"Soraya Farha is an artist who understands the aesthetic and emotional power of color. The artist’s simplified forms heighten the impact of her chromatic compositions, distilling emotion and building a narrative using color. Her titles are signposts to meaning. Walking As You Did In Your Rags of Love is composed of swathes of passionate deep red and blushes of light pink. Forest Bath captures the deep greens and blues of a forest canopy divided by a bold channel of ultramarine. Farha’s paintings capture the essence of a feeling or the sense of a place that exists beyond language. Her work celebrates a simplicity of form, a passion for color and the texture and materiality of paint, pastel and oil stick. She explains, “My inspiration is drawn from poetry, song lyrics, and the natural world, from urban gardens, to twilight skies by the ocean and Canada’s vast wilderness with its forests and lakes.”

-Bisa Bennett, Director/Curator in Chief, Artio Gallery