'RiH la' (Be Gone) Painting

I am a British artist who has spent most of the last twelve years living in Egypt. I am qualified teacher of Art and this work has supported my art practice and love of travel. Inspiration: I feel a strong need to engage with my subconscious in a visual and expressive way as part of an ongoing personal journey. I am inspired by surfaces that shows the effect of time passing, and the experience of being in unfamiliar places. I am very much interested in the nature of the passage of time and how this affects us on different levels as human beings. I am motivated by a sense of duty to comment as an artist about the experience of being a person alive in this world at this time. Technique: I collect ephemera. I take photographs and keep journals. I make work in a variety of mixed media. In recent years my principal artistic output has been made using acrylic paint on canvas. I work on the canvas in an upright position. I use various techniques, in particular a palette knife, to convey the idea that the paint is disintegrating over time. My brushwork has been influenced by arabic calligraphy. I have a passion for colour and its emotional quality and I work intuitively with it to attain a balance within my compositions. About the exhibition 'A State of Mind: Paintings from Egypt 2009 to 2013 These paintings are about our human capacity to accept time. They were conceived in the cauldron that was Egypt leading up to and following the Revolution of 2011. When I arrived back in Egypt in 2008, after being away for two years, I began sketching head shapes and using them as motifs in my paintings to explore the condition of being in an emotional state of 'protest'. This had been stimulated by an idea I had developed during my previous stay in Egypt , which was that the 'soul' of Egypt was somehow submerged in the surface of an old wall, caught in time and in a state of limbo, slowly fading away in a reverie of nostalgia. It was not until I saw the massed faces of the protestors in the media in January 2011 that I saw that there was a very strong visual connection between these images and what was actually happening in the world outside; it seemed that life was suddenly imitating art. So many anonymous faces had become a pure collective expression of human will, demanding to be recognized, to be validated. This was the soul of Egypt emerging from its prison in time to say "now we are here and we will be heard".