Armenian-Lebanese artist Mireille Goguikian has drawn upon her personal knowledge to express her view of life in her exhibition “Myrrhe, Myrtille et Vanille,” (“Myrrh, Blueberry and Vanilla”), which is nowadays on display at Hamazkayin Art Gallery, Lebanon.

Forty-six mixed media works (oils on canvasses and collage) comprise “Myrrhe, Myrtille et Vanille,” each of them revealing Goguikian’s extraordinary use of color as a means of sublimating past experience into art.

The artist explained how the title of her exhibition was taken directly from her memories. When she was a child, she said, she and her brother used to eat blueberries (“myrtille”) from her garden, The Daily Star reports.

“Vanilla” – or more precisely the yellow color, which is characteristic of vanilla – reminds Goguikian of the Syrian Desert, where many Armenians were forced to march till death. The color plunges her into the collective memory of the 1915-1916 Armenian Genocide, the Deir al-Zur camps, and the massacre she heard and read about when she was younger.

“I am a colorist,” Goguikian said. “Looking at my paintings is like looking into a kaleidoscope.”