Aleah Koury comes from a diverse artistic background, with a Bachelor’s Degree in Ceramics and a Master’s in Printmaking. This has encouraged him to be bold in experimenting with new materials and imagery. At various times he has incorporated collage, printing, found materials, and a variety of different types of paint media in his work.
A gifted colorist, over the past decade Koury has increasingly been drawn to pastel as the purest expression of the colorist’s art. By the late 1980’s Koury had made a national reputation with a series of abstracted landscapes called ‘Skyscapes’. In these works the gesture of the artist and the full brilliance of color are revealed in the unclouded intensity of the raw, pastel pigment.
More recently, Koury has further stretched the expressive possibilities of pastel by combining it with enamel and latex paints, gold bronze, and silver leafing, oil pastel and pencil to create works of spectacular richness and texture. The ‘Gardens’ and ‘Floral Still Life’ series draw inspiration from the 19th century French Master Odilon Redon as well as Koury’s own California garden and the particularly exotic orchids, which he cultivates.
Koury has also continued to work in completely abstract idiom and his latest series of abstract works: “Organic Geometry” and “Way of Things” mark a new and typically bold departure from his earlier work. In all these works it is the uninhibited sensuality of color that is true subject, whether found in beauty of the natural world or the poetry of the imagination.
Aleah Koury was born in Bellingham, Washington, and spent his early childhood in California before moving to the Midwest. In 1975, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia and in 1980 a Master’s from the University Southern Illinois at Edwardsville. Since that time Koury has lived in and around the San Francisco Bay area.
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