Aida Murad: No Paint Brush Needed For This Spiritual Artist and Healer
BY MONIKA SAMTANI, CO-FOUNDER, AND EMILY MONTAGUE, SENIOR EDITOR, THE FEM WORD
Art is…
There are as many ways to end that sentence as there are people on Earth. Likewise, every artist has their own story about how they found their way to their art, and even non-artists have a relationship with expression and creativity that is utterly unique. Art is human. Art is universal.
When we first sat down with Aida Murad, a talented artist and healer, we knew the focus of our interview would be on art as a visual medium. As it turns out, it’s all the other things that define her art – all of the magic and miracles that inhabit her work – that truly matter.
Her collaboration with Ami Becker-Aronson, a like-minded changemaker and philanthropist, seems both natural and fated when viewed in the light of their shared values. Both of them discovered the power of art while embroiled in painful but ultimately transformative journeys of healing. To learn more about Ami’s story, you can read part one of this series here.
As for Aida, we hope you find her words as profound and inspiring as we do.
Art In The Blood – A Self-Taught Legacy Born From The Necessity Of Healing
Aida Murad surrounded by her art, Washington, DC
All of us start out with plans for our lives. Some plans are firmer than others, but we tend to approach the art of living with a lot of assumptions. We assume that we know who we will become, in a general sense, and how we will work our way from point A to point B.
Or so we’re told, anyway. That’s how things are “supposed” to go. Reality tends to be a lot messier.
Aida’s family has art in the blood. “I come from a family of artists,” she tells us. “They’re all self-taught, but I’m the first professional [self-taught] artist. That means I’ve never graduated from a university that specializes in art. I actually studied economics – and [I] used to be an economist before being an artist.”
Talking to Aida today, you can see a glimmer of the analytical mind that once fueled her career as an economist. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, and she often weaves words like innovation, spectrums, and impact into her discussions about the power of art to connect people to themselves. There is something of the high-powered executive present in her purposeful aura, and it makes you want to go still and listen to what she has to say.
Some of that strength comes from an even deeper, more visceral place, however. “I turned to art for healing my own trauma, and that was health trauma,” she explains. “Art has been a tool for healing, for processing, for understanding.”
Aida was still a young woman when she began to experience shooting pains, stiffness, and eventually partial paralysis throughout her body. As these symptoms worsened, she lost more and more of her mobility. She sought a diagnosis.
“The health issue that led me to being an artist – or introduced me to art, really – was rheumatoid arthritis,” she says. “I had severe rheumatoid arthritis at a very young age. My senior year of college. All of a sudden – overnight, almost – I couldn’t move my body. I had to actually change majors because I couldn’t go to classes, so I graduated with something easier. I had two primary episodes of [R.A.] over all four and a half years, [and these consisted] of being semi-paralyzed. Some days I could walk, some days, I couldn’t.”
Facing this level of pain and reduced mobility would be devastating for anyone, but it was especially shocking for a young woman who was supposed to be in the prime of her life. Like so many people faced with a severe, lifelong chronic illness, Aida encountered despair and a loss of self as she confronted her diagnosis and tried to make sense of its impact on her future.
“A pivotal moment when I turned to art was when I was applying for jobs and people asked me, ‘Why should we hire you?’” she recounts. “And I said I have no idea, because I genuinely didn’t know what was special about me. Usually, when you’re struggling with a physical health issue, depression kind of pairs with it. So I was in that state.”
She speaks about her experience with such calm now, but you can feel the weight behind her words. This diagnosis – this disease – was a wound that cut deeply into Aida’s soul. Its implications were so profound that no one could have blamed her for simply giving in to that depression and choosing a sedentary path for her future.
Aida murad
“Painting without a paintbrush has been so freeing! I’m constantly advocat[ing] for play – I’m an advocate for adults learning how to be messy and be like kids again.”
“Then doctors told me ‘you’ll likely never use your hands again,’ and you can see there’s physical damage here,” she notes, showing us the limited range of motion in her fingers and wrists. But Aida, like other great artists before her, possessed something powerful, almost magical in its ability to take hold of her path and shift it towards something greater than despair. It is an inner voice, a touch of fate that drips in and past the other mental voices that might otherwise hold us back.
“I remember walking away [after that appointment] – walking very slowly, [because] that was one of the days I couldn’t move [much] – and I just heard a whisper: ‘go buy paint,’” she recalls. “Because I kept thinking about what makes me unique, and I thought about our fingerprints. [I thought], ‘Ok, I have a unique fingerprint, so there must be something there. I just can’t see what’s unique about me [yet].’ So I just start painting with one fingerprint at a time to try and unlock the answer.”
The experience unlocked more than she ever could have imagined. “What I did find in art at that time was a safe space to process all [of] my emotions – and then I never looked back,” she says. “I found my purpose, and I wouldn’t change a single thing in terms of the amount of pain I’ve experienced because of that health episode. It’s been the best and worst thing that’s ever happened [to me].”
It’s tempting to see that inner voice as a legacy, a gift given by all of the artists in Aida’s lineage. She’s proud to be a Jordanian-American artist, and her family history plays an important role in that identity.
Even so, her journey feels so uniquely her that one imagines it would have happened no matter where – or who – she came from. It’s universal. Like Ami, Aida simply has her own field of gravity about her. It drew the pieces of her story together and birthed art from the chaos.
And like birth, Aida’s art is intensely physical and utterly innate. It’s pure intuition.
This leads us to another branch in Aida’s still-growing story. This one relates to healing as an art…as well as an expression of everything that makes us, as a species, so uniquely and humanistically creative.
Like Tendrils Of Light – On Giving, Receiving, And Channeling The Power Of Creative Expression
Considering the impact and incredible detail inherent in Aida’s art, you might find it shocking to learn that she’s never once picked up a paintbrush. Her brush is her body.
This style brings us back to our core memories, reminding us of our oldest, youngest instincts as human beings. The-body-as-expression is a concept at the center of Aida’s artistic philosophy, and she sees it as a process of remembering as well as creating.
“Painting without a paintbrush has been so freeing!” she exclaims. “I mean, I’m constantly advocat[ing] for play – I’m an advocate for adults learning how to be messy and be like kids again.”
Every species of mammal on earth engages in play, and it doesn’t stop once they reach adulthood. Humans are bizarre – and bizarrely alone – in their general insistence that “play” is a child’s activity. Play is how we discovered ourselves back when we didn’t even have words for who or what we were becoming. Play is behind our greatest inventions, our deepest philosophies, and our most enduring works of art.
“There’s something so powerful in painting with your fingers, as you did when you were in kindergarten,” Aida explains. “[And] there’s another part of that…there’s something so intimate that you end up sculpting, [you] really [end up] being sensually activated. It’s powerful beyond words.”
This process of tapping into ourselves has been echoed in every major religion and every philosophical teaching we’ve laid claim to as human beings. Art is philosophy, religion, and self-discovery, and Aida embodies that reality both on and off the canvas.
She happens to be a Reiki Master as well as a visual artist, which means she spent ten years training in the ancient Japanese art of “light healing,” a semi-spiritual, intensely physical process that involves the meditative “giving” of healing and energy by one person to another. In many ways, it is the metaphysical version of someone donating blood or plasma.
Aida in NYC - PHOTO CREDIT: Ksenia
For practitioners, Reiki is the sharing of one’s very essence – a selfless act that heightens one’s purpose in life while simultaneously providing real, measurable healing to another human being. This unique skill set is something Aida is passionate about, and it is one more way she reflects her innate desire to give of herself, body and soul.
“Typically, the Reiki philosophy is [that] every physical element and pain comes from an emotional imbalance, and what Reiki tries to do is remove the emotional imbalance by moving energy so it doesn’t reach the physical [body],” she explains. “I ‘do Reiki’ on all my art. People [notice] – I have quite a few testimonials of them saying, ‘After I’ve been around your art, I feel a real, deep sense of calm’ or ‘I feel activated from the art’ and ‘[I feel] inspired’ or ‘hopeful.’”
Within our typically Western and generally skeptical society, this idea may sound odd or unbelievable. Such assumptions are tied to a lack of understanding of Eastern healing traditions, and they are born from biases that artists and healers like Aida seek to combat through their work.
These are ancient practices that bridge the imagined gap between physical medicine – which is, of course, vital and necessary – and spiritual medicine, which we are just beginning to understand as an equally vital and necessary part of the healing process.
By combining these traditions with her art, Aida creates more than beautiful paintings. Each canvas is an act of love freely given to the world, and within her pigments and patterns lie seeds of healing that are eager to be seen, connected with, and grown.
Which is where we, the audience, come in. It’s also where Aida’s friendship with Ami began, and it’s how her work came to transform the face of the Georgetown Lombardi Cancer Center. From here, it has changed the lives and healing journeys of countless patients, each of them carrying within them the same needs, hopes, and desires that fueled Aida’s own journey from patient to artist.
Gifts Without Measure – How Art Became A Hospital’s First Weapon Against The Sickness Of Despair
When we imagine Aida Murad and Ami Becker-Aronson meeting, our image is one of a supernova on steroids. Both of them are such powerful women with such incredible drive, their connection seems both fated and almost blinding in its potential.
They first met through Aida’s work as a teacher – Ami was a pupil learning to use her body both for and as an expression of healing.
“Part of healing is activating your gifts, activating your magic, so I create virtual art journeys and in person,” Aida explains. “For example, with Ami, she is a cancer survivor and [just an] incredible woman, [and the Lombardi Arts] project would not be here without her. I painted her body – parts of her body – and then held space for her to have a dialogue with cancer through [that] art. And in our few-hour sessions, she paint[ed] with her body because that’s where the body wisdom comes in. [And] we contain[ed] a lot of our journey there. In order to start a new chapter, we also need[ed] to release it.”
This “conversation with cancer” became a dialogue of healing between Ami, Aida, and their own selves. From there, it grew into a project that would allow thousands of other people to have similar conversations with their own bodies, minds, and hearts as they sought their own path to healing at Georgetown Hospital.
For Aida, the exhibit is and was an intimate experience. It was a natural step on her road of self-exploration and expressive giving, a bridge between her past self and the artist she became after enduring a profound health crisis.
“The healing art exhibit at Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center is very special on so many levels,” she tells us. “One, personally, I got sick in Washington, D.C., so the symbolism of me coming back to D.C. as a healthy human being…[knowing] that I can walk and I’m creating art in a hospital or the cancer center, in a place of healing, is so [powerful]. I hope that people hear the story [in that art], because I wish I could go back to my past self and say, ‘Just wait a few years, and you’re going to be back, running – not walking, running – and doing what you love with purpose.’”
This art is not merely a generous gift to other patients, but also a gift from Aida to herself. And if the Eastern traditions are right and time is more of a circle than a line, perhaps that gift was always there for her, giving her the strength and intuition that would eventually lend expression to her deepest values, her most profoundly human self.
Of course, healing is as messy as every other part of life, and Aida captured that fact beautifully in her intensely tactile, distinctly complex paintings.
“The exhibit, [it’s] all custom art. When I paint, I connect with the energy of who[ever is] meant to see it, and [so] there were a lot of tears and a lot of emotions [while] creating it – because I could feel the pain,” she recalls. “My first iteration of the art was ethereal – that was kind of the theme – and then while I was painting and connecting with patients, I felt like I wasn’t doing their journey [the] honor [it deserved]. And honoring that, it’s tough.”
She turned toward a more visceral theme, adding organic, free-floating elements to the ethereal base of her work. “I recreated it and created many [more] layers, and if you go see it, it’s highly textured,” she tells us. “Texture symbolizes: ‘I’ve lived. I have scars. I have depth. I am a cancer survivor, maybe a cancer patient turned survivor, hopefully.’ Each painting has a different message.”
Aida at her exhibit in Chelsea, NY.
Among these messages are themes like “fun,” a nod to the power of play, and “Mountain,” which embodies both the symbolic effort it takes to overcome cancer and the literal climb undertaken by Ami Becker-Aaronson – the act of “adventure philanthropy” that ended up funding the entire exhibit.
“I wanted to embrace the [full] spectrum of being and states as you heal,” Aida elaborates, “but always ending with a note that I want to choose, that we [all] hopefully want to choose, which is love, light, and healing…and life!”
Life is survival, and survival is healing. It’s putting one foot in front of the other, one hand over the next, and climbing – sometimes scrambling – toward that shining peak. It can be rough, all bloody knuckles and scraped knees, and it can be playful.
It is beauty and pain layered ad infinitum until the ascent is done and the full complexity of the landscape below becomes visible. Aida’s art captures every facet of that climb, that journey of healing, and reflects it back into the eyes and hearts of those who view it.
It’s only appropriate to finish with Aida’s own words, which capture the space she occupies and encapsulates the role she has settled into with such grace. Both artist and healer, her chosen identities as inseparable as flesh and spirit.
“My mission is to help people feel seen, heard, loved,” she says, turning her eyes to the future. “I’m primarily a healer – and my modality is art.”
Several pieces of Aida’s collection remain as permanent exhibits at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, including her largest piece, ‘Garden of Hope.’ Others are available for purchase via her official website.
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The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the interviewee, and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Fem Word organization. Any content provided by the author are based on their opinions and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.