Sahar Al-Jajeh dreams about flowers.

In her dream-garden grow new species, unrecognizable combinations of petal, bud, carpels and anthers. These creative amalgamations; parts of orchid, gardenia, iris or hydrangea materialize on canvas in over-blown swathes and folds in oil.

Technically still-life, Jajeh’s paintings of flowers are not traditional. Painted on large–scale canvases, flower componants fill the frame in microscopic detail that reveals their inner workings - but never the whole. Rather than rooted to the ground, and free of any vases, these flowers hang in space in mesmerising layers of purples, blues and pinks.

As a keen gardener, Jajeh says she looks at the shapes of the flowers, which reorganise themselves in her mind and never works from photographs.

Displaying a charming form of pragmatism, the self-taught artists says she would rather focus on the beauty in life in her art, than pain and conflict.

“These are the flowers of my mind; from my dreams.”

Elaborating: “I don’t want to show the ugly things...there is enough pain in life, so let art the place to show the beauty.”

“People can see the beauty of life when they look at my art,” she says.

It wasn’t always the way.

Walking around her sumptuously decorated home, al-Jajeh points to older works; traditional still lives, then later in her career, stark abstract expressionist works of white figures wandering lost in eternity of black disorder, and abstract light plays of mirrors and glass.

In her quest to find her calling, Jajeh experimented with style, application and disciplines, finally settling, for now at least, on the flowers.

Exhibiting in Camden and Brick Lane galleries in London, she recognises the feminine symbolism of the flower’s insides.

“Maybe there is a sexual component – after all, Syria is a male dominated society and these paintings are very feminine.”

“But maybe, I think, it is about needing to see the inner workings of people.”

“In my paintings, you feel human emotion.”

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