A school of book art developed among the painters by the early 2000s, in part with the encouragement of pioneering artist Dia Azzawi, who supported their efforts despite living abroad.[10] Azzawi’s own experiments with the art form predate those of the Eighties Generation by several decades and were part of a larger regional movement, stretching from the Maghreb to the Gulf states, that engaged the Arab world’s rich literary history. The London-based artist was initially drawn to art notebooks in the 1970s. Exploring the conceptual potential of a multipage format, Azzawi began to view its components as possessing neither beginning nor end—a transcendence of the representational limitations of painting.[11]