africanah.org

biography

I was born in Ethiopia. It all started with my participation in the Shankar Children’s Competition in 1986. I finished high school and went on to the University of Asmara, Eritrea, taking a break of 12 years before I took a significant step towards art again. I graduated from the Asmara School of Arts in 2000 after taking courses in painting, sculpture and print making.

thoughts

My work moves back and forth in search of the purest forms of existence. I paint man/woman and its surroundings….I like to understand man from the existence part of being; man in relation to its environment and surroundings.

Architecture and fabric patterns relate so much to nature’s own patterns and man’s understanding of its environment. I also find they are the closest to human beings and also connect man to nature…. Simply – nature is well imitated in architecture and fabric.

Using these mediums, I try to connect to the past and understand our ancestors yet in searching our purest forms of existence now. Our element, man’s element….

Another strong element of man is water… My feeling and connection with the ocean or any body of water gave me another insight. The sea is vast and constantly in motion; moving back and forth…It’s also a force in our cycles of life. It helps me understand life, movement, harmony, balance….For example – if we see our physical being, our body, the existence as vertical objects that rises out of earth, then I would like to see the ocean/sea as our horizontal point of reference; man’s best companion, balancing our being in the universe…(horizontal vs. vertical).

In my work color has become an experience. To me: “it’s a moment in time and texture once I have passed by or lived in. “    Once I was traveling the Sahara desert, it was until I came back home and realized my color palette has changed…: ”I was so confident in using the color yellow for the first time. Then I realized the color yellow came to me as a moment once lived in Sahara; I had a yellow experience…..” Color talks to me in three dimensional forms…

On my canvas I create a feeling or a sense of a meeting place, an interaction or contact of the ages, ancestors, the universal elements that evolve with us, within us, and us as existing beings.