Visual Art

My AP concentration focuses on my struggles and feelings living with Type One Diabetes. I
wanted to explore my disease while providing people with visual representations of life with
diabetes. I set out to create works that non-diabetics can use to understand different aspects of
the disease without experiencing it firsthand. Overall, my pieces represent what it feels like to
have Type One Diabetes.

My focus started with diabetes as a whole, but as the year progressed I began to create abstract
self portraits meant to express how I feel. Image 1 is an abstraction of a beta cell, the cells in the
pancreas meant to produce insulin. I thought I would start with the root of diabetes in this image.
Image 2 is my attempt at making blood sugar “fun.” By placing sugar cubes into a blood vessel, I
create a relatable and comical look at my disease. I progressed to abstract self portraits pertaining
to what I feel I look like in different diabetes related scenarios. For example, painting 5
illustrates how I feel that I look when my blood sugar is low. By abstracting myself and looking
more at my feeling than my physical self, I feel I am better providing people with a viewpoint
they can understand and digest. I painted the varying feelings of high blood sugar onto the
different colors of a ketone strip in image 6. Image 7 explores how I radiate heat when my blood
sugar is high. Image 8 explores the nightmares I have when I sleep with a high blood sugar.
Images 9 and 10 illustrate my interactions with others and their involvement  with my disease.
Other images tackle drug costs and technological aspects of the disease. All of my paintings
provide a new level of insight into diabetes by focusing on emotions that people can understand.

My concentration is insects. Throughout my life, there is one thing that attracts me the most
besides art, and that is insects. Insects are so tiny and prevalent that most people won’t notice
or care to look at them. But from my experience at a young age, insects are the most
fascinating creatures. They not only have captivating colors, but they also exhibit interesting
behaviors. I want to illustrate an enjoyable little story about them to encourage more people to
appreciate their beauty.
Insects have an important role in the ecosystem. I believe that as human, we should respect it
even though some might think negatively of it. To make this theme more approachable, I made
up a fantasy adventure story based on my life experience and combined it with graphic novel, a
fun style that I am more familiar with. I chose markers on paper over other media because of
the transparency it gives. Different from oil painting, I could always add up colors to create the
precise effect I wanted without completely covering the first color. In the first four images or so
I remained conservative on coloring, using more gray colors. I grew more confident in applying
brighter colors to balance the gray as pages go on, especially represented in picture 7 and 8.
The storyline also progressed in this way, turning from gray to happy. I tried different
perspectives, storyboard and frames to make the images look more interesting. I also turned
from focusing on all the details to focusing on coloring, how I can group different colors
together so the drawing looks integrated. I feel like now I am more skilled in using markers than
when I first got them for this project. Looking back, I took a bold step in deciding to draw in the
style of graphic novel, and I'm glad that I have explored in a whole new medium.

In Islamic culture, patterned scarves, handmade plates, teapots, and prayer beads hold high
significance in prayer & in all aspects of life. I wanted to display these iconic pieces and reflect
the beauty and intricacy of religious icons in the Middle East. Early in the year, I centered my
concentration on depicting these religious objects in still lives in iconic positions. As the year
went on, I began reflecting on the state of Islam across the world and the war that has torn apart
my home country of Syria; I knew that presenting my religion as these perfect, beautiful objects
was not an accurate representation. My ideas developed from placing the plates on top of images
of a war-destroyed Syria, to abstracting these images to show the skewed perception of the wars
going on, to actually breaking the pieces in order to show the shattered state of Islam in the
Middle East and across the world.