Rita Asfour

Her Armenian father, Kaspar Thomassian, was born in Turkey in 1901.

Her Syrian mother, Gamila Khoury, was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1905.

Her parents escaped the holocaust and ravages of World War I and ended refugees down sought in Egypt where Rita was born.

Rita was the second of three children.

Her elementary school was run by French nuns and her high school education was at the Lycée Français.

Rita Asfour (February 9, 1933 – June 29, 2021) was an American modern artist.

She was known for her colorful aesthetic paintings of the human figure.

Rita projected life and movement by the strength of her compositions.

Feminine mystique and sensuality were her trademark.

In Egypt, her high school education was in a French school.

Rita Asfour was born on February 9, 1933, in Cairo, Egypt.

Her maiden name is Markrit Thomassian.

In the middle of World War II, in 1941, Hitler bombed Cairo trying to gain access to the Suez Canal.

Rita was then eight years old.

She remembers the air raids and crying under her bed.

In school, her friends sketched bombs falling, but she painted flowers and happy faces.

That was when she started drawing to express herself.

In 1959, she received a BA from the Italian Art Institute Leonardo Da Vinci.

After graduation her first job was in Beirut, Lebanon.

She started as an illustrator and ended being the art director of a weekly magazine.

After five years, she was in search of a bigger artistic challenge.

After finishing high school, Rita spent six years studying art at Leonardo da Vinci's Scuola Internazionale Italiana, from where she graduated in 1959 with a BA.

Rita immigrated to the United States in 1965 and found a job in Los Angeles at Universal Studio Tours, sketching pastel portraits of visiting tourists.

Another major event that same year was her marriage to an aerospace engineer, Jeffrey Asfour.

California was her home for the next forty-seven years.

She was free to paint what she wanted.

Free strokes and bold colors appeared in her landscapes.

The thirty years she lived in Malibu were her most prolific and creative.

In the United States in 1968, she took private lessons from Samuel Markitante (1887-1975), who was a French artist, living in Santa Monica, California.

His specialty was Landscapes with thick layers of paint on board to give a three-dimensional effect.

In 1969, Rita attended several classes at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, California.

Rita Asfour began her career as an impressionist.

She was educated at Leonardo Da Vinci Art Academy and travelled from Africa to America, via Asia and Europe, to pursue her goals.

These travels influenced her artistic style.

In 2012, at the age of seventy-nine, Rita retired in Las Vegas.

But went back to painting after seeing a spectacular Las Vegas showgirls review.

The University of Nevada exhibited her new paintings in 2016.

Public Television in 2017 aired a half-hour documentary about her long artistic career.

Rita continued to paint until 2021.

She died on June 29, 2021, after an accident that caused a broken leg.