Artist’s Statement
Vulnerability and sadness, weakness and silence—states often dismissed or hidden—possess a remarkable capacity to coax beauty from places where desolation once bloomed.
Raised in a conservative Middle Eastern culture, I learned early to mask grief, tenderness, and confusion behind stoicism. My work is a rebellion against that inheritance. It is where the quiet, wounded parts of myself are allowed to speak. Each painting confronts emotional terrain I was taught to avoid.
For many years, I lived the life expected of me while longing to live another. Vulnerability felt dangerous; silence felt necessary. Painting became a way to enter what had been suppressed rather than continue to contain it.
I turned to artistic expression because it allowed me to engage creativity as a means of survival and transformation. The text and figures in my work—distorted, raw, sometimes grotesque—are not representations of emotion but manifestations of it. They are intentionally unresolved, because healing is not orderly.
These works are not only personal but ancestral. The silence did not begin with me. Emotional repression, inherited shame, and the fear of softness are generational. My practice reaches toward that lineage, toward remembering, reckoning, and release.
I came to my art practice later in life, following a career as an attorney. While studying law, I became immersed in Persian and Arabic poetry, comparative religion, psychology, and astrology, fields that continue to inform my work.
Some of my paintings span sixteen by eight feet. I begin with drawings before building surfaces through layered fields of color and inscribed text drawn from poetry and personal reflection. These text-like compositions echo illuminated manuscripts and the allover paintings of the New York School. Potent content is written and then buried beneath layers of paint. This act of concealment mirrors the psychological negotiation of belonging. Scraping, layering, and rewriting become both meditation and resistance. Decorative beauty operates as a foil to the deeper psychic intensity beneath.
Autobiography and patriarchy also shape my smaller works. Dogs become protagonists in narratives about power, independence, and freedom, while intimate portraits function as encounters with subconscious images I summon, face, and release.
Working primarily in oil and pastel, my work draws viewers through material richness and surface, and then invites reflection on identity, memory, desire, and the quiet persistence of becoming.
