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Kamal Youssef, 80, paints expressionist works and is internationally established, having shown in major modern art museums in Paris and in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt. His work represented Egypt in the 1953-54 biennial at Sao Paulo's Museum of Modern Art in Brazil, which included masterworks such as Pablo Picasso's tumultuous "Guernica."

Two of Youssef's works will appear in "Wake America," the exhibition in which his son, Hisham, also is showing art.

The paintings that crowd Kamal Youssef's rural Indiana County home — in every available space on the walls and floor — are mostly homage to the female figure, a frequent theme over his 60-year arts career.

The work changed dramatically after Sept. 11, 2001. His easily identifiable human figures became dark, distorted and far less human. Once-separate colors began running together in convoluted blobs. These paintings reflect his anger, he says, at the extremist ideals that ignited such terrorism.

Youssef is Muslim, but jokingly calls himself "not a very good one" because he likes to drink Scotch in the evening. He once made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a major tenet of the faith.

A former Highland Park resident, he has lived with his American-born wife, Maria, in the Pittsburgh area since 1957, when he came to work as a civil engineer — his other profession. For Swindell Dressler, he directed the construction of steel mills and other factories in the Middle East and also in Algeria, France and Venezuela.

Youssef had been in living in France after leaving his native Egypt, where his avant-garde paintings, first exhibited in 1939, met with overbearing disapproval from conservative patriarchs.

He readily admits that he loves his adopted country — he became a U.S. citizen in 1958. He feels free to create whatever he pleases. And he says his rural neighbors accept his impassioned stance that U.S. foreign policy deserves some of the blame for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Youssef is mostly nonchalant about "Wake America." He jokes — he does that frequently — that a reporter should choose which art he'll submit to the exhibition.

"What is important is 'Here I am.' I did not come from England or Sweden. I came from Arab countries," he says in his mild, raspy voice. "This is the work I'm doing. This is America today."

He is adamant, though, about how his work should be shown — side by side with whatever poetry Dani Benshalom of Washington, D.C., submits. Benshalom, the lone out-of-town artist in "Wake America," is Jewish.

Youssef's message to the world through "Wake America" is peace and coexistence.

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