About Alisha Taweel
Artist Bio
Alisha Taweel (b. 1997) is a painter based in Atlanta whose work centers on the quiet, often unnoticed behaviors of the natural world. Through a practice rooted in minimalism and observation, she explores the nuanced interactions of materials; most often water.
Born in Canada and raised in Nashville, Taweel studied glassblowing at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Though trained in three-dimensional craft, she eventually returned to painting, drawn to its quiet immediacy and its capacity for subtlety. Her background in glass continues to inform her process, particularly the tension between control and surrender that glass demands.
Taweel lives with ADHD, and her creative process is shaped by its demands. Working with restricted tools; a single color, a sheet of paper, she leans into simplicity as a method of grounding and focus. The results are layered, meditative works that unfold slowly, revealing complexity not through narrative but through sensation.
Artistic Origins
Much of my early life was spent indoors, wrapped in stillness. My parents, careful and protective, kept close watch over me as a girl. I went to school only two days a week; the rest of the time passed in a kind of suspended quiet, not unpleasant, but undramatic. My world was small, and so I learned to see it more deeply.
I’d sit on my bed and stare at the wall for what felt like hours watching how the paint caught light unevenly, how a patch of gloss shimmered beside the matte. I’d lie on the carpet and fixate on a single, rebellious fiber that didn’t lie flat. I wondered how it came to be there. I wondered whether gravity felt different for small things. I gave my attention to texture because texture was what I had.
The silence wasn’t empty, it was filled with questions. The wind, the clatter of a dying car in the distance, the hum of something unnameable. In college, I found myself doing the same thing; staring, sketching, responding to surface, letting shapes emerge from the subtle.
My work didn’t begin with ambition. It began with watching. And I’ve never really stopped.
Artist Statement
My paintings begin with behavior. Not mine but that of water, gravity, surface tension, and stillness. I’m interested in how materials move when left to themselves, how something subtle can feel enormous if you give it your full attention.
Rather than impose a vision, I start by listening to texture, to shape, to the quiet pressure of material. I work with minimal tools, often a single hue, often a single surface. I don’t aim to capture a moment of inspiration but to build a space where something quiet might unfold.
My process is slow. It asks for patience, softness, a kind of surrender. And what emerges is not a message or a symbol but a presence, a moment of interaction, suspended on paper.
I hope the work invites a kind of reverie. A pause. A sense of being with something you might not need to name.