Having
spent over a decade living in the Caribbean, the
lights and colors
of the tropics, its vegetation and people are imprinted
on my work. Images of contrasting colors fill the entire format in paintings
with themes such as women's portraits, fauna, flora, and thoughts of harmony. The Green
Woman, based on the legend of the Green Man, has also been a recurring
motif in my work.
My travels and my fascination with
the divergent cultures in the world are major influences. I value the natural environment in women's lives: women in close relationship
with the world. I love depicting everyday moments,
snapshots of mankind inadvertently involved in natural processes; flashes
of nature that will bring us positive changes.
I utilize the millenary Javanese Batik
technique, a dye-resisting process
that I personalized by working with
beeswax, dyes, colored pencils, watercolors
and acrylics on cotton
paper. I keep a mental register of color tone and
luminosity, where transparent
colors interplay with each other to produce
a surprising effect, once the
wax is removed.
The goal of my work is to represent
a new reality, one which not only hints
at where we have been, but which
also invites us to seek out a new direction. Because, after all, there
is always a ray of hope – somewhere.
Doris
Naffah |