My Story

Georges Ward, born in Zaragoza (Spain) in 1971 to a Lebanese father and Spanish mother, started studying the arts of drawing and painting at a very early age.

His inspiration derives primarily from mythology and nature, where entomology plays an important role.

From a young age he is very influenced by the Near East art, due to his many trips to these lands, especially the one-year stay in Syria. The smells of spices, damasks… everything plays an important role in his laborious painting.

In 1985 he was awarded first prize in a contest held by the Diputación General de Aragón (The Aragonese Regional Government), and, during that same year, began to gain regular exposure at art exhibitions.

After completing his studies at the Escuela de Artes de Zaragoza, his enthusiasm for investigation led him to become immersed in numerous pictorical movements, such as Realism or Surrealism.

In several of his trips to London (United Kingdom) he visits the National Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts where he is mesmerized by the Victorian painting, in particular by Pre-Raphaelite authors like John William Waterhouse, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Dante Gabriel Rossetti among others. After visiting the Louvre Museum and the Orsay Museum in Paris (France) he is enthralled by the symbolists, painters like Jules Joseph Lefebvre, William-Adolphe Bouguereau…

On a visit to Ghent (Belgium) his fascination about the polyptych The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Paul Van Eick, leads him to make several tondos in which appear natures that require long and complex executions, involving several years of work each piece.

In the American Museum of Natural History in New York he soaks in mural art dioramas, and at his return to Spain begins to delve into the landscape. His fixation with all living beings of the natural world leads him to reinterpret painters like Martin Johnson Heade, Pieter Brueghel, the flowers of the Napolitan school or the expeditionary illustrators of Jose Celestino Mutis mainly.

His themes journey between fantasy and reality, inviting us to look out of a window through which we are able to contemplate societies parallel to our own. His works take the form of universes; worlds which materialize with their own codes that show us the pyramid of life, codes that are critical of the relentless advance of our 21st Century human anthills, revealing to us a reality nourished by fiction and vice versa. Each plant, each insect and each organism plays a social role, or is maybe a real being closely related to our everyday lives. Georges ward’s theatre sets, bursting with flora and fauna, display an atmosphere which takes root in the synesthesia of the image, in symbiosis, and where the sensuousness of aesthetic beauty belies a critical stance; a feedback mechanism which portrays a paradise of divine proportion and biodiversity laden with symbolist elements. An ever-changing Empire of the senses, brimming with colouristic compositions which speak to us about life and death.