Artist of the Month: September 2025
Artist and Architectural Designer
Based in Calgary, Alberta
Artist Bio
Fauzan is a self taught artist, and architectural designer based in Calgary. Carrying on this interest over the years, his signature expression is through large-scale oil paintings. His work blends realism with abstraction, crafting narratives that unfold with each brushstroke.
Inspired by nature and travel, he aims to capture the beauty of wildlife and landscapes while exploring and documenting diverse places' architectural contexts.
Fauzan, you’ve built a path as both an artist and an architectural designer. Can you tell us about your creative journey? How these two worlds came together, and how they continue to shape your art today?
Since the time I first learned to hold a pencil, I’ve had a passion for sketching—starting with drawing animals and birds on the walls of my home. Over time, this curiosity grew into a true passion as I explored different mediums such as graphite, watercolours, and charcoal, eventually moving into professional oil-on-canvas paintings. Alongside this, my background as an architectural designer has added another dimension to my creative journey—allowing me to design spaces for users and bring them. My knowledge in art helped me ace my architectural drawings and visual communication, while my skills in architecture helped me polish my skills of materiality, observation, scale and proportion. I continue to work in both fields, and they keep me driven to continue designing.
How does your background in architectural design influence your approach to structure, perspective, and storytelling within your paintings?
One of the fundamentals of architectural design is understanding the scale and proportions of spaces and its effect on the user. Diving into these observations really helps in sharpening your eye to details, composition, analyzing an object relative to the other, and understanding the relation of a subject and the backdrop.
While the aim of any painting might not specifically be storytelling, architecture drawings are a medium to convey information to someone. Architectural sketches help convey the concept to the client, Architectural presentation drawings are often used to convey to the design to the client or users, and construction drawings convey the details to the construction contractor. Visual communication is a completely different medium than textual or verbal communication, and my artistic skills have played a huge role in honing that part. I have been able to channel this strategy in making my paintings tell tales.
Much of your inspiration comes from wildlife and landscapes. Can you walk us through how a specific place or encounter with nature has directly shaped a painting?
Since childhood I was fascinated by seeing animals – birds, rabbits, cats, horses, especially during long drives in the outskirts of the city. My favourite activity while travelling was to look out the window throughout and somehow the shapes and forms in different elements of nature fascinated me. After the travel, I used to come home and sketch out the visuals from my observations – trees, farms, huts, and especially horses. This approach has led to not just one but many of my paintings. It’s like a live painting, but from memory.
What draws you to oil as your primary medium, and how does working with large-scale canvases change your relationship with the painting compared to smaller works?
I stumbled upon oil paintings because of the artist I look up to – M.F. Hussain. He was an influential figure in my journey so much so that I was given an unofficial title of Junior M.F. Hussain in my school. After doing countless number of pieces in graphite, watercolour, oil pastels, acrylic, I tried oil on canvas and have since been enjoying this medium. Some of the reasons behind sticking to oil on canvas have been the richness of the colours, ability to mix and blend and think along the process and the bold and prime results. Since the age of three I was drawing on large surfaces – walls, posters, whiteboards and I enjoyed the freedom that the large canvas provided me. It still gives me more freedom and makes the process of transferring my thoughts to lines smooth like butter.
You mentioned a focus on horse paintings. What do horses symbolize for you, and how do you bring out their character and movement on canvas?
This is the question I get asked everytime, and I haven’t found the perfect words to describe the reason yet. I have personally found horses to be really fascinating and elegant. It was always interesting to draw them and study their structure, behaviour, and motion. At a point of time in my life, the modernist artist – M.F. Hussain’s horses also inspired me. After working for a longtime with realism, I started blending abstract work, leveraging abstraction as a medium to paint motion and dynamics. This approach helps in finding ways to crafting thoughts in a still picture.
What personal strategies or turning points helped you overcome the challenges of understanding the local art scene as a newcomer and find your place in Alberta’s creative community?
New place comes with new challenges, mainly the challenge of building your base from scratch. Networking has helped me a lot to build connections and find like minded people. I don’t see networking as a professional development, rather, as an essential part of human nature – which is – socializing, getting to know people, share experiences, and make friends. I strongly believe relations go a long way and it is something that a person can really own, unlike materialistic elements in life. I stumbled upon ICAI and Calgary Arts Development, attended exhibitions, signed up for news letters on social media and these interactions have been the stepping stones to start my journey as an artist here.
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