Divine Illumination II Painting

Merna Liddawi is an award-winning British-Jordanian artist. She describes her art as a spiritual journey to discover hidden beauty and harmony in the universe. Drawing on the sacred art of iconography and an academic background in maths and science, she is fascinated by repetitive pattern and geometry. These she sees as uniting everything around us, from atom to cosmos. Her art explores the mysteries beyond and within our physical world, a search for the divine at the heart of creation. Liddawi’s creative process is meditative in itself. She revives medieval methods handed down from Byzantine artists and uses genuine gold leaf of various colours. The imagery is worked in hand made tempera of mineral and earth pigments mixed with egg yolk laid in luminous glazes on gessoed panels and then gilded with gold leaf. Her images are simple yet profound. After completing a Physics degree in Cairo, Liddawi taught maths in the UK for many years. Since she gained her MFA (Master’s in Fine Art) with distinction from Sussex University, her work has been exhibited internationally, in London and across Europe. She was awarded the prestigious ‘Lorenzo il Magnifico’ painting award at the XI Florence Biennale 2017. Her paintings are in private collections in the Middle East, Europe, South Africa and the US.