The Car in the Middle of the Road
By Nasha Maryam
There were supposed to be two cars in Highway (2026). One heading toward the destination, one whose passengers were happy to take their time. Nasha Maryam planned it that way, and then the canvas told her otherwise. The dimensions were too small for both, so she cut one, and placed the remaining car somewhere in the middle of the road, deliberately not rushing it forward. She softened the wheels so they wouldn't read as urgent. The painting became, in her telling, about the passengers who were enjoying the ride more than where it was going.
That kind of decision — practical in origin, meaningful in effect — runs through most of what Maryam makes. She is a painter based in Sharjah, working primarily in acrylics on canvas, and her subjects are the landscapes she has lived inside: the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, the salt flats of Abu Dhabi, the mountain roads of Ras Al Khaimah, the coastlines that connect her adopted home to her family's roots in Kerala. She grew up in Jeddah, has spent most of her adult life in the UAE, and the two geographies have never fully separated in her work.
Her professional practice is recent — she has been exhibiting for roughly two years — but her relationship with painting goes back to childhood, where she won school competitions before setting it aside for a university degree in English and a career as a language teacher. The pause was long. When I asked what teaching gave her that still shows up in the work, she said it gave her permission to start again. "You're never zero and you had never been zero," she told me. "It's okay to start once again and also to take time and be patient to reach my goal." The patience is visible in how she talks about process: she tests color in small patches at the canvas edge before committing to the full surface, uses a slow-drying medium from Winsor and Newton to extend her working window on acrylic blends, and will work through to early morning on a piece she cannot leave mid-flow.
The heat in UAE summers is actually useful for this. Acrylics dry faster in the cold, and she described a piece called Beyond Journey to the Faraway Islands — started in winter — as one of the most technically difficult she has made. The paint was setting before she could blend it, forcing her to work without stopping, continuously, until she reached a point where she could put the brush down. What finally makes her stop on a long session is daylight, and the return to her role as a mother. She picks up the next day by going straight to the focal point of the composition to assess whether it is working. If it isn't, she adjusts color before anything else.
Color is where most of the decision-making happens. For desert scenes, she reaches first for yellows and oranges — the colors of sunrise and sunset, which she treats as the defining light of the landscape regardless of the time of day she is depicting. For seascapes, it is blues in various registers. The trickiest blend, she said, is cerulean against a greyish blue in the sky, and her solution is to thin the first layer down to almost nothing — full pigment but very little body — and work slowly with the retarding medium to keep the surface open. When that isn't enough, she adds birds. They are a structural fix as much as an aesthetic one: placed against the sky, they establish scale and give the viewer a position from which to read the rest of the composition. She decides their size by fixing her eye on the painting's focal point and working outward from there.
The Al Wathba Salt Lake series — three canvases that together form a continuous image, painted across all four sides so the view carries around the edges — came together faster than almost anything else she has made. She had visited the site and the image had locked into her before she picked up a brush. "Everything was spontaneous. Everything was quick," she said. Texture paste stood in for the salt crust on the surface of the lake; she considered adding gold or chameleon paint to the crust, then decided against it, finding the original paint colors more accurate to what she had seen. The series was nearly finished when she heard other people responding to it in front of her. She knew then she was at ninety percent and needed only to refine the edges — a slight addition of turquoise blue to sharpen the perimeter — before she was done.
Gold leaf and metallic paint appear in other work. EID (2025), painted in acrylics and gold leaf on canvas, shows pilgrims, travelers, and families moving toward a mosque for early morning prayers, the moon placed above them in a sky that Maryam built with gold at specific points rather than across the whole surface. She spent the most time on the figures themselves, cycling through colors before settling on grey — a shade that stood out from the composition while still sitting inside it. The decision came from stepping back and noticing that the moon's placement was pulling her eye, which in turn showed her what the figures needed to do. She found the grey by accident in that moment, not by plan.
1001 Arabian Nights (2023) is a series of small canvases arranged in sequence, each one a fragment of a desert night, combining alcohol inks, acrylic, and gold paint. The challenge there was restraint: the desert has a golden quality she wanted to honor, but covering too much of the surface with metallic paint would have flattened the whole thing. She had to identify specific places — the fire, the moon, particular sections of the dunes — where the gold would do work rather than simply accumulate. The fire took the most adjustment. She was looking for the right scale of flame, something that read as realistic without dominating the surrounding dark, and she worked at it across multiple sessions before it resolved.
In Sunrise in Jebel Jais (2024), painted in acrylics on canvas, she had planned to include the mountain goats that are common at that altitude in the early hours. She cut them at the last minute. Without the goat, she said, the viewer's eye moves upward, from the plateau to the peaks themselves, and the painting becomes about the mountain rather than about the encounter with wildlife. She described this as a shift in perspective, and said it confirmed something she had been moving toward: that her goal is to render the landscape itself, and leave the rest for people who have been to these places to find in their own memory.
The process behind each of these works begins before Maryam touches a canvas. She keeps a creative journal — a sketchbook of ideas gathered outdoors, in the desert or at the coast — and the concepts she records there are what she carries into the studio. By the time she lays down the first mark, the image is already fixed in her mind. She starts with perspective and the horizon line, then builds color from an undertone outward, adding shades of white, yellow, orange, and magenta simultaneously while the surface is still wet. On a piece like From Dawn to Dusk, Jebel Jais, she built the mountain forms in texture paste first — the physical relief of the peaks raised from the surface — and then painted the landscape on top of that ground, adding ghaf trees sparingly so they would read as belonging to the scene without pulling focus from the mountains themselves. That sequencing, texture before paint, was decided at the start rather than arrived at mid-process.
Her first award came in 2023 from The Art Circle, for a piece called The Mighty Melt, entered under a sustainability theme and selected as the first prize winner. She said the recognition mattered less for the credential than for what it confirmed: that returning to painting after years away from it was not a detour but a continuation. In 2025, Bountiful Fujairah received an Exceptional Art Award from the Fujairah Fine Arts Academy. She has shown at the Ras Al Khaimah Fine Arts Festival, the Design Gallery in RAK, the Abu Dhabi International Boat Show, and exhibitions under the umbrella of the Emirati Art Museum, as well as at ADIBS under DIARBID and the UAEMC Umm Al Quwain Visual Art Fest. The 2026 work Highway is among her most recent.
"My goal as an artist was to bring out the beauty in my landscapes that I had been to," she said, "and the remaining are the ones the people who visit places should find."
Discover more of Nasha Maryam's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.