"Los Angeles 2025" Painting

As an Ethiopian-born French designer, with a Greek father and an Egyptian mother, I spent my youth living across the continent of Africa. Following few years working in India, I shifted few years ago to New York where I am currently based. For over 30 years, I have worked at the highest level of fashion and interior design in Europe and the USA with various top international brands such as Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Azzedine Alaia and Andree Putman interiors among others. My professional and personal years in the fashion and design world in diverse cultural and geographical realms has exposed me, and fostered the decision to undertake a path of artistic creation. Since the age of seventeen, following a visit to Saint Paul de Vence (Fondation Maeght, France), the inspirational site for artists across generations, I found kindred voices in the work of the Cubists and Impressionist masters, which led to my embrace of Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism. To paint embodies a creative mind, its process often resembles that of a story teller. As such, using my “past”, traveling and living abroad, naturally manifests into composing art, drawings and paintings in particular. Based on abstract renditions of natural stimuli, light curving lines and organic forms are combined with flat fields of color, ranging from cobalt blue to bright turquoise, similarly yellow to vibrant red and gold, or a monochromatic palette. In terms of materials, the natural realm dominates through my usage of natural pigments and papers. In addition, I have been exploring inks, oil paint, colored markers, acrylics, tempera, and cement powder on variations of Khadi or rice paper. This mixture of color and form, combined with small textural elements on the surface plane, produces a strong sensation of movement, suggesting in some instances a dance in a process of metamorphosis, or/and in others, an intersection of elements (fire, earth, air, and water). Inherent in this work, there are no frontiers, no boundaries, no race, no gender, nor demarcations of time. Only a need for expression, ever evolving.