My paintings are from my dreams. My dreams show the feeling of battles, with cancer, war, death, and pain of loss. Loss of what we know.
You decide who will appear in Artforum Magazine, take home $25,000, and display their work at The Art of Elysium's Salon!
Paintings, photography
Where do you find inspiration?I watched my father, uncle, and two aunts die. Slowly. I was there when each one took their last breath. I saw the light leave their eyes. I grew up in war. I went back to work in war zones as an adult. Loss is constantly my reality; it is the most concrete thing I know. All the less I have felt comes to me in my dreams. Dreams that wake me with images. I paint them. Not to make them beautiful but to give them life again. My paintings represent the presence of those who left the physical world.
What would you do with $25,000?I would create a space where refugees and children who have watched someone die can pick up a brush and not have to explain themselves. I know what it is to feel loss, to have an external force shape one's life. I know what it is to carry that alone. Art has helped me let myself survive and bring to life those who are gone. I have worked with refugees who lost everything: a parent, a sense of safety. Not therapy. Not talk. Nothing can replace what is gone. But art can be the strongest outlet.
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