The Art of Becoming: How Zaina Deesi’s artworks explore the concept of belonging

To understand what drives artist Zaina Deesi, look no further than the painting she created for her cover shoot. It is bright, colourful, complex, and deep. Rich with meaning, symbolism, and elements designed to start conversations. A tribute to the UAE, the place this third-culture kid calls home, the painting is a physical manifestation of her artistic exploration of belonging. All the more remarkable, then, that the woman who painted it has only been calling herself an artist out loud for about a year.

Springing forth from the middle of her painting is a palm tree — its trunk woven through brushstrokes in the traditional Sadu style — representing a quiet constant in the UAE’s ever-changing landscape. “The palm tree stands for so much, it has seen all this growth that the city has gone through. In the beginning it was the only thing standing tall against the sky, how times have changed,” says Deesi about her chosen centrepiece.

Everything else in the painting grows out from behind it: a vast red canopy, green fronds spilling left and right, and a painted mirror perched at the top of the palm (more on that later). Around the edges, panels pay further homage to the nation: a mauve barjeel wind tower, a dhow riding green waves, and seven gold stars for the emirates, balanced by blooming yellow Al Samer flowers. While a field of red dots on yellow nods to a favourite abaya fabric. And that list of cultural anchors barely scratches the surface of all the touchpoints the artist has incorporated into this one piece.

And what about that mirror?

The mirror was not in the original sketch Deesi shared. This matters, because she is a planner by profession and by temperament. She draws by hand, moves the sketch into Canva to select a palette, and then uses AI to trace the dimensions so a client can see the piece before it exists. “Usually I stick to the sketch and add, of course, the textures throughout the journey,” she says. Then, halfway through the piece she created for this cover shoot, she had an epiphany.

Dress, Abadia
Jumper, Cos

“It needed a little more texture, a little more of a link to the future, and I wanted it to be modern,” she says about her decision to update her original idea. What she landed on was the concept of reflection, in both senses. “We’re seeing our country flourishing, with all these new advancements, and changing year after year at such a fast pace. We’re seeing all of these transitions happen right before our eyes. So I thought a mirror would be a really nice symbol to pull it all together.” The addition makes even more sense when she later shares her father’s favourite saying, one she seems to have adopted as her own motto: the only constant is change.

The painting is, for a 45th anniversary issue, an almost unreasonably apt gift, and Deesi toiled night and day to create it in time for the shoot. When she describes the finished piece, the word she keeps returning to is busy. “We perceive the city as something that is quite busy. It’s a heavy piece. It’s a busy piece.” But the sentence she ends on could just as easily be about this magazine as about the city it has covered for four and a half decades. “We’re still cherishing it. We’re still growing. This is still the beginning.”

Dress, Abadia
Jumper, Cos

Truth be told, she has been making art for far longer than a year. Her mother is a pastry chef and wedding cake designer, and before that her mother’s family ran a wholesale fashion business, where as a child Deesi would turn up with drawings of accessories she hoped would be made. “I used to always do sketches of shoes, of different things, and then pitch them,” she says, laughing at her own nerve.

Painting proper began at university, as a way of processing things that were difficult to put into words, and then stayed a private pleasure for years: a sketchbook on holidays, portraits for friends’ houses and offices. “It really started because my family kept encouraging me. ‘You should do it, you should do it, you should do it,’ they would say, and at some point it was like a switch flipped in my mind,” says Deesi, who found herself with an almost physical need to paint.

Jacket, Bouguessa

“I was thinking, I want a creative outlet where I can express my own voice, my own originality,” she recalls. “And honestly, to just use my hands other than for typing. We’re so consumed with our laptops, our phones. So I thought it’s really time to explore this creative outlet on a canvas.”

The typing comes courtesy of a demanding day job. Deesi is acting head of marketing at the Dubai Future Foundation, where she has worked on Dubai AI Week, the Foundation’s first immersive installation at Alserkal Art Week, and the Dubai Future Forum at the Museum of the Future, and was named one of Campaign Middle East’s faces to watch last year. Far from resenting it, she is entirely unapologetic about loving the work. “I’m one of the very few people to say that I love my job,” she says. “They challenge you to be creative. They challenge you to do something new.” Her manager even pushes the team to build something outside the office. “He says, yes, work is work, but you guys have to do something on the side,” she says. “A lot of my colleagues are also abaya designers, fashion designers, artists, you name it.”

What she hadn’t accounted for when she started painting in earnest was the exposure. “Any art form is putting your views out there for the world to see and get that insight into who you are,” she says. “Especially as my paintings talk about feelings, mostly feelings of home, feelings of belonging. So that says a lot about a person.” Early on, Deesi’s work was mostly internal. “I have to definitely convince myself that this is my voice, and I have to be true to myself.”

