About the Artist:

 

When faced with hardship, one can laugh or cry... Most often, I've chosen to paint. Looking outside oneself, beauty and joy can always be found.
Rokhaya grew up in Rockport, Massachusetts where, in 1972, her French mother and American father founded La Petite Ecole (now The Waring School). From the earliest age Rokhaya was drawing on a daily basis, especially while traveling. Rather than snapping photos, it was studying and rendering what she saw in sketchbooks that developed her visual memory, and it is this practice that has most directly influenced her art. Today she enjoys the advantages of working both Plein Air but also in the studio from reference (which includes her own sketches, watercolors and photographs). It is in the quiet focus of an indoor space that her visual inspirations are clarified and interpreted.

After graduating from Princeton University in 1988 with a BA in Art History and the Visual Arts, Rokhaya spent the Summer painting in the ancient Provencal village of Forcalquier and after a sold-out show at a local Bistrot, Provence and Paris was where she would return to paint and exhibit for the next twenty years. Since 2008, Rokhaya has made her home and studio in Gloucester, MA (where she is a member of The Rocky Neck Art Colony). Her extensive travels to paint have also included California and Florida, England, Italy, Greece, Scandinavia, Israel, the Caribbean and French Polynesia.

Over the last twenty-five years Waring's work has garnered her a steady stream of exhibits, commissions and devoted collectors- including Brooke Shields. She has been a member of the Copley Society of Art and has exhibited in juried shows in both Europe and the United States, including the Salon Des Artistes Français and the Salon d'Automne in Paris, and the Currier Museum of Art. She is featured in the book "100 Artists of New England" (Schiffer 2011). Rokhaya's oils and watercolors are held in hundreds of private collections internationally.

Waring's bold colors and vigorous brushstrokes have prompted comparisons to European Impressionists, but the artist remains true to her own vision:

"Most everything I know about painting has come from regularly immersing myself in nature and really looking. All I wish to convey is the essence and life of a place- for viewers to feel the wind and the sun, sense the space and light".

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