Nashid Chroma
‘I feel like my ultimate goal right now is to just be the best artist I can be and continue to produce things that I feel proud of while challenging myself’


Evan Dale // October 18, 2024
The sun was starting to fall in between buildings of the tall Toronto skyline. It was early evening late in Summer when Nashid Chroma and his lovely life, Afsha welcomed us to their home and studio where the visual artist - with influences bore equally into his Bangali roots and his affinity for hip-hop and R&B - lives and creates.
You've likely seen his work before, even if his name isn't ringing a bell just yet. Vivid colors and floral patterns underline and overlay some of our era's most influential musicians and public figures. And in so many ways, his vibrant understanding of color and detail feels musical in and of itself, speaking with emotionality on the subjects he admires and paints.
Ever since abandoning a traditional career for a life where he can explore a true passion for art that plays at the intersection of what art can mean through the widest of lenses, he's not only found purpose, but success. And yet, nothing is ever perfect.
Evolution drives his yearning to continue creating, but the social media era and the stranglehold of the algorithm leaves him with an audience that runs the risk of being one dimensional.
For an hour or two, we spoke about his roots both in Toronto and Bangladesh and the cultural confusion that sometimes infuses in him personally and creatively. We also spoke on his love of music and food, his business accumin, his growth as an artist, and the desire to expand his artistic breadth without sacrificing what he's built.
NASHID CHROMA: Welcome to Toronto, man. Grateful that you had reached out to me because I feel like the insight that you're able to gauge into an artist's work… it is deep. I feel like I felt seen through your words and it's an incredible feeling to have someone actually recognize some of the more like abstract or behind the scenes things and this is the stuff that you're articulating. Yeah, without having ever met me like that was your take just off of a visual and a few words exchanged. To me, that spoke to this aesthetic sensibility of yours. You're able to look at something and kind of unpack the layers. And, yeah, no, I appreciate what you do. Welcome to my home. And I'm excited to have this conversation with you.
RINGLEADER: Yeah, thanks for having us. It's people like you that makes it easy for us to do what we do, you know?
And I think too, there are so many points of visual art that is incredibly broad, but I think we obviously share a lot of similar passions, even though I’m not an artist. Obviously your attachment to music and your attachment to really particular corners of music make it easy for me to try to articulate the work that you do in a story like we had written. I think it was always kind of a natural fit. When I first came across your work I was like, ‘oh this is really cool, all of these artists that this visual artist is representing in his art are people that I look up to, that I cover or that, you know, make incredible waves and push the envelope a lot in their own spaces.’
Visual art is amazing. It's really hard to cover, but if you kind of have a similar space to source it from, like me as someone consuming your art, then I think it's easier to articulate what it means to me. And that probably aligns a little bit to what it means to you just because of a natural affinity for music, or whatnot.
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah. It's a shared interest.
RINGLEADER: So for you, what goes back further? A visual artist or someone who just clearly loves music – a fan?
NASHID CHROMA: It was art first. Throughout my whole life I've been drawing. I moved a lot as a kid, so I think that kind of solidified my relationship with art.
It was always me with a piece of paper and a pencil or a marker, whatever it was. Because it was hard to make connections. In each spot I've lived at since I was like 4 years old, I've lived at for a year or less, up until the time I was in grade 6. And then at that point, I was a little bit of like an awkward person.
In grade 6 is when I started developing my love for music. Before that I don't think I really had a connection to it personally, it was just whatever was on the radio. It didn't make sense at that age, but then I met this group of guys who were obsessed with Linkin Park.
And for me to join their friend group, they made me memorize like eight Linkin Park songs.
RINGLEADER: That's a good test. A tough test, haha.
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, exactly. It was pretty intense. But, think that through the community aspect of music, I learned to appreciate, how much of an impact music can have. And I started producing music as a couple of them were interested in that too.
