If the timeless art of Pablo Picasso were red, and Norman Rockwell’s meticulous celebration of the ordinary were yellow, blending them may produce the legendary orange that is the art of Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour.

Mansour was born in the summer of 1947 in a tiny Palestinian village named Birzeit, meaning “oil well.” It is named after the dense groves of olive trees that fill its hills and valleys. During the summer, olive flowers turn into fruits that grow on the branches. The inner pit becomes hard. That summer, Palestinian life was hardening too. At the age of ten months, Sliman Mansour lived through the Nakba of 1948 and the destruction of much of Palestine that ensued. At age four, he lost his father. 

The gifted boy was sent to a boarding school for orphans in the city of Bethlehem. One auspicious day, on the roof of the orphanage, he saw a painter—the brother of the founder of the school—in action. The man was not painting a rusted window, or a peeling door, or a wall in a room. He was painting on canvas. Mansour’s son, Bassel, says that was the moment when Palestine’s leading painter-to-be felt the spark in his soul glitter like the star he was destined to become.

At age fourteen, Mansour won a United Nations contest for art by children. It carried a monetary award. That encouraged him greatly. The affirmation of this early welcome of his talent became evident in the subsequent outcome over a volcanic journey of color that lasted until Monday, August 24, 2026, when he died at age seventy-nine. 

I read the news of his death and could not sleep that night. The almost-total eclipse of the moon that happened over my city in America only forty-eight hours after his death, covering more than 96 percent of the moon, felt like mourning and announcing to the entire world his passing.

Ever since it began, the Israeli military occupation has aimed to empty Palestinian life of joy and happiness, hope and safety, roots and belonging, the very essence of life, to force people into diaspora and take over their land. It attempted to make Palestinians absent, invisible, and silenced. Sliman Mansour’s work did exactly the opposite: Where the occupation erased, he painted and worked to replenish the Palestinian spirit with what it needed: joy, hope, and a vision of wholeness.

Where the occupation erased, Sliman painted and worked to replenish the Palestinian spirit with what it needed: joy, hope, and a vision of wholeness.

I knew the work of Sliman Mansour since I was a child in Ramallah. His name, Sliman, like my father’s name, became part of my life’s vocabulary in many ways. I was at a United Nations school for refugee children when the army killed student Lena Nabulsi, who was walking in a demonstration. She was only fifteen years old. The army prevented journalists from photographing her death. Sliman painted what he imagined would be Lena that day.

Subsequently, not even one wall surrounding a school in Ramallah, or a shopping center, or a gate to an orchard, did not have the poster of Sliman’s painting: a girl on the grass, dead and alive in the mysterious ways the Mona Lisa smiles at you from every direction, Lena was being born in our memory on the day she died. Before that day, hardly anyone outside of Nablus knew her. 

In the painting, Lena was wearing the same school dress we all wore daily, which was green and white. The image of her dark hair and her red blood made for all elements of the Palestinian flag. That was haunting. 

Like many of Sliman’s paintings throughout his journey, the painting of Lena was confiscated and banned by the army. Sliman himself was imprisoned several times on different occasions. A gallery featuring his work was burned down just before the opening. Army officers suggested to him and other Palestinian artists that they could paint “occupation-acceptable” images, such as beautiful women and flowers. Wasn’t Lena a beautiful young woman that he painted on her last day on earth? 

Mansour responded by painting beautiful Palestinian women tilling the land, raising children, harvesting orchards, raising their heads to the sun, saying no with elegant postures that would not bend to injustice, guarding cultural memory, and he painted flowers that represented the beauty of freedom and the land.

A Christian Palestinian, Mansour and his paintings were baptized multiple times. His most famous painting, Jamal Al Mahamel (The Camel of Burdens), was burned in the country of Libya. He painted it three times, nothing short of artistic resurrections. But when his works were destroyed, he redid them with brighter colors and a renewed fountain of freedom.

When his works were destroyed, Sliman redid them with brighter colors and a renewed fountain of freedom.

The art of painting relies on line and color. The line traced by Sliman’s brush was turned into an umbilical cord connecting Palestine to all Palestinians everywhere to be born in togetherness each time we see his paintings. He used shape—the shape of our dreams; texture—the texture of life we know and love; value—the value that we were deprived of in the world; and composition—the composition that included Palestinians in humanity. 

As painting invites perspectives, the influence of Sliman’s vision and art on Palestinians could fill a mural surrounding all of Palestine.

Novelist Said Abu Gaza says that Sliman Mansour’s work simply gives him strength. It also pours resilience into the days of the children of Gaza. They see these images in the creases of refugee-camp life like wellsprings of beauty. The children smell the earth from the paintings on the walls and see the features of their mothers that hide under the pain. Mansour’s paintings make the faces of the mothers huge, radiant, magnificent, like full moons. In the end, says Abu Gaza, “Mansour gives us a dictionary of the vocabulary of our Palestinian life. Each image awaits a storyteller to listen to it.”

