In the course of her artistic career, since graduating with an MFA from the University of Chicago in the 1990s, Farida has experienced three epiphanies that uniquely energize her abstract aesthetic. The first was removing the horizon line from her paintings, which liberated her sense of composition. The second was removing the human figure as a reference point. This decision allowed Farida to focus on the kinetic qualities of bodies—distilled to small, amorphous aspects of shape and color—as vibrant objects in various states of collision, separation and formation. The third epiphany was painting from an aerial perspective, so that complex relationships and group dynamics play out in compositions emphasizing active and negative space, on lushly painted backgrounds. “Creating a work of art, for me, is a problem solving experience, an intellectual exercise that builds to a kind of performance of intuitive mark-making in my studio. It is getting to the exhilaration of the finishing stages of a painting that I crave.” Farida’s work is part of numerous private and corporate collections across the United States.