Awadh Baryoum (M.F.A., painting, 1997) currently lives in London, Ontario, Canada where he creates and teaches art. In his uniquely styled gestural paintings and drawings, Baryoum explores the dynamic relationship between the known and the unknown. His diverse body of work has been exhibited internationally, and has received numerous accolades throughout his career, among them a Fulbright Scholarship. Baryoum was featured alongside prominent artists Dale Chihuly, Chuck Close, Louise Bourgeois, and Richard Serra in “Art Educates the World”, an exhibition benefiting future Fulbright scholars. In 2016, Baryoum was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Hunting Art Prize for the fourth year. About this recent series of drawings Baryoum says: “In this series I continue work with the intention of depicting things that can be concurrently recognizable and unrecognizable while pursuing traditional approaches that maintain the representational aspects of drawing and painting. My process is a deliberate attempt to create imaginative pictorial illusion in which the imagery seems to resemble arbitrary biomorphic shapes and natural formations, and ambiguously relates to living organisms and geological structures suggesting growth and equilibrium. The imagery in my work, as well, delivers nonlinear narratives of multiple and mutable meanings through which the viewers may find themselves engaged and invited to generate their own interpretations and develop their own stories."