Yisehak F-Selassie was born in Addis Ababa into a very religious family. His grandmother, then-Princess Welete-Israel Seyuom was particularly devout in her Christian beliefs and she inspired this passion in her grandson. She had had no formal art training, but she used the power of visual arts to express her spiritual devotions, often dedicating her paintings to the Church. F-Selassie learned this practice from her and since the age of seven, his paintings have centered on his faith. In 1974, he was forced to leave his home and his parents due to the revolution in Ethiopa. After this upheaval, F-Selassie moved to the United States, earning his Bachelor’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988. Determined to continue his formal art studies, he attended the prestigious Taylor School of Art in Rome, Italy. Since his graduation from that esteemed institution, he has exhibited his artwork in Paris, New York, and California, as well as many other locations.

F-Selassie’s work reflects his faith and spiritual devotion, but it also relates a powerful consonance with the human condition. He attributes this connection to his experience of being uprooted from his home in 1974; with such a painful history, he can understand and empathize with the pain of the human experience. Together with his recent inspiration from fourteen-century Ethiopian spiritual paintings, his paintings combine religious symbolism and modern sensibilities. To elucidate the various aspects of his piece, F-Selassie accompanies each piece with in-depth, insightful summaries, particularly making note of each piece’s religious significance. Including the unseeable in the visual arts as he does is a complicated matter; he explains that his art, “although it has realistic elements, it conveys matters beyond the reality that we see in nature and into the spiritual realm of faith.” This is the message of F-Selassie’s work, and this is why it is so well-received in the United States and internationally.