I was born in Egypt, and I live and paint in California. People ask me if those are two separate lives. For me, they are one life, and one palette. Egypt gave me my first colors — gold, sand, deep blue, and the green of water. California gave me new light to see them by. When you stand in front of my paintings, you are standing in front of both places at once.
Gold is not just a color for me
In Egypt, gold is everywhere in the old art — in the temples, in the icons, in the way late light hits stone and turns it warm. I grew up with that glow before I ever picked up a brush. Gold, for me, is memory. It is dignity. It is the sun that does not ask permission.
That is why gold keeps returning in my work. In Golden Face, 24 by 30 inches, the face is not a portrait of one person. It is light itself, built up in oil so the surface catches your room the way old stone catches the afternoon. And in Desert Sun, from 2010, the warm layers are my attempt to hold desert heat on canvas — heat you feel at noon and remember years later.
Blue, the other half of my life
If gold is the sun, blue is the water. Egypt has the Nile, and blue there is life — the river that made farming, travel, and cities possible in the middle of desert. That is why I am drawn to deep, layered blues and cannot leave them flat. A flat blue is just a color. A layered blue is depth you can fall into.
In Blue Dream, the blues are built glaze over glaze so the painting feels like water or a dream you are still inside. California strengthened that side of me. The Pacific is a different blue from the Nile — cooler, wider, more open — and living near it taught my blues to breathe. My blue today is both: the old river I carry, and the new ocean I live beside.
Symbols that stayed with me
I do not paint ancient symbols to be decorative. I paint them because they stayed with me when almost everything else changed — country, language, work, home.
The clearest example is my Feet series, one project in three paintings. Foot in Sandal comes from a Pharaonic inscription of King Kagemni, 4,366 years old, from Saqqara. Mosaic Foot comes from a sketch by Michelangelo. Golden Foot is my own foot, here, in 2026. Three eras, walking in one direction: growth, confidence, and moving to a better stage.
You will also see the ankh in The Way to the Heaven — the old Egyptian symbol of life, painted in blue, rising. I am not copying history. I am carrying it forward, in the language I speak now: abstract color.
My Three Fishes, 48 by 48 inches in oil on wood, belongs to this story too. Fish are life in the water, movement, abundance — an image people understood thousands of years ago and still understand today without a word of explanation. The golden fish are old and new at once, and that is exactly how I feel about my own life.
Two lights, one palette
Desert light is honest. It shows every edge. California light, especially in Riverside where I paint, has that same honesty — bright mornings, long warm evenings, hills that go gold at day's end. Sometimes I look out my window here and, for a second, the light takes me back across the world. That second is often where a painting starts.
So if my colors feel warm and cool at once — gold against deep blue, heat against water — now you know why. That contrast is not a technique from a book. It is the geography of my life.
A living artist, between two homes
I am a living artist, painting now, for people living now. My paintings carry Egypt in their symbols and golds, and California in their openness and light. When one hangs in your home, it brings you a piece of a life still being lived — mine, meeting yours, on your wall. That is the best thing art can do: it travels farther than the artist ever will, and keeps telling the story in new light, every day.
Looking for the right piece for your wall? Write to me at [email protected] — tell me about your room and I will help you find the painting that belongs there, and tell you the story behind it.