, "Funky 16 Corners," took nearly three years; Sherif says it is the only piece his father would have refused to sell.

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