I went by DJ Fusion. And I maintained that alias in undergrad where I was DJing a little bit, I joined a DJ club and I DJ’ed a few parties and I thought that would be my way to keep this love of music alive. But I was also studying art at Waterloo – at the University of Waterloo.
RINGLEADER: Was that what you majored in undergrad?
NASHID CHROMA: I majored in art and minored in psychology. And I knew I wanted to get into architecture. I had a plan to get into architecture out of high school, but I didn't get into the University of Waterloo, and they had offered me urban planning as an alternative, so I originally went to school for that, just so I could leave my family home, get some space for myself. In my second semester, it was not what I thought it was going to be.
So, I took an art elective in my second semester and I had tried to get back into architecture because they accept like four to five students every year from first year. And I had made it further in the process, but I still didn't make it and I didn't make it 'cause my portfolio was weak and that was shocking to me because I thought I was a great artist at that time.
So, in my last two years, I did predominantly sculpture. I was doing these wooden sculptures wrapped with these floral fabrics to speak to my Bengali Canadian diaspora. I got into U of T for my Masters in architecture and that was an intense program. I really disliked it. I felt very isolated.
I never really felt like I belonged, but I thought maybe it would get better once I started working.
But, there was kind of the segue into, ‘all right, you know what? Everything that I'm thinking of doing is this art derivative. It's what I think will give me the fulfillment that art has provided me, but the stability of a real occupation. I figured if what I'm chasing is the fulfillment that art gives me, I should maybe try dedicating a year of my life, at least, to art.'
And that's when I had committed to a daily art production challenge, where I made a piece on Procreate every day and I was posting it to Instagram. I had seen this guy on YouTube talk about how he did a daily poster design challenge and by the end of the year he grew his account from zero to 30k and started getting recruited by his dream design agencies in New York.
So that was like the template for my motivation. By the end of 2020, I was still working my architecture job at the time but being in lockdown definitely helped 'cause I was no longer commuting. I used to live in my family home in Scarborough, which is maybe a 45 minute to an hour train ride in.
So, I was saving two hours a day. It helped so I could just grind on all of these things. I learned how to do digital marketing. I learned how to set up a Shopify store. I learned social media and my art got a lot better. I lost my job in 2020 and that was kind of the start of doing art full time.
By the end of 2020, I picked up something like 17,000 followers. And everything kind of felt like was falling into place. I mean, it was shitty losing my job. But it could be an opportunity. And I haven't looked back. It's been almost four years now of doing this professionally and it's amazing.
'Right now, when anyone asks me what my favorite pieces are, it's a very challenging question, but there are certain pieces that I feel like I latch onto because they're instrumental in defining a certain aesthetic or intention along my journey'
RINGLEADER: Yeah, that's a really legit time frame to be proud of to be able to do something like that as your career. It's really hard to get to the point where that's even a feasible Idea, so that's commendable for sure.
NASHID CHROMA: Thank you. It's officially the longest job I've held.
RINGLEADER: ‘Independent Artist’ is a pretty cool title to have as your longest standing one.
A little bit of structure was really valuable when all of that happened too - the pandemic I man. I feel the same way about doing what I have always been doing with the mag. It gave me a sense of direction when a lot of people were just floating without gravity.
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah. Every piece you make is a little bit more experience towards leveling up. And I feel like my ultimate goal right now is to just be the best artist I can be and to continue to produce things that I feel proud of while challenging myself. And I feel like everything that I've been doing, and I'm proud of this, has met those criteria. I feel like I'm starting to get to a point where things are even starting to feel a little bit repetitive.
I feel like there's a lot of expectation of what I should be producing. And, despite all that, I feel like I'm trying to experiment and do different things, like reincorporating traditional media back into my work. If you guys have a chance, my show is still going on until the end of September.
It’s over here at the Riverdale Hub. It's in the Little India neighborhood of Toronto. And it's a crazy gallery because it's tucked away. You wouldn't even think that there was a gallery there. But I grew up going there to Girard Street as a kid.
