The summer I turned 14

The summer I turned 14

I was fourteen the summer I met myself, and then the war started. This is that story, and what it has to do with why I paint. It's about a minute.

 

I grew up in America being told who I am. The people who do the bombing tend to be the ones who get to write the stories about the people underneath them, and my story has been told for me more than once.

So I paint. The layers, the plaster, the letterforms, all of it comes out of holding more than one place at a time and refusing to let someone else summarize it.

You can see the current work here.

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ABOUT ME

I'm a Lebanese-American abstract artist based in Southern California. I work in plaster, acrylic, oil, and pigment, building each piece in layers so the surface carries real texture and invites a closer look. The work keeps returning to the same questions, identity, memory, and the meaning we hold in the things around us.

I make work meant to slow you down, a moment of pause and a quiet kind of attention that most days don't leave room for. My pieces are in the homes of collectors across the country, each one bringing a little calm to the space it lives in.