Andalucia

This is an oil painting titled Andalucia. It's my first painting in oil, painted just a few weeks after my Chopin in Acrylic. Although it was very unusual experience using oil, especially for someone who has only ever played with poster paints and acrylic at school. I must admit I really enjoyed the slow drying process, aside from the fact every time I tried to lift it, and no matter how carefully I did so, my fingers would smudge a bit of the sky or some other part of the painting. I have used medium thick brush strokes to give it a feel of It took around 2 months for this to dry completely, and its only now that I realised that it was because I used the paint straight from the tube and didn't thin it out. I don't mind anyway I prefer the thick texture, it adds drama when it catches the light, I prefer it this way. I hope you concur.

Frédéric Chopin

Here, I did a painting for my dear friend, who is studying Music at Queen's University in Canada. He admires Frédéric Chopin among many other composers, and so as a present for getting a place at such a prestigious university I decided to do a painting of Chopin (because i knew he would like it so much). You can see the steps that I've taken, from the inital sketch (which didn't look like him at all) to the final stage. It's painted in acrylic and on a spare mdf board I found lurking behind my bed. The aim was to emulate his pain and frail health through his eyes expressions, and through the choice of colours. Composers have such a turbulent life, and his was of no exception.

Cross and Crescent

So a few summers ago during the Israeli massacre of Lebanon I became interested in Lebanon and having done research I realised how all religions lived so peacefully together, especially Christians and Muslims, and that really inspired me. Being a Muslim (Sufi) myself, I loved how the two religions were so close and in love. It really goes well with my Sufi thinking, and so therefore, I wanted to design something as interesting as the unity pendant above, this is still an ongoing project.









So my final design so far

Representing the Family

So here's a project from last year, based on representation of information. We joined into a group of 4, and decided to look at how we could represent our level of love for each main member of our family.

It took many days of sketches to work out how to represent certain people. We had to bear in mind that representing something in one way could mean something else in another person's culture.


This is the final key we created, a total of 10 characters.



An extra print out to use as a guide to cut out a prototype on thin acrylic.






This is the final version. It's created as a fan, and each group member is represented using a different colour. We chose to represent our love and closeness to each member by varying the length, i.e the longer it is the closer we are to them. Each person gets 20 characters, one for the father's side and one for the mother's.






The other people in my group included: Hourieh, Sachiko, and Zara.