Light, Space and the Essential: A Conversation with TeYa Noor
TeYa Noor is a self-taught Egyptian contemporary abstract artist whose work explores the space between landscape, geometry, and pure visual experience. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, she reduces familiar forms to their most essential elements line, color, rhythm, proportion, and space.
Her paintings invite the viewer to slow down. A horizon becomes a sequence of colors, a geometric form becomes a gesture, and an apparently simple composition begins to reveal subtle emotional tension. In this conversation, TeYa Noor speaks about reduction, intuition, landscape, color, and the quiet space she hopes to create through painting.
1. “I reduce the visible until only the essential remains.” This statement seems to define the philosophy behind your practice. What does “the essential” mean to you when you begin a painting?
For me, the essential is what remains when I stop trying to explain everything. I don't want to tell the viewer exactly what they are looking at or what they should feel. I want to remove the details that are not necessary and leave behind the things that still carry the feeling the color, the line, the rhythm, the space.
Sometimes I think of painting almost as editing. I keep taking things away until the painting starts to breathe on its own.
2. Your paintings often sit somewhere between geometric abstraction and landscape. Do you begin with an actual place or landscape that you have seen, or does the image emerge more intuitively from shapes, lines, and colors?
It can happen both ways. Sometimes a landscape stays in my mind a particular horizon, the way the sky meets the earth, or simply a feeling I had while looking at a place. But when I start painting, I don't try to reproduce that place.
I let the memory become something else. The landscape becomes a structure, a rhythm, or a color relationship. Eventually, I may not even remember where the original image came from. What remains is the feeling of it.
3. Many of your compositions contain strong horizontal bands that can suggest horizons, landscapes, or layers of space. What draws you to the horizontal line, and what does it represent for you?
I think I have always been attracted to horizons. There is something very quiet about a horizontal line. It separates two spaces, but at the same time it connects them.
A horizon can suggest distance, movement, waiting, or simply a moment of pause. When I work with horizontal bands, I am not necessarily painting a landscape. I am thinking about layers of space, time, memory, and emotion.
4. In your work, a landscape can remain recognizable without being literally depicted. What interests you about transforming a familiar landscape into something almost abstract?
I like the moment when something familiar becomes slightly unfamiliar.
If I paint a landscape exactly as it appears, the viewer may immediately recognize it and move on. But if I reduce it to a few colors and lines, there is more room for personal interpretation. Someone might see a sea, someone else might see a memory, and someone else might see nothing specific at all.
That ambiguity is important to me.
5. Your compositions are visually simple, but they do not feel empty. How do you decide when a painting has reached the point where nothing more needs to be added?
This is probably one of the hardest things to learn.
There is always a temptation to add one more line, one more color, one more detail. But sometimes that extra element destroys the balance that was already there.
I usually know the painting is finished when I stop thinking about what it needs. When I can look at it and simply stay with it, without wanting to fix or explain anything, I know I should leave it alone.
6. Negative space is an important part of your visual language. Do you think of empty space as the absence of something, or as an active element within the composition?
Definitely as an active element.
For me, empty space has a voice. It gives the other elements somewhere to exist. Without it, even a beautiful form can become too loud.
I think this is also true outside painting. Sometimes what we don't say, or what we choose not to fill, can be just as meaningful as what we put there.
7. Your geometric works use very simple forms,curves, rectangles, lines and blocks,yet they can create a strong sense of movement and tension. How do you build emotional energy from such restrained forms?
I think a simple form can carry a lot of energy depending on how you place it.
A curve can feel soft in one painting and almost aggressive in another. A rectangle can feel stable or restrictive. It depends on its size, direction, relationship to the other forms, and especially on the space around it.
I enjoy that tension between something very controlled and something that still feels alive.
8. Color plays a central role in your paintings, from soft pastel landscapes to deeper combinations of blue, turquoise, pink, yellow and black. How do you choose a palette, and what usually comes first: the color or the composition?
There isn't one rule. Sometimes I start with a color that I cannot stop thinking about, and the whole painting grows around it.
Other times, I already have a composition in mind and the colors come later. I am very sensitive to how colors behave next to each other. A color can completely change depending on what surrounds it.
For me, color is not decoration. It is one of the main ways the painting speaks.
9. Your paintings often balance structure with something very organic,the visible brushwork, imperfect edges, and traces of the painting process. How important is imperfection to you?
Very important.
I don't want the paintings to look mechanically perfect. The brush leaves evidence of the hand, and I like that. It reminds us that the painting was made by a person, not generated by a perfect system.
Sometimes the unexpected mark is actually the thing that makes the painting feel alive. I have learned not to erase every mistake. Some of them are better than the original intention.
10. You describe your approach as intuitive, yet your compositions show a strong sense of balance and proportion. How do intuition and control coexist in your creative process?
They constantly argue with each other.
I usually begin intuitively, without knowing exactly where the painting will go. But as it develops, I become very aware of balance, proportion, and rhythm.
There is a point where I have to stop controlling the painting and listen to it. I think the interesting part happens somewhere between those two things,between knowing what I want and allowing the painting to surprise me.
11. You are a self-taught artist. How has developing your practice independently shaped the way you understand art, technique, and your own visual language?
Being self-taught gave me a lot of freedom, but it also made me question everything.
I didn't have a fixed method that I had to follow, so I learned mostly by experimenting, making mistakes, looking closely, and trying again. Sometimes I would discover a technique simply because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do it that way.
That independence became an important part of my artistic identity. I don't feel that I have to fit my work into a particular category.
12. What role does repetition play in your work? When you repeat horizontal lines, shapes, or gestures, are you thinking about rhythm, movement, time, or something else?
Repetition creates rhythm, and rhythm creates a sense of time.
When I repeat a form or a line, I am interested in how a small difference between each repetition changes the whole composition. It is similar to music,one note repeated can become something completely different depending on the rhythm.
In my horizontal works, repetition also reminds me of looking at a landscape for a long time. Nothing dramatic is happening, but the atmosphere keeps changing.
13. There is a remarkable sense of stillness in your paintings. What attracts you to creating images that encourage the viewer to slow down rather than immediately understand what they see?
I think we live surrounded by images that demand an immediate reaction.
I like the opposite.
I want my paintings to be places where nothing is asking for your attention. You can simply stand in front of them for a while.
Maybe the viewer understands something after ten seconds, or maybe after ten minutes, or maybe never. I am comfortable with that. I don't think every painting needs to be solved.
14. Your work does not tell a specific story, yet it can evoke very personal feelings in the viewer. Do you believe abstraction can communicate emotions more directly than figurative art?
Yes, because abstraction can bypass the explanation.
When we see a figure or a specific place, we immediately begin constructing a story around it. Abstraction removes that starting point. It leaves more space for the viewer's own experience.
A painting doesn't have to tell you what to feel. Sometimes a certain combination of colors or a particular movement of a line can reach you before you even understand why.
15. As an Egyptian artist, do you feel that your cultural environment enters your work consciously, or does it appear more subtly through your perception of light, landscape, color, and space?
Probably more subtly.
I don't consciously try to make my paintings “Egyptian.” But I grew up surrounded by a particular light, particular landscapes, colors, architecture, and ways of seeing space. All of those things inevitably become part of how I see.
Even when I create something completely abstract, I don't think I can separate myself from the environment that shaped me.
16. Looking at your work as a whole, what are you trying to remove,and what are you ultimately trying to leave behind?
I am trying to remove noise.
Noise can be visual, but it can also be conceptual,the need to explain, decorate, impress, or say too much.
What I want to leave behind is a feeling. Something quiet but persistent. Ideally, the viewer may not be able to describe exactly what they saw, but they remember how the painting made them feel.
17. Your visual language continues to evolve. Are there new forms, materials, colors, or ideas that you would like to explore in your future work?
I want to continue pushing the boundary between landscape and abstraction.
I am also interested in becoming more experimental with form. My geometric paintings have taught me a lot about structure, and my landscape-inspired works have taught me about atmosphere. I would like to bring those two worlds even closer together.
I don't want to decide too early what the next stage should look like. I would rather discover it while working.
18. If a viewer stands in front of one of your paintings and remains with it for a few quiet minutes, what do you hope they will experience?
I hope they feel that they don't have to do anything.
They don't have to understand it, find a story, or decide whether it is beautiful. They can simply look.
If the painting gives someone a few quiet minutes in which their mind slows down, even briefly, then I think it has already done something meaningful.
For me, that is perhaps the most important thing abstraction can offer,a space where we are not being told what to think, but are given the freedom to simply experience.
Closing Thoughts
Speaking with TeYa Noor offers a glimpse into an artistic practice built on restraint, intuition, and a deep sensitivity to space. Her paintings may appear quiet at first, but beneath their simplified forms lies a thoughtful exploration of balance, atmosphere, and perception.
In a visual world often filled with excess, TeYa’s approach reminds us of the power of reduction ,of what can happen when an artist removes everything unnecessary and allows color, form, and silence to speak for themselves.
Her work does not ask the viewer to find a single answer. Instead, it creates a space for looking, feeling, and discovering something personal within the simplicity.
TeYa Noor — Artist at Coral Bridge Gallery
Written by Eva Ellwood
