Palestinian artist brings portrait of a leader to the masses

Ramallah: The life of a Palestinian portrait artist in the West Bank is seldom lucrative, but it's certainly looking up for Waleed Ayyoub.

Israel's conflict with Hezbollah boosted the image of Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanese group's leader, provoking a surge in demand for portraits among Palestinians.

Whereas Ayyoub, 33, used to deal mostly in portraits of late Palestinian president Yasser Arafat and former Egyptian leader Jamal Abdul Nasser, now it's all about Nasrallah.

"Shaikh Nasrallah is now number one," said Ayyoub, as he put the finishing touches to a portrait at his roadside easel in Ramallah, the main city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Before the Lebanon conflict broke out on July 12, Ayyoub might have been lucky to sell one or two portraits of Nasrallah a month. At a cost of $10 (about Dh36) each, it wasn't a big money spinner. But now, with no political rally complete without Nasrallah's image being held aloft or worn on T-shirts, Ayyoub can hardly produce enough pictures of him.

In fact, he's taken to printing cheaper, more-quickly produced posters of the Lebanese cleric, based on his portraits, to make Nasrallah more readily available to the masses.

On Tuesday alone, Ayyoub said he sold 1,000 posters of the cleric for $1 each. Ayyoub plans to donate the proceeds to Lebanon's poor and displaced.