Randa Fawzi
"Scottish Landscapes"

Nocturne (Oldmeldrum) Encountering Randa Fawzi's paintings sets you off on a highly individual visual journey. With their strong abstracted geometric shapes, intense non-naturalistic colour and stylised forms, Fawzi's paintings act like discrete visual poems. Condensed, intense they invoke the immensity of sea and sky,stark mountain peaks by night or golden seaside days. At the same time the thick layers of accumulated paint make you feel the grit of the sand, the hardness of rock or the foam of the waves as if they were under your hand. Life in 1989 The work on view - the result of a 10 year stay in Scotland - reflects Fawzi's passionate response to the elemental drama of the Scottish landscape. Inevitably it also reflects herself. Most particularly the international nature of her own upbringing. Born in New York she was educated in England and Switzerland and now divides her time between UK and Germany. In search of her cultural roots she chose to study art in Cairo before completing her training with post-graduate course at Goldsmiths. A study of her work suggests she has made borrowings from modernism and expressionism then melded them with her Egyptian heritage to produce a vision that is completely her own. Crudenbay If the paintings stem from an international viewpoint they are also fuelled by the artist's philosophy of life. Most notably, the recurring triangle which acts as a building block to so many of her compositions, symbolises her belief that all aspects of life are inter-connected. What we actually see in a particular place, the underlaying structure we know to be there, how we feel and on a wider front how we interact with Nature.Sea, Cave and Rockface This sense of wholeness is most harmoniously expressed in Breakfast in Oldmeldrum where the external landscape as well as the breakfast dishes are all contained in the same picture space. With Life in 1989 (Bennachie) the emotional pitch is raised as Fawzi' s response to Nature finds expression in hot jewelled colour and in the star-spangled shapes that spin off the mountain face. Here and in the gilded counterpoint of Cruden Bay the sense of exultation is palpable. The idea of connection can also account for the disconcerting ambience that emanates from some of the work. A View in the Cairngorms In A View in the Cairngorms the mysterious silence is menacingly heightened by the black wands of the trees with their prickly pear-shaped heads. Similarly in Sea, Cave and Rockface the wings of red at the top of the picture seem to threaten the harmonies of earth and sky. An illusion perhaps to Man's intervention in Nature suggesting a too brightly burning sun or an impending cloud of toxic rain. Snow by the Road of Turriff By contrast, Snow by the Road of Turriff casts Nature in a symbolic role. With the gilded trees and birds and vibrating furrows of snow the radiant earth holds out life-enhancing hope.

Jane Norrie