Soraya Chemaly is a talented artist with great insight to different eclectic multi-layering of textures, colors and objects. She brings many new and textured mediums to mix with her great sense of light, spacing and color. These have allowed her to obtain the unique look on her artwork. Just from a young age, she knew that she would become an artist. She spent most of her free time occupied by doing artwork. She began her career painting only in watercolors, but later decided to take up oil painting. Soraya has been consumed with making paintings that evoke viewer’s emotions and seduced by the beauty of color. By mixing and applying colors directly to the canvas she gets paintings that are deep in texture, color, and vibrancy. Soraya enjoys painting simple but large images that focus the viewer's attention on unconventionally harmonious, but contrasted colors.
Her paintings have been heavily influenced by her childhood in the Bahamas, where she was regularly exposed to Caribbean and Haitian art. The Haitian art in particular is infused with plants and flowers that take on a life of their own in her paintings and often representing, in the primitive style, gestures, people, symbols and moods. Her works consists mainly of large-scale flowers painted in contemporary, vivid, contrasting colors. They have been published as greeting cards, as fine art prints, and as posters. Soraya’s work can be found in several institutions and in thousands of private and corporate collections all over the world. She moved permanently to the US after completing her studies and has been residing in Washington, DC.
