Ziad was my first client, after finishing school and moving back to Oman. It was incredibly easy working with him and we hit it off straight off the bat. We spent hours talking to each other about life and love and heartbreak and I experienced an incredibly brave and vulnerable human being, and if you’ve read his poetry its very reflective of that. Provoke was his first published collection of work, and he put his everything into it. It felt only natural to find a way to reflect that. I decided to create a silhouette of him to kind of show that this book is Ziad expressing his inner world to the outside world. I chose to go with an abstract painting full of color and movement and texture to represent his layers and his passion and to emphasize it all by contrasting it against a black background.

I tried a few different colorways for this project, when I paint abstract it is a very emotional process. Its an expression of how I feel about a situation or place, in this case Ziad. Each painting represented a different emotion I experienced when talking to him, in the end we both agreed on the multicolored abstract painting as the best representation of the spectrum that is Ziad.

The title of the book as well as Ziad’s name were my handwriting. Itried a few options and we landed on this one for the final piece.