"2020, I can't breathe" Painting

I have been working as photojournalist and writer for the past 20 years. I have covered conflict areas, refugee camps, poverty and famine. I have developed Participatory Photography workshops to teach the people of these communities a skill and a tool to tell their stories of struggle, dignity and hope. I wrote a book, Voices of the Jungle, while I was living in a refugee camp covering the movement of Syrian refugees to England and I was invited to talk at the United Nations General Assembly to talk about my work. I love my what I do. I love meeting new people all the time and being able to tell their stories, keeping truthful to what these people go through every day. It's a hard job and sometimes it is inevitable to bring home some bad things with you; things that you hear and see and that get tangled in your memories so tight that they become part of who you are. Painting has helped me to overcome these skeletons, it has helped me to trap them in plain canvases and fill them in with colours. In my paintings I portrait the complexity of life with all the colours it has to offer. The darkness and the clarity, the power, the happiness, the nostalgia, the sadness and especially the love. All my characters are filled with bright and dark strokes that represent who they are, they are beautiful in their on way, complex, passionate and free.