Through the 1970s AlYousif turned to oil paint and to narrative, building scenes from the folk memory of a Bahrain that was already changing around him. Pearl divers, wedding processions, mothers and children, neighbourhood gatherings: these paintings hold the customs and rituals of pre-oil Gulf society at the moment they were passing from lived experience into recollection.

The tone is warm rather than nostalgic. Works such as Childhood Memories treat everyday incident with the same care given to ceremony, and figures are drawn with a symbolic weight that lifts them beyond illustration. As a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society, AlYousif was working alongside a generation intent on giving Bahrain a modern visual language of its own, and this body of narrative oils, direct and unsentimental, is his clearest early statement of what that language could be.