I got my hair cut there. We would eat food at the restaurant across the street, La Hortica House. So when David, the curator, had reached out to me and told me the location, I was really astonished that there was an art gallery there the whole time. So it felt like a really cute intersection of like my past and my present.
He had asked me, because they're also a charity for South Asian immigrants, if I wanted to do something that was inspired by some sort of South Asian imagery. So I had painted Joy Crooks. I don't know if you're familiar with her – she's a British R&B singer, but her heritage is half Bengali and half Irish.
I've wanted to paint it for a long time. I got to see her at Coachella, and she was incredible. And I have this pride of being a Bengali person, so that felt like a great opportunity and for this piece - everything that you see on these walls right now have been painted digitally in Procreate. But for this piece, I had painted her face and her body digitally and I left the flowers blank so I could paint with oil. It's very cool. And I had done two other pieces like that.
So this show is special to me because it's not only in this sweet spot where I grew up, but it's also – I feel like it showcases some monumental pieces in my catalog. Right now, when anyone asks me what my favorite pieces are, it's a very challenging question, but there are certain pieces that I feel like I latch onto because they're instrumental in defining a certain aesthetic or intention along my journey.
Like the first Mac piece that I had done, the After Hours piece that I'd done of The Weeknd, the Blonded piece – all for various reasons. The After Hours piece was my first real pop culture piece. I'm a huge Weeknd fan and he turned out to be from here which is beautiful in its own light. He went to the high school that's a 10-minute walk from my house.
RINGLEADER: I’m an R&B kid as you know, so I’m all for it.
RINGLEADER: In what ways do you think your background as being Bengali has helped influence you as an artist?
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, I think my love of color probably comes from the clothes that my mom was dressing me in. Seeing the clothes that she was wearing, I thought she was so beautiful growing up. Like the clothes that my whole family was wearing. And on top of that, I love Yu Gi Oh cards, and I do think the holographic element to Yu Gi Oh cards was something that was also really special to me growing up.
And it wasn't a conscious decision to pick flowers, you know, or colors. It was as I was doing the daily challenge, I had to pick reference images. Flowers stood out to me because I couldn't spend too long designing. It was just pick something, paint it, post it. And for the first month or so, what I was focused on was just doing black and white portraits because I wasn't good at portraits and I wasn't good at reading value.
I just printed this out. The idea with this is kind of reverse engineering my current process where I will digitally collage my final design and then paint my reference image from scratch. Everything is kind of already set in place. With this, what I want to do is in an attempt to try and make the process feel more fun again, to not kill myself on the design stage at the beginning, just find reference images like the initial part of the design challenge, paint them, and then collage the physical assets afterwards and draw and paint on top.
So this is the first kind of execution of that concept. And this one's not going to be a musician, it's going to be a figure drawing that's in the art community on Instagram. Uh, there's this thing called Drawing Senior Style Challenges. So, are you familiar with that?
RINGLEADER: No, I’m not. Tell me more.
NASHID CHROMA: So, I used to do that a lot once I felt comfortable.
So I'm kind of revisiting that because it allows me to re-engage with the art community on Instagram. While also being able to loosen up, interpret someone's hard work, and turn it into my own thing. It kind of removes a little bit of that friction. But I'm working on a scissor piece right now, and I want to try and employ the techniques from this piece into that.
The final result will look like what you see on the walls, a portrait with floral and other adornments. And this one I actually took elements from SZA’s cntrl album, like the computer monitors and stuff. And it's nice because I can just like paint those elements and figure out how to collage them after.
RINGLEADER: Do you still find yourself doing daily things or are you at a space now where you don't feel like you have to anymore and you can just dive into a piece that you really want to do? And it's not necessarily just content for content's sake?
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, it kind of does fall into that space. There's still a balancing act. I mean, yeah repetition is an element of every creator’s process, but it doesn't have to be daily. I think I'm getting into a cadence. Right now, my output's maybe like one piece every couple of months, which is just a little bit slow for what I want to be producing.
