TRIPOLI // Karim Namssi, an unemployed 25-year-old in Libya's capital, understands the explosion of long-suppressed anger found in the graffiti that has been appearing on walls all over Libya since Muammar Qaddafi's fall.
Colonel Qaddafi depicted as a giant rat, with wild hair, sunglasses and long tail, is one favourite theme, along Tripoli's seaside corniche and on the walls of shops and homes. Col Qaddafi getting blown up is another commonly, and lovingly, rendered scene: On a bomb. On a rocket. On top of an erupting volcano.
But Mr Namssi wants Libyans to move beyond that. "We want to be much better than those guys" - Colonel Qaddafi's guys, he said.
To that end, Mr Namssi, despite being no artist himself, has organised some of the first post-Qaddafi appearances of something few Libyans saw in the three generations of Colonel Qaddafi's rule - a public art show, featuring the work of ordinary Libyans, on any theme of their choosing - just not the former Libyan leader.
Art and artists "have been ignored" in Libya. "No one ever cared about them," says Farah Jamal Bin Yezza, an 18-year-old who was completing a watercolour of a wounded Libyan rebel fighter, and a separate one of a mermaid, to exhibit at the first of Mr Namssi's weekly shows, which started at the end of September.
Previously, "I only drew in the margins of my notebooks," Mr Yezza said.
More than in almost any of the Arab countries undergoing revolutions, Libya's artists have been stifled by the regime. Loath to allow Libyans to get in the habit of speaking out, Colonel Qaddafi banned even the sale of spray paint, residents of Tripoli say.
Final exams in school art classes consisted of students drawing any composition of their choosing, as long as it was about one of the glories of Colonel Qaddafi's revolution, art teachers said. One of the few art shows Libyans remember hearing about was for Saif Al Islam, Mr Qaddafi's not notably talented son. And that was in London.
"If we wanted to sing, we had to sing about him," Mr Namssi said. "We got used to him being a one-man show."
Mr Namssi's impetus for organising the shows comes not from any personal artistic drive, but from some of the same anger at the old regime being expressed in the burgeoning anti-Qaddafi graffiti.
The son of a widow with limited means, Mr Namssi, a pilot by training, put himself through flight school in Canada to obtain specialised instrument-aided flight instruction that Libyan officials had promised him would land him a pilot's job.
He shovelled snow and washed dishes in Canada to pay his way. But having come back to Libya after graduating at the top of his training class, he found that the first question Libyan officials asked at his job interview was the only one that counted. "Who is your father?"
With no influential family or connections, Mr Namssi didn't get the job.
It is a common complaint among young people in Libya, where unemployment was 20 per cent under Col Qaddafi, and was much higher for young people.
"I am trying to translate my suffering to make change. I don't want them to be ignored like I've been ignored," Mr Namssi said of young Libyans.
Mr Namssi and his friends were able in a matter of days to get permission from city hall for the art shows, planned for each Friday on the edge of Tripoli's old Green Square. The heart of Libya, the square has been named Martyrs' Square since Col Qaddafi was driven from power. It is packed each night with the kind of spontaneous public gatherings that the Libyan leader prohibited.
Under Col Qaddafi, filling out the paperwork for the exhibit would have "taken five years - and then they still would have said 'no'," one colleague of Mr Namssi observed.
Mr Namssi still faced obstacles for his exhibition. He had never seen an art show himself, for one thing. And none of the artists had ever exhibited. Mr Namssi and his friends had to find the city's hidden artists by word of mouth, and convince them that there would really be a show.
"They can't believe it. It is going to be on Martyrs' Square," Mr Namssi said.
Mr Namssi and his associates spent the last days before the first show driving around Tripoli, ordering banners, and dropping in on artists to urge them to turn out for the event.
Worried, he spoke of a backup plan of going to one of Tripoli's few galleries and buying a couple of paintings to exhibit, just so the first Friday show wouldn't be a failure. In the end, though, it was a success.
Nicely placed LED lights illuminated each painting. The young organisers found a red carpet to throw on the pavement. The artists showed up, and so did print and camera reporters to interview them.
The crowds lined up, to see paintings, not of Col Qaddafi, but of babies, Libyan women and old men in traditional garb, flowers, martyrs, and one mermaid.
"Libya has art, civilisation to show the world,'' said one viewer, 38-year-old Hakim Saadi.
Mr Namssi smiled on the sidelines. "Not bad, right?" he asked.
* The Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting contributed funding for this report.