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Acrylic paint and mixed media on canvas
Twelve works, 40 × 30 inches each
What appears universal is never universally felt.
Across twelve works, six elemental words gather around luminous circles held within opposing fields of light and darkness. Free becomes liberation or abandonment. Love offers sanctuary or tightens into possession. Joy radiates or becomes a disguise. Dream reveals a future worth pursuing or becomes an impossible vision that leads us astray until aspiration turns into a nightmare. Brave embodies courage or the demand to suffer without being seen. Hope becomes the strength to continue or the ache of waiting beyond reason.
Through saturated colour, sculptural texture and insistent repetition, Perception gives these emotional contradictions physical form. Each word remains familiar, yet its meaning is no longer fixed.
The word and colour enter through the eye; it is within the heart that they become light or darkness.
Artist Bio:
Mais Al-Sheikhly is an Iraqi Canadian contemporary artist born in Baghdad and based in Toronto. Her abstract practice gives form to emotions that are deeply felt yet often difficult to express. Shaped by migration and a life between cultures, she found in art a space for freedom, reflection and belonging.
Working with saturated colour, sculptural texture and layered form, she explores the tension between beauty and unease, justice and betrayal, vulnerability and strength. Her work has been exhibited internationally.
Her paintings do not illustrate emotion. They reveal the moment it can no longer be concealed.
ARTIST’S REFLECTION: “Not every truth asks to be spoken. Some wait for colour to carry them into the light.”