International photographer, author, and founder of the Palestine Prize for Art, Yousef Khanfar, spoke about Mansour with animation when he chose him as the first recipient of the prize in 2021. Khanfar said that “Sliman Mansour did more than paint Palestine. He carried Palestine’s earth, memory, dignity, and longing onto the canvas. Through his art, he gave generations of Palestinians a way to see themselves. The Palestine he painted will live forever.”

Mansour won multiple prizes for his unmatched brilliance, including prizes from Rome, Moscow, Sharjah, Cairo, and many of the world’s other capitals of art. Few prizes carried the name of Palestine. Palestinians rarely receive a prize with the name of Palestine on it. Khanfar celebrated how this prize, especially, was profoundly moving to Mansour. 

Palestinian author Taghreed Najjar reflected on the indelible images Mansour offered Palestinians. “He painted fields of olive trees, and strong Palestinian men and women in their traditional clothing. As a Christian artist, he painted Jesus Christ as a Palestinian from Nazareth, rather than as a European figure.” She noted how his creative reservoir was always overflowing:

During the First Intifada, intending to boycott Israeli products, he, along with other Palestinian artists, turned to using locally made paints derived from Palestinian plants, straw, henna, stones, and mud. When the Palestinian flag was banned by Israel, Palestinian artists began using the colors of the flag—red, green, white, and black—in their paintings as a way of symbolizing it. The watermelon as a Palestinian symbol was born.

Kamilya Jubran, a Palestinian singer and oud player living in Paris, sees Mansour as the top leader of a fine arts movement who influenced all his contemporaries in all genres of art, not only in paintings, including her own songs. “He represented Palestine as it should be, not only as it was, or is now.” 

Mansour painted from the perspective of children, women, old people, drivers, farmers, and in a huge number of moods. His brush had thousands of eyes that cared and recorded and conversed with the canvas so he might reach past barriers, and he did. 

Mousa Ibrahim, a Palestinian painter and artist, says that Sliman Mansour brought light to the world. “Artists are like suns and stars, and without them the world is dark. We don’t want to walk our lives in darkness and without a compass. Beauty and truth are light, and art is how we are enlightened.” Ibrahim says that when he was a student at Tel Aviv University, he saw Mansour’s paintings and “woke up to the political reality he was living and the beauty of seeking justice and freedom, a beauty that never fades for humanity.”

As an author, I could not be more thankful that I met Sliman Mansour in his studio in Ramallah in 2019. Speaking with him was part of the journey of writing my most recent children’s book in Arabic, The Hidden Gate of Jerusalem. The book was published in 2025 by Al Salwa Publishers, winning two major literary prizes for offering children of the world a free and magical journey to Jerusalem. The children go through a hidden gate that is Sliman Mansour’s iconic painting Jamal Al Mahamel (Camel of Burdens). Mansour loved the book and how the painting of burdens unleashed a gate of freedom for generations of young readers. The name Jamal Al Mahamel was not given to the painting by Mansour but was suggested by renowned Palestinian author Emile Habibi and adopted by Mansour. (Editorial note: The painting was featured in the “Palestine Voices” issue of WLT in 2021.)

When I was a child, I loved this painting. I wanted to take the old man to feed him and give him good clothes and help him to rest. As a teenager I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and felt that this old man in Mansour’s painting was our own Palestinian “Old Man and the Sea.” He was battling a sea of injustice. So, it was necessary that he fulfill his dream. I finally could help him do so in The Hidden Gate of Jerusalem. In the book, the children carry parts of the city, and the burden becomes lighter on him. He finally smiles!

A million voices can reflect on the contribution of an artist as an artist, but that does not show the person behind the brush and canvas. Only those who know him intimately can tell of that truth. Bassel Mansour, son of Sliman Mansour, reflected on the gentle and loving father Sliman was. As a child, he carried Bassel and pressed his leg and told him that he loved him. 

In the face of hardships, Sliman dipped a brush and painted the world with light that burns with the love of freedom and endless hope.

When asked about his favorite painting in the entire body of work of his father, he answered without hesitation: When the Village Awakens. This village has the soul of Birzeit, the well of olive oil where the heart of Sliman Mansour, in the face of hardships, dipped a brush and painted the world with light that burns with the love of freedom and endless hope. 

Before his death, Mansour said that he was born one year before the Nakba, and he had a feeling that he would die one year before the liberation of Palestine. We have one year to find out. But whatever happens next year, after more than half a century of painting a river of beauty that runs in the soul of Palestinians, Mansour has planted magnificent seeds of Palestinian liberation in the terrain of an entire people’s heart, soul, imagination, and creativity. 

Anyone familiar with Sliman Mansour as an artist and a person cannot say “goodbye” to him. One can only wave as though he’s going home. Syrian poet Nouri Al Jarrah put it succinctly: He went to reside inside the Palestine he painted. And what a beautiful Palestine he has given the world! Dear Sliman Mansour, beloved painter of Palestine, we see you everywhere in Palestine.

Columbia, Missouri