Make Chaos Work For You: Hashim Akib on Painting
Watching Hashim Akib (Ep.50) create one of his incredibly bold paintings, might be like watching a wind storm wip across paint. The artist works big and he works fast. A word might begin to come to your mind as it all seeming like chaos.
And you’d be right.
In fact, the artist sets out for chaos from the very first brush stroke. It’s the thing that keeps him interested and engaged in his work. It’s the thing that causes spectacular accidents that lead to incredible paintings.
And more than anything, it’s chaos with confidence that whether or not the outcome is a good or bad painting, it’s the way the artist works best.
However, what you might not see when you’re watching Akib paint is that it’s also chaos built on an incredible set of skills especially in drawing from art school and his 15-year illustration career.
EARLY DAYS
Akib went to art school and found that while most instructors were pushing for oils, he gravitated towards acrylics. He liked that he wouldn’t be working in the long shadow of art history. He had nothing to live up to as an acrylic painter, historically speaking. The medium was really only invented in the 70s.
His early work was much more representative and took weeks to complete.
It was also making him hate art.
“I was on the cusp of getting a normal job,” says Akib.
He was teaching painting at the time and also working as an illustrator. He almost decided to give up painting and choose one of those other paths for full time.
“I was acutely aware that if I didn't change something about the way I was working, I really wasn't going to get very far.”
But luckily, one day Akib struck up a conversation with a gallerist who mentioned her admiration of expressive painting. That it was something a bit different from all the realistic harbor scenes that were the art scene’s local bread and butter. Paintings that Akbi himself was making.
So Akib went home with an idea to try something new. And it saved him.
INVITING CHAOS
Acrylic as a medium works for Akib’s expressive style.
“I like the idea of getting the thunderbolt of the inspiration of seeing something and being able to represent that quite quickly,” he says. “My thought processes are very fluid, and there's a momentum behind the painting.”
Today Akib’s process looks very different from those early years. He knew he wanted to go bolder but his tendency was to pick up small brushes, color inside lines, and overwork areas with blending.
So he found ways to force himself to do the opposite.
He picked up a large, flat brush to create hard shapes. He started using extra heavy bodied paint and laid it on so thickly that he couldn’t physically do detail work. He tossed the drawing stage completely.
He also changed how he loaded and mixed his colors.
Akib knew what he wanted for his paintings. He wanted to create something where the energy of the painting came through the canvas and grabbed the viewer from across the room.
But he didn’t yet quite know how to make them yet.
“You're either going to learn diving in the deep end, or you're gonna do it slowly over the course of time. But because time was limited.”
So he dove into the deep end.
BAD PAINTINGS
“I definitely produced some hideous looking paintings to start off with,” says Akib of those early days.
But he never looked at it as working through failure. In fact, he didn’t think about that at all. He just wanted to learn as quickly as possible.
“It's just a way of learning about color fairly quickly,” he says, “by just making a mess.”
So messes he made. And he found that for the first time in a long time, he truly loved what he was doing. He felt energized by the process. He was thinking in new ways. He was excited.
He learned to build his paintings almost as sculptures. Putting in big shapes and then sculpting down to the final details.
He stopped using water and stopped cleaning his brush. He loaded up his brush with multiple colors and then, what little mixing of his colors occurred, mostly happened on the canvas.
“I didn't want to go timid and I didn't want to go super soft with too many close tones. I wanted my painting to scream and shout from the far corner of the room.”
ANCHOR POINTS
Akib isn’t going for hyper-realism. He’s also not going for pure abstraction. He wants to anchor his viewers with a little reality.
To do that, he has to get a few things right.
If he’s doing a street scene for example, he knows the buildings need to follow perspective. He needs to get the head size the right relationship to the body size of the people. He’s using local color even if it’s pushed in saturation. He creates a sense of sunlight and form by making one side of a shape have warm light colors and the other side have cool dark colors for shadows.
There’s great opportunity for play once he has visual anchors to guide his viewer through the painting.
Then it’s just a matter of learning how much he can get away. Figures don’t need every detail. Buildings don’t need every window. That sun side can be really warm and that shadow side is incredibly cool.
WORKING THE WAY HE LOVES
As the artist gets older, he recognizes that the amount of energy he has is less. But he is still filled with energy in every painting he creates. This is because he has found a process that keeps him present and excited.
He doesn’t do thumbnails. He doesn’t do color studies. He doesn’t even really keep sketchbooks anymore for the work he’s creating. He wants it all to happen on his canvas.
To keep this excitement, he knows he has to honor the process that he loves. Sometimes, that means saying no to clients who might ask to approve a sketch.
He has learned to tell them no. That’s not how he works.
“[If] someone wants a painting from me the freshest painting they'll get is if they just let me just launch into it with what's in my head.”
Akib not only wants his paintings to be the freshest version of themselves but that way of working prioritizes his love of working in a specific way.
He has seen other artists make concessions over their careers and often the result is liking what they do less.
“I want to die with a brush in my hand and still enjoy it,” says Akib. “Passion… that's got to be the priority when doing something creative.”
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