And it also kind of kills the engagement across social platforms, which is frustrating. The whole algorithm is crazy. But my wife, Afsha, does all the content right now for the brand. And all the filming, editing, research. It's a lot of work and it's nice to have an ally in this whole endeavor. But at the same time, if I'm not making art, there's less content to produce. So then, if I'm not making art, it kind of puts a bottleneck on everything. What I have been able to prove though is, I don't have to be making a lot of art for this business to run successfully. Which was something that I was always curious of. Like, do I have to be grinding all the time to make income? But going live and talking to all your followers and stuff - or even just making a piece every week or whatever, you know? So that's been nice to understand.
And yeah, there's a lot of business stuff that's going on right now too. Before I was doing print on demand, so I was using Printful to fulfill all of the orders. And that was great because I could just focus on making art and I didn't have to think about the logistics and all that. But now we're printing like a hundred percent of the orders from here.
RINGLEADER: Damn, that's great.
NASHID CHROMA: Thank you. We have two guys who come in and help with the printing and packaging. So yeah, the business side of things has been flourishing. The infrastructure has taken a lot of time to set up, but we're trying to build it from the ground up.
'One of the things with digital art is that it's frowned upon, but a lot of people also frowned upon pop art and pop culture art'
RINGLEADER: The business side of things is the toughest aspect of it all. Just to pull everything together when it comes to sourcing and printing – whether its for art or clothing – is such a hurdle to figure out and to expense.
NASHID CHROMA: For sure. Like, I think the other aspect of my personality – and I'm sure the people who follow me might have a sense of it – but I've always been very entrepreneurial.
Let me show you guys the studio.
RINGLEADER: Yeah, this whole place is sick, man. A home and a studio with a separation of space that still seamlessly transitions from one to the other. It’s fluid, and the light is insane.
NASHID CHROMA: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. So yeah, I can show you – this is the iPad I work on. I was talking to Afsha about this, but one of the things I really miss when I first moved out of my place in Scarborough – I was essentially living in a closet on the third floor of a skinny Toronto house – but it had a brick wall.
And it was very cozy and I was just in bed all the time on the iPad grinding away. And now I don't have a nook like that and I'm trying to figure out how I can reestablish that into my working environment or spaces that I’m productive in. So, I've been working on the couch a little bit more just to loosen it up ‘cause I remember back then, even though it was hard, it didn't feel like work, you know?
Right now it feels like work. So, the thing that I'm really trying to tap into is how do I make this fun? Fun and productive is that sweet spot that we were trying to float in. And it's so hard to get there sometimes because trying to be so professional about it takes out the fun.
And then when you're having so much fun, you're like, ‘I'm just doing this for me.’ That's not really for what we want to do. I think that's the beauty and the fun of what we – everyone in this space – kind of tries to do, you know, just going back and forth. The unfortunate aspect is that simply sometimes it's not going to be fun.
RINGLEADER: Yeah. You’ve got to push through those periods of time and work and get something done. The creative process in general is always nice when looking back because the outcome is fun, and hopefully something you can stand on. The vision from the outside is really cool and it looks like of course it had to have been fun. But yeah, you're going to have those really difficult, tumultuous spaces where it's like, ‘I need to do this, I have to push through it,’ but it's really hard.
And sometimes you push through something and it's really hard and you come out the other side and it just didn't turn out. It's one of those things, you know. You're going to have those times and those spaces where you're trying to get something done, but if you’ve gotta do it, and you force it, you can tell that it was forced.
NASHID CHROMA: Consistency is definitely the common denominator in everything. Like I have talks about discontinuing my entire catalog 'cause I feel frustrated sometimes with the expectations that people have of me - what they want me to produce and the style that I'm working on, when I have all these other ideas in my head, and that'd be really fun just to explore. But then this is still a business and it's supporting our livelihood and so I have to be strategic about it and that's where, even though I might be getting a little bit bored with the style, how can I re-ignite it with like something