Painter. Observer. Turning lived experience into layered form.‍

Artist Talk is a series by Densi where we speak with artists about the intersections of life and practice. As artists ourselves, these conversations are an ongoing way of understanding how creativity takes root, and how we can continue to cultivate its power.

Born in Lagos, and having lived across London, Madrid and now New Jersey, Tariq Oliver is a painter whose work is shaped by a life lived across continents and cultures. He came to painting not through art school but through loss, through movement, through a gradual understanding of what he was always meant to be doing. Working primarily in oils, his canvases hold the weight of lived experience: grief, beauty, the emotional landscape of everyday life, all translated into vivid, layered form. He is a painter who trusts the process above all else, and lets the work tell him what it needs.

Art in three words: Inspiration, process, evolution.

On becoming —

"I've always felt like I was an artist in some way."

Tariq didn't arrive at painting through a single decisive moment. Nor did he take what would be considered a traditional route into the art world. He studied Banking and Finance, then Business Information Systems - a path that made sense on paper, even as something else was quietly pulling at him. 

"It wasn't really one sudden shift for me," he says. "There was a gradual change over time, even before anything major happened in my life, where I slowly became more drawn to creative work and less aligned with the path I had originally studied. After my dad passed, that shift became more defined and intentional - but I'd say the direction was already forming long before that. And honestly, I've always felt like I was an artist in some way."

On place —

"The masks change, but what's underneath is deeply familiar. That's majorly the thread in my work."

Lagos. London. Madrid. Three cities, three entirely different worlds - different languages, different rhythms, different ways of moving through life. And yet what Tariq took from all that movement wasn't a sense of difference, but of sameness. "Despite the different cultures and people, moving between those worlds really just taught me how universal our inner lives are," he says.

It's that universality that runs through his work. The loss of a loved one, he says, is something you carry with you forever, and it has been the biggest influence and a continued inspiration on his art, alongside the texture of everyday life. But it's never about reliving fixed memories. "There's always a shift in subject matter. Something sparks a series and ideas keep changing all the time," he says. "It's more so what the body holds. That residue is always there, just constantly changing shape." In translating his own experience into paint, he finds something that reaches far beyond the personal.

On process —

"It's in that space of discovery that unexpected forms, textures, and compositions emerge - things I wouldn't have planned."

Tariq works primarily in oils now, a shift from the broader range of materials he once used. But ask him how he decides what a painting needs, and he'll tell you honestly that he couldn't say. "It happens in the process," he says simply. "The work tells me."

He begins with an idea, a feeling - sparked by everyday life, by people and their emotional landscape, by what he notices - and then follows it. "I usually start with an idea or a feeling, but I never really know where it will go, so experimentation drives a lot of the process. I try different materials and techniques, and I let the process guide me as much as the concept." Sometimes, he says, "my work also comes from beautiful accidents - a lot of the time the paintings just come about naturally, almost before I fully understand them myself."

Something has shifted in recent years, a loosening, a letting go. "I think my work has evolved in ways I could never have planned," he says. "I trust the process more now and feel less concerned with controlling the outcome." There is something he is quietly exploring at the moment, something he is not ready to share yet. We'll be watching.

On residency —

"That experience opened up something I never expected."

Tariq didn't apply for his first residency. He won it. Participating in the CAN Art Fair in Ibiza, his work was recognised with the fair prize - which included a residency at CCA in Mallorca, Spain.

What he found there surprised him. New environment, new artists, new ways of seeing his own work. "It was such a great experience. Meeting talented artists and being in a completely new environment really inspired me. It gave me the chance to create in a different way and see my work from a fresh perspective." And then - unexpectedly - sculpture. Stefan Rinck, artist and "one of the coolest people on earth" according to Tariq, taught him how to sculpt. It was his first time. "Maybe that's something I'd love to explore someday," he says. A door opened.

Would he seek out a residency again? Absolutely. Without hesitation.

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See more of Tariq's work - here

Tariq Oliver on Artsy