Samah Ahmed

Samah is an artist who has painted exclusively using the colour blue for more than 20 years. Her muse has always been, and remains, the sea—the tropical sea of the Maldives, where she was born. Having started off painting her blue canvases in a representational style, she has, over the years, moved towards abstraction. She has in the past dealt with subject matters such as climate change and its consequences on small, low-lying islands like the Maldives, but now focuses on a more personal subject: solitude.

She uses three hues of blue paint in her canvases, never mixing them. She does not start the canvas with any specific image in mind—it’s the accidental marks made during the process that she looks for. The process involves the canvas being laid horizontally and using metal bars to move the paint back and forth.