Bosnian-American artist hopes to open a gallery … with his alter ego “the Observer”
Salem, Mass. – Growing up in Revere, SUVAD H. was the student who doodled over assignments and notes, covering each page of his notebook in scribbles. Now, at 25, sitting in his very own studio with “Spongebob” playing on an old box TV in the background, he still remembers how much those drawings played a role in his high school years, eventually bringing him to refine the star character of his abstract and mind-expanding paintings, “the Observer”.
SUVAD’s artwork is the type of artwork that makes you feel connected to the world around you and your own being, it inspires reflection and exploration of the self. His pieces feature a bright pink entity called “the Observer” who takes many forms and is depicted doing many different activities; pondering a new existential consideration about the universe, ascending to the astral plane, communicating with the stars, or gallivanting through an unknown dimension.
SUVAD’s creative perspective becomes a lot more clear once you see his studio; which is complete with a homemade cardboard racetrack on the floor, works in progress pinned to the wall, obscure clippings distributed throughout the room, a map of all the places people have bought his artwork from, a multitude of art books, DVDs of films like “The Pursuit of Happiness” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and, his old notebooks from high school, “The drawings were a massive part of high school, I never understood why, but I had a fixation on it. Even the character you see a lot in my works, that was a stick figure drawing I did in my notebooks.”
Before fully embracing the fact that he was an artist, he worked as a video editor and as a spectrometer engineer—a spectrometer being a device “used for detecting and analyzing wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation,” according to Encyclopedia Britannica. In 2020, when the world came to a hard stop, the video editing business slowed, leading SUVAD to dive deeper into his personal interests. This is when his paintings really started to develop, starting with smaller canvases, he would create pieces pretty quickly, giving them away for free on Instagram.
Once he eased into his craft a bit more by posting on Twitter, a person from California reached out, saying they wanted to buy one of his paintings, “She was like, ‘Hey, I want to buy one of your paintings for my upcoming engagement party.’ That was my first ever internet sale that gave me $300.” This was a big shift for him, going from doing video and editing work to selling paintings. At the time, he had no idea where this new avenue would take him.
Originally, before moving away from home, SUVAD’s painting space started in the basement of his parent’s house, but when he started to take on commissions and build his own canvases, he outgrew the space very quickly. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, real estate prices dropped, allowing him to move into a vacant space in Salem, after sharing a space with another artist in Danvers.
Commissioning artwork offered SUVAD a unique learning experience, he realized that his style of painting wasn’t exactly the type of style that could be altered and manipulated to fit the image people wanted from him. “I was making very Basquiat, Pollock, Warhol inspired works, very loud mental baggage types of works.” Realizing that he needed to ditch the customer service approach that he was used to from past jobs, he began to lean more into the fact that he was an artist, with his own unique and idiosyncratic way of representing himself through painting.
Early in his career, SUVAD labeled many of his art pieces as “mental baggage dumps,” and he says it stemmed from the idea that art needs to have a purpose. His urge to doodle and draw was a form of therapy for him, becoming a way to deal with anxiety from what he was going through in a physical form, “It was all the gibberish that was going on in my head just going into the canvas, and that’s where it would stay, that’s my masterpiece.” This process, SUVAD described, was also one powered by aggressive energy, being unleashed and transferred by throwing paint, ripping up notebooks, and embracing a sense of chaos, “What I saw in this was peace and chaos. It was like the loud chaos in my mind was being translated through me and encapsulated in the painting itself.”
Malachi Roth-Cohen, a sophomore at Boston University, and a friend and artistic collaborator of SUVAD said of this technique, “He does this thing called erasing where he will throw a bunch of paint on a canvas and then take away some bits with this giant roller mop thing using a huge bucket of white paint. He really likes texture, that’s something I learned early on, just building up paint and making a type of geography across the canvas.” When asked what was something that he wished people knew about SUVAD when they viewed his artwork, Roth-Cohen responded, “He’s a very caring person, he cares a lot about his brother, he cares a lot about his family. He’s also not in the starving artist category, I think that’s a big thing, he has a life outside of art, art just happens to be something he can use as an outlet.”
SUVAD, having a Bosnian-American cultural background, grew up in a religious household that was mainly Muslim. “That’s how I was raised. I have a lot of respect for religion. But personally, for the lack of a better term, I am an atheist. It’s not that I don’t believe in anything, I definitely believe in a higher power. For me, when people say well you got to believe in something, I believe in myself, right? Like I am my own God.”
These emotional connections to his artwork and his views on religion and spirituality is what truly brings his creation “the Observer” to life. SUVAD describes this being as an extension of himself, specifically, as his “consciousness personified.” The character has almost become unescapable for him, lingering in the artist’s mind whenever he’s painting, “When I make a painting and I don’t include the observer, it doesn’t feel right. Like he’s knocking on the door.” Sometimes, SUVAD feels like “the Observer” runs off without him into a world beyond the threads of his canvas, “The Observer has already replicated and made himself a whole different entity in the art.”
“The Observer” draws on SUVAD’s personal meditations, embodying dreams he has had that have allowed him to further study and understand his life experiences, “I had this very vivid dream one night. It was a personal dream where I was running through these hallways and there were a bunch of window frames on the walls, and inside of those frames were snapshots of my past experiences. I immediately woke up and painted these scenes, with “the Observer” navigating my dreams essentially.” Ever since then, it became clear to him that “the Observer” would be a vessel for him to explain his own spiritual journey.
SUVAD is still on that journey, and opening his own gallery is a milestone that he plans to reach along the way, “I think what I would appreciate more is having my own storefront, where I not only can host my solo shows, but have space available for other artists, a space that I could use as a platform for solo artists.” Whatever form SUVAD’s artistic talent may take in the future, one thing is for certain, he and “the Observer” will continue to evolve and grow with each other, “I think art should be a lifestyle, not just a hobby. I really hope whoever reads this, whoever is interested in becoming an artist themselves, just do it because you want to make dope shit. Whatever you do, just make sure it’s authentic and you’re expressing it in that way.”
This article was produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven, news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
