Dogs

Maha has been keenly painting dogs for over a decade. Her compositions are created using found reference images and extending these to complete the backgrounds and other anatomical details. She loves capturing the dogs in their most characterful poses, and these are often not headshots or sitting poses. She believes painting dogs as a compositional exercise elevates what is often brushed off as a rudimentary pursuit in the current world, that sometimes over intellectualises art.

When asked why she paints so many dogs, Maha said “Dogs as a subject have served the same objective for me as Morandi’s restricted range of still life. Opportunity to focus more on palette, composition, tone, light and spatial tension.”