I grew up in Dubai, in an Iranian family that had already made this city home long before I came along. Like a lot of families with that history, ours ran on a quiet understanding: you work, you build something solid, you don't risk your future on a feeling. So I learned to be practical. But I was also the kid who drew on everything, who told anyone who asked that one day I'd be a painter.
When university ended, I did the sensible thing and joined the family business.
I stayed for twenty years. Sales, marketing, e-commerce — and I was good at it. I don't tell this part as a tragedy, because it wasn't one: two decades of building things taught me discipline, patience, and how to take something from nothing all the way to finished. But on paper nothing was wrong, and that turned out to be the hardest part. There was no disaster to point to. Just a slow, persistent sense that I was living a life that belonged to someone else.
In 2020 I picked up a brush again, alongside the unglamorous work of being honest with myself. There was no single thunderbolt. It built gradually, one painting at a time, until the thing I'd been calling a hobby had become the most honest part of my week — and then the part everything else arranged itself around. The question stopped being whether and became when.
I didn't rush the leap. I trained, I put in the studio hours, I treated painting as the craft it is — and brought to it the same discipline that twenty years of building businesses had drilled into me. On June 1st, 2026, I stepped away from the family business to devote myself fully to painting.
I work in mixed media, and I build a painting the way I once built everything else: in layers. Some pieces are pure abstraction — atmospheres and horizons, color and texture worked up coat over coat until the surface has a weight you can almost feel. Others explore the human form, sometimes it's a face, sometimes a figure, sometimes something more abstract. I don't really have a set way of approaching them. Each painting develops differently, and I like giving myself the freedom to see where it takes me.
I paint hope and beauty because I've come to believe that they are not luxuries. They're an essential part of being human.
If you're drawn to these pieces, my guess is you already know that too.
— Ayoub