“Art is my Drug of Choice” Artist: Norma T. Nemer
Born:  Adelaide, South Australia
​Heritage:  Lebanese – Arriving in SA in the 1870s & in the 1950s.
 
A full-time Lawyer (1994) & SA legal business owner (Nemer Essey Lawyers (2000) Sitting on many voluntary legal committees, societies and boards; a writer & lecturer of many university legal courses. However, I choose to silence my mind by painting. Artist since 2011 – Untrained. Works in Oils and Acrylics on Canvas and Board. Exhibits in SA galleries by request. Artwork privately Commissioned & Sold since 2012.  Facebook page: for more artwork: -  “A walk through Nemer Essey’s Gallery”
 
My Philosophy relating to Art Why go searching for what is already in you? Stop resisting and be still. You hold the answers within you for what you seek. Your journey does not require you to travel a distance – just a willingness to rest a while in quiet. Enter into these paintings in peace. Allow you inner self to become submerged in the isolation of what you see and what you find. You do not need to travel anywhere, for the paintings come to you bringing with them a wave of thoughts, emotions and reactions.  Trust yourself enough to shut the world away. Don’t look with the eyes; for eyes are only useful to discern an often-deceitful physical world. Blur your sight, for I now give you permission to find no meaning within them, except the truth with which you attach to it.  My art is to feel peace or disquiet in isolation. Art is to breath and within which to lose yourself - It is not to see. Each person’s own unique spiritual wandering within the art may bring with it their uncomfortable truths. And if you should find yourself disturbed by your thoughts within this silence, then will you be brave enough to stay a while to feel the physical discomfort enough to hear and heal your pain? Or will you tear yourself away quickly back into the world to avoid the uncomfortable emerging awakenings and hence the inevitable confrontation which must follow? I urge you, on behalf of your hidden self, to stay a while to heal – for to hide in the world to silence it, cannot be beneficial. For at some point it will find its voice.  I paint to provide my brain with a playground to entertain itself in safety, whilst I find time for my undisturbed inner spiritual journey to connect to my Creator and find my answers and my solace. I use it to keep my mind distracted and entertained, so that I may just be in silence long enough to hear and “to know”. For I truly find that it is only whilst playing in abstract colours and blurred scenes, that my mind stops its chitchat enough, such that I may hear the longings of the soul to answer its call.
 
Norma T. Nemer  2018 – Glenelg Art Gallery Exhibition