I, Raghad Elwali, am more than just an artist. I am a medium. I have been painting since my adolescence, painting with watercolor, focusing on charcoal and acrylics, and later on experimenting with digital media. My essence lies in creation; all the work I produce that is worth producing is work where I express my deepest emotions, whether it's salvation or sorrow.

My path began when I was 6 years old, pondering on my eldest sister, and how she makes the paint flow on canvas and paper, and how she makes paintings and portraits and beautiful things form. There is a subtle power in the pencil, in paint, even in photography, that captures a moment that the eye cannot. At 6 years old, I fell in love with creation, with the moon and the sky and the trees and the leaves and the marble floor and how everything came to be. With the “angareb” and “bambar,” objects that made up the furniture culture in Sudan. I fell in love with my heritage and my grandmother's prayer beads, and her beautiful gold ring that you could see from a mile away, I fell in love with thobes and fashionable forms of expression.

Also, I could talk about my past and woes and pain and all that made me who I am, it is not who I am, so in this statement, I refuse to recall the resentment, the pain of the past, and how it formed me, because it didn’t. I formed myself through reactions that are much stronger than chemical bonds; instead, I want to talk about physics and biology and how all of these subjects come together in art in a way they would never in another profession. I want to tell you about the constellations and the pictures they make, I want to tell you about the language of the trees, and how pollination belongs to flowers, not just bees. I want to tell you that my paintings are not worth a thousand words; they are timeless. I want to tell you about the rhythm and the blues, and how I fight threats to my consciousness through pen and paper.

And when I work, I let my fingers do the talking; I do not resist, unless I do. I let my fingers flow, and the brush strokes tell their own stories. I am a medium. This is an expression of a higher form; I am but a vessel and brush strokes. That is my statement.