Interview With The Artist

FlowFrenzNFT Community Newsletter
Sunday. January 14, 2024
Vol 15. The Flow Connection

Diba ADIB, Visual Artist & Painter in Interview with the FlowFrenzNFT Community Newsletter

Interview With Diba ADIB, Artistic Path & NFT Collections

January 14th 2024

Q: Please tell us about yourself! What is your name? What is your creative pseudonym? How old are you? Where are you from? How long have you been in NFTs?

My name is Diba ADIB, 35, visual artist and painter from Iran. My friends in web3 call me Diba, though I sign my artworks as ADIB (in Persian alphabets, of course). I’ve been an artist almost my whole life. I remember painting throughout my childhood, and at 9, I started taking workshops on drawing and oil painting. Then at 15, I entered art high school. I continued studying art academically and obtained my Bachelor’s in Art.

After my graduation, I started my professional life as a painter, holding two solo painting exhibitions in 2014 and 2016. I always followed my passion for exploring new ways of presenting art rather than the traditional path through traditional art galleries. I started NFTs in August 2023 with a collection of 30, 1/1 hand-drawn digital paintings called “Tree-Verse,” which is closed and sold out. Now I have two collections on Foundation, three on Objkt, and one on Layerr.

Q: You are an artist. Tell us what styles do you work in? How long have you had a love for abstract art? Have you studied this type of creativity somewhere or done your own research to learn the basics and patterns of style? What themes are most often present in your artworks and why do you make these choices?

To me, the most important aspect of painting is the power of expression that lies within the visual elements we deal with while composing and creating a piece of painting. By expression, I don’t mean facial or gesture expression, which is so theatrical, but the revealing of feelings and the deep relationship that visual elements are capable of by themselves, like the power of a line or a stroke of color.

In my academic studies, I learned that all the different types of visual arts share almost the same basics and fundamentals. They use mutual alphabets to form various styles of arts. Among all of these styles, I chose Abstraction as I found it more powerful and capable of expression, as I mentioned how important I find it in my art. In order to obtain this experience and expertise needed in abstractive painting, I passed specialized workshops and courses with some of the most renowned Iranian contemporary painters. This specially helped me find my own words in the abstract language.

Q: What are your sources of inspiration? Are you interested in the artworks of abstract artists? Do you visit exhibitions and museums?

I have always studied old masters’ artworks as well as contemporary movements of fine arts. This includes galleries and museums.

I have admired legends of abstract art, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich, but I cannot explain my feelings when I saw a work of Mark Rothko in Tehran contemporary art museum for the first time. I melted in that canvas, covered with vast violet and yellow shades. I believe this was the moment that I discovered the power of abstract art.

Q: How can an abstract artist find his own style?

I strongly believe that a visual artist, whether academically trained or self-taught, can find their own style only through two main factors: “visual study” alongside “personal practice.” By visual study, I mean looking at a work of art, preferably a masterpiece, and trying to analyze the elements used by the artist. Also, trying to find the things that made this work of art a masterpiece. Personal practice means not judging your process of making mistakes. It means working and working and working, and realizing that your personal style is not going to be born overnight. It is progress, a result of a long and hard process. These two should be maintained by an artist during their whole artistic career, as there is no end to learning and growing.

Q: What challenges do you sometimes face as an artist?

Being an artist is a whole life challenge if you want to be a genuine artist, not a hobbyist or entertainer. Some parts of these challenges are in common between all, and some differ from one artist to another, depending on artists’ personal stories.

Q: Please tell us what the creative process is. How does an idea appear? Do I understand correctly that you create paintings as real, traditional art, but you can also use technology to refine the work to the end? What materials and programs do you use?

In order to clarify, I should say I am a physical painter. Tangibility plays a great role in my creative process. If you go through my official website, you see that more than 90% of my works are absolutely physical. On-chain, you can see that my two collections on Foundation are again purely physical. I have started to paint and draw on my mobile phone screen a couple of years ago, leading to my Tree-Verse collection on Objkt. Other than that, in my other three collections, the main work is done totally on cardboard, and only the little elements are added by Photoshop at the end.

I usually go through various paths and processes in different projects, depending on the subject and also my inner need. As I believe that painting is not your monologue with the canvas but a dialogue between you as the artist and the canvas. This means most of the time the work itself tells you what your next step should be, of course, if you know its language. To reach this state of creation requires well-learned knowledge and a lot of experience that together provide a reliable understanding of what your work says to you.

In general, I seldom start a project or even a single canvas with a pre-designed sketch. I just start with an idea in my head, and it defines itself along the way.

Q: How does color affect the mood of a painting? How do you choose the color palette for your work? What does this depend on?

Color in my vision carries visual energy, like any other visual element. This energy in a color creates a visual quality, leading to the birth of a visual space or environment. To manage this, it definitely requires proper study and experience. That’s why studying colors is a huge part of visual basic courses in any trustworthy educational path in fine arts. It is knowledge, a language that, as an artist, you should learn. If not, when you try to talk in that language (using colors in your paintings), your sentences would be obscured and meaningless to people who know this language of visual arts. So knowing this, I pick my colors for each work based on the message I want them to convey or the effect I want them to have on the viewer’s eyes, mind, or even subconscious.

Q: What stage of creating an artwork do you think is the most important and difficult? How do you create texture? At what point do you realize that the artwork is completely finished and you need to stop?

You are asking a very general question. The creation of a painting is based on multiple stages that are equally important. From the formation of an idea to technical stages and statement writing or presentation, all of these can be challenging for an artist depending on the level of their knowledge, how talented they are, and the nature of their project. It varies from artist to artist and also from project to project or even in different times of their artistic path.

Texture is one of the strongest visual elements that sometimes dominates my works. Depending on the technique, style, and atmosphere of each project, I use this element accordingly.

In art, we say a work is complete when it is impossible to add or reduce a thing to improve it. This is only recognizable to a trained eye and mind.

Q: The impressive “Non-Absolute Abstraction” collection at Foundation is a success! Already 6 collectors have purchased your amazing creativity!

How does art allow you to express yourself through color, unusual shapes, effects and textures? How long did it take to create one painting? What artistic methods and programs did you use? What is the general idea of the collection? What is special about these works of art? How should art affect the viewer?

The collection “Non-Absolute Abstraction” as you mentioned has a unique place in my artistic journey. And it comes with a quite interesting story, both in the creating process and presenting method. I presented this collection as a virtual exhibition on my website, which was considered an innovative move in 2016 and opened new doors to art presentation in Tehran. It was covered by newspapers and media.

The 18 pieces of this collection are all physical paintings, acrylic on very large-scale canvases. They are created in Abstractive Expressionism style, which I should say requires a deep understanding of visual elements (point, line, color, texture, etc.) Also, the visual qualities (balance, harmony, contrast, etc.), mastery in techniques and materials, plus a high-speed performance and ability to make decisions synchronized with the flow of your mind.

I spent a whole year immersed in this project, working for hours every day, focusing all of my time and energy on the formation of this collection. This happened in 2013-2014. There were many more pieces, obviously, but these 18 are the ones that I curated to be exhibited as a collection. Then I exhibited them in my second solo exhibition in 2016, which is a whole another story that is readable on my official website.