Underwater Life

Malak Morgan, a New Orleans Artist and Architect, was born and trained in Cairo, Egypt, a vibrant city that maintained its ancient historic traditions of 4,000 years and assimilated diverse multiple cultures of Western occupation during the past 2,000 years. She assimilated diverse multiple cultures throughout her career as an Architect as well as an Artist.

At home, she was influenced by the middle-class Coptic Egyptian tradition. At school at the Lycée Français du Caire, she and her sister were influenced by French culture. At the age of 12, she started drawing portraits of family and friends with pencils and then watercolor. Portraits were drawn on paper with such details and resemblance of character that friends and family were asking her to draw them.

It wasn't until high school that she was invited to attend the School of Fine Arts. She attended 3 years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cairo. She did well painting live models using mainly oil media. She also advanced in math in high school. She worked with an organized logical mind and a creative nature. These characteristics prompted her to seek a creative profession that combined math and art. Architecture is a profession that matches these characteristics because it is interdisciplinary and involves art and engineering. The year she graduated, she started her own practice with residential commissions for many private residences in Cairo, Egypt. She was the first practicing woman architect in Egypt.

Inspired by New Orleans City’s rich multi-art culture and its people's art, and her diverse multiple cultures, she pursued more training at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She exhibited her work annually at the academy’s student shows and at the art fair at the academy. Around the city, she was invited to exhibit at the AIA New Orleans Center for Design, the Whimsies Group, Ochsner, and Touro Health Systems, among other entertainment places in the City.

Her abstract impressionist style employs mixed media, mainly acrylic gold leaves, pigments, watercolor gouache, and collage. Lines, forms, and selection of colors are intentional; nothing is random, and meaning is expressed during the whole painting process. The final work allows viewers to form their own interpretation. This multimedia process is built from several layers of acrylic paint, pigments, lines, and a mix of gold, silver, and bronze leaves. The lines connecting the forms have organic continuous joinery that is architectural, rigid, and loose at the same time. Each shape is akin to an individual form acting within a pictorial whole piece. The shapes are mainly expressive to imply an emotional feeling.

Her work consists of sinuous curves, smooth surfaces, and colors that have an architectonic characteristic embodied in an array of colors and forms combined into mixed media drawings, constructing her work in a physical way, through color, and drawing-based procedures. Her paintings lie on the shifting border between legibility and abstraction. The body of the work is based on the timeless elements of sea, sky, earth, and human life, integrating contradictory elements into a cohesive unified whole.

These abstract paintings are influenced by formal principles. She uses these principles both literally and metaphorically as the guidelines with which she develops her compositions. In order to capture this richness, She works on a large number of paintings concurrently. This allows her to interchange strong elements and techniques from one piece to the next. Each multi-layered rendering shares some details with other works. The overlap of elements enriches each individual expression and deepens the cohesion within each body of work.