Noura Masri | Dubai United Arab Emirates
My paintings are about the enjoyment of playing with images, imagining, creating fantasy, and of course most importantly the enjoyment in creating harmony with colors, expressions and how it evolves to become a personal narrative. To me, the end result doesn’t matter: It’s the enjoyment of creating/painting/writing, etc…
People usually ask me “what inspires me”, and I say: “everything” and “nothing”. I truly believe that you can create your own inspiration and that nothing is impossible. Inspiration is not something that you should wait for to happen. Inspiration comes from within and from anywhere and everything around you. To me, painting is not all about getting the figures or the shapes perfect, yet it is more about the process that you mentally go through when you paint.
Even though my work is described as “Expressionist” or sometimes “Free Figurative”, I personally do not prefer to label my work, however, I am in particular inspired by “Magical Realist” art and writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Louis Borges and Pablo Neruda. I am also inspired by painters such as Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Claude Monet, Van Gogh, Rene Magritte, Dali, Picasso and the sculptor Lorenzo Quinn. Mainly, most of my paintings are derived from my imagination.
Having the chance to teach kids – and learn from them – I am in particular inspired by their spontaneity, innocence, creativity and imagination.
For the major part, my work is experimental and more of a journey towards the soul.
My paintings are the result of my own investigate journey – mental journey – where the painting starts leading me instead of me leading it; until it starts speaking to me. For this reason, I choose to allow the viewer to perhaps share my imaginations, explorations, experimentation, and experiences and enter my world… in order to create their own investigate journey and therefore have a unique and individual relationship with each painting.
