I have loved art since I was a kid. I remember always being fascinated with pastels, color and faces. In high school, I took private lessons weekly and religiously with an elderly English lady above a bakery in New England’s Williamstown, MA. I recall the smell of fresh sourdough and oatmeal raisin cookies wafting through the studio while I studied anatomy, learned from the masters and experimented with water color. My main tool then was a charcoal pencil that I painstakingly sharpened with a razor, covering my fingers and nostrils with black dust. It was a labor of love.
Once I arrived to college, I took every art class I could while studying art history. My notebooks during lectures turned into sketchbooks. I was determined to be a fine artist with discipline. At Georgetown University, I focused on portraiture and figuration and frequented the National Art Gallery on a weekly basis for seminars and more sketching. While traveling, I always carried a fountain pen and a small sketchbook and spent hours drawing from life, at the Spanish Steps, in museums, cafes and in front of Winged Victory, more sculptures and many fountains.
By the time my managerial career in advertising in New York City started, art became my essential hobby. I prepared paper the way old masters did, and continued copying from the likes of Michaelangelo, Rembrandt and Ingres. An underground studio in Soho greeted me on weekends and helped me lose myself in uninstructed classes with live models. I also enrolled in the famous Art Students League to continue learning from life while focusing on anatomy.
After moving to Los Angeles, I started exploring a new direction in art and longed to find my own artistic voice. I enrolled at UCLA; it was from exercises such as using the opposite hand and not looking at the paper that I found my niche, stepping away from realism and tradition and tapping into the world of expressionism and abstraction. To explore new possibilities with color, I took a color theory class at Brentwood Art Center (BAC) and that was the opening of my Pandora’s box; I unleashed so much color in me and poured it so bravely on canvas that I felt for the first time uninhibited by past doubts and trepidation. I started learning abstract painting from BAC teacher Gary Paller, inspired first by artists such as Guiseppe Capogrossi and Richard Diebenkorn. I found it to be extremely difficult. I soon re-discovered myself in painting rich, colorful portraits that float between the real and the abstract, the expressionistic and the fauvist, all the while capturing a genuine human emotion.
I paint people I discover every day, whether in person, through books, activities or concerts. I choose portraits of those who inspire and teach me. My subject can be my baby niece, an activist, a violin virtuoso, a Supreme Court judge or a First Lady. Somehow, each of them has touched me in some way and shaped the person I am today.
On a personal note, I am happily married to Rabih Aridi and together we have two daughters, Nour and Lulu. Prior to living in LA, I worked as an Advertising executive for 12 years in NYC, mostly for Ogilvy Worldwide managing global accounts such as IBM. In addition to art, I enjoy playing tennis, classical music, travel, and good food.