Jacket, Studios I Am, Jumper: Sportmax

A major shift in the trajectory of her work came early on, thanks to a stranger on Instagram. A woman wrote to say that she kept returning to one of Deesi’s paintings, and specifically to the sun in it, which is one of a handful of motifs that recur across her work. “She told me that every time she looked at the painting, she had a sense of calm,” Deesi recalls. Then the woman, who was pregnant, asked for a custom piece for her future son.

She became Deesi’s first client. “That was the first time I felt comfortable calling myself an artist,” she admits. “I realised that just as I poured my joy and energy into each painting, I wanted that same feeling to resonate with whoever received it. I’ll never forget that moment. She was the one who set me on this journey.”

Anyone scrolling back through Deesi’s work on her website will notice how much her style has evolved. The early pieces were quite abstract, full of faces, mirrored and halved. Today her painterly style is bright, busy, layered with context, and unmistakably hers. Arriving at it took a while. “Sometimes you can end up going back and forth a million times before you land on something you think is you,” she shares. To help find her artistic voice, Deesi consulted art advisers. She experimented. And then the answer came from a place she least expected.

“Funny enough, I realise that my identity was starting to come together hearing it from others rather than myself,” she says. “Because when you’re painting, you’re so consumed in the work, and your hand starts doing the strokes without you realising it sometimes.” She describes watching her own style shift in real time, and making a deliberate choice about where it should land. “I loved the abstract pieces from my early work. But then, as I really started my art journey, I realised that I want my art to hang on people’s walls, and people want personal things on their walls.”

Jacket and trousers, Bouguessa
Top, Abadia

Which brings us to the central theme of her painting — belonging — the driving force underneath everything she makes. Deesi is a third-culture kid several times over: the UAE is home, her mother is Lebanese, her family’s origins are Palestinian, and she spent her university years in Lebanon. But ask her where she belongs and she doesn’t choose.

“This is my home. This is the home that I resonate with,” she says of the UAE, “and whether it’s traditions, whether it’s food, whether it’s clothing, whatever it may be, it is home and forever will be home,” she adds. From Lebanon she took something less tangible. “People are so happy, and they bring so much energy wherever they go. That’s something I think anyone who visits there feels.” From Palestine she took the olive trees that appear in her paintings, and a quality she names without hesitation: “defending your land, and really sticking up for what you love,” she says.

Dress, CDam

“It’s not only certain traditions that I pick up from the three cultures. It’s more feelings, and that’s what I portray in my paintings as well,” she adds. “You’re not belonging to a certain place. You’re belonging to multiple different places, and this is what makes you you.”

The motifs in her current work flow from all of this. Birds, which are “always a symbol of freedom. I love their movement. I love how free they are and what they carry with them.” Suns, for brightness. And houses, over and over, because the idea of home goes hand in hand with that of belonging.

Her writing has shifted, too. She used to write short poems and narratives to accompany each piece she posted on her website, which she now reads as the work of a younger, rawer person. “Before I was more overbearing with my narratives than I am now. Now I’m telling other people’s stories, whereas back then I was telling my own.”

Dress, Ralph Lauren
Shoes, Jimmy Choo

Telling other people’s stories, through commissions, is a part of the job many artists find frustrating. But Deesi adores it. “I want to bring an art piece to life through collaborations, through commissions. My ultimate goal is that I want to fill people’s homes,” she says. She is working now on a painting for a client whose cat has recently died, bringing together on canvas all of the animal’s favourite things, down to the crisp she used to be given on her birthday. “What brings me the most happiness is seeing the joy on the faces of the people I have worked with, for something that we created together.”

Her ambitions from here are enormous and slightly surreal, which suits her. Most notably, she wants, literally, to get inside her own work. “One of my dreams is to be able to perhaps walk into my painting, to make it a physical place you can step into.” She wants to collaborate with a lighting designer. She wants to work with fabric, stones, and metals “to see how they react with paint”. Her robotics engineer brother (one of three siblings) has suggested they make something together. And she has a credo her colleagues tease her for, which she repeats anyway, with total conviction. “The future is art,” she says matter-of-factly. “Art is not defined by one medium, but stretches across so many different mediums. And it’s still being created. We haven’t even seen what new mediums are going to appear.”

Dress, Ralph Lauren
Shoes, Jimmy Choo

“I just feel like it’s time for everyone to create,” Deesi says. “I don’t want it only to be about me. It’s time to use our hands. It’s time to make things happen.” She means all of it, not just painting. “Even if it’s jewellery, even if it’s perfume making, whatever it is. It connects us. It brings us together. It makes us rely on one another — it’s what makes us human.”

Senior Editor: Jessica Michault

Photographer: Greg Adamski

Fashion Stylist: Jade Chilton

Hair & Makeup: Kalina Kocemba

Videographer: John Melencion

Videographer’s assistant: Mohammed Jazim

Stylist Assistant: Rejie Lumaghan Tanghian

Editorial Assistants: Riya Kumar and Sai Prasanthi

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: emirateswoman.com