When she was 4 years old, Vian Sora was given a paintbrush with some water colors and crayons by her grandparents. She recalls her immediate fondness for recreating various shapes and patterns she encountered inside her house.

“My home in Baghdad seemed like a mini-museum of oriental objects and soon-to-be subjects of my paintings,” she tells Insider. “I loved the interaction with pigments and how every time I drew something, it created a new result, never repeated, which was a very serene feeling to me then, as it remains today.”

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