Embedded in many of my layered artworks are images of my own face, but don’t call my pieces “self-portraits.” “They are self-portraits and they are not,” I describe the feminine faces I create as beautiful, powerful, and successful. The women never look fearful or defeated. Despite any potential struggles with discrimination, poverty, loss, or stress under occupation, they are still empowered. They look ready and able to carry the burdens for themselves and their families. This is the feminine psyche at its most magnificent.
For me, the female face is a springboard for revealing deeper and more spiritual connections. I create women on canvas who are a hybrid of their experiences and identities, each one a strong, unafraid, and even hopeful individual. I perceive my hybrid self as empowered and positive despite my feelings of exile and memories of the loss of my childhood homeplace. “I call myself a hybrid being both here (in America) and there (in Palestine)”. “The women I create are extremely brave. They reveal my deep personal identification with my Palestinian history and culture.” I was just 18 years old when I immigrated to the United States from my hometown of Ramallah, in Palestine’s West Bank. I attended art school at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and am now a resident in Fairfax, Virginia.
I have exhibited all over the U.S. and abroad, as a modern American woman, a wife, and mother to three daughters. But the memories of my homeland, the knowledge of the anguish many have to bear, especially women, are layered into my paintings. I blend Arabic words and symbolic calligraphic forms with beautiful, sometimes tranquil, images of faces and people. Often the subjects are clad in traditional Middle Eastern dress. I layer paints, pastels inks, and sometimes digital images, onto my canvases, evoking the look of chipped wallpaper or faded graffiti aging on weathered surfaces. My layering feels like more than just paint; they are symbolic of the psychological layers we all carry of our own experiences, cultures, and traditions. Exploring psychology has been a longtime obsession of mine, and it shows.
After drifting from art to raise a family, I returned to school to study psychology. I earned an advanced degree in the Psychology of Art at George Mason University. After maturing and gaining insight into my own psychology, I began a daily practice in the studio again. That was 15 years ago, and I have never stopped since.
“It’s a beautiful addiction, and it gives me life, to just get lost in the studio”. “Time goes by, and I look up and think, ‘How did that image happen in front of me? That was not a plan.’ I like the surprise and the spontaneousness.”
