Narda Roushdi studied art at the University of California at Berkeley as a way to tolerate her other classes. When she finally had to declare a major she chose art. Initially she worked in oils but due to space limitations she switched to tempera on very thick 300 pound paper and using an egg yolk and water mixture instead of just water alone. The feel of the mixture combined with the tempera gave her the feeling of working with oil; the gloss from the yolk lent a shine to the surface. She has always been interested in figurative painting, using family photos to compare and contrast the two sides of her family. Her father was born and raised in an upper class Egyptian family, while her mother was from a Depression era family that had to deal with poverty.
In her early work, she would incorporate found papers and small paste jewels into the work. More recently, she has moved from only using paper to small gessoed wood panels, using a technique which involves cross hatching lines. The type of paint remains the same, egg tempera. There has been a shift in the kinds of images she uses. Straying from family photos, she now looks to discarded photos available from thrift shops. She looks carefully at them, trying to work out a possible story.
Klimt was an early influence. The attraction being the immersion of the figure in a dense flood of patterns. Wayne Thiebaud was a later influence particularly his love of outlining his figures with bright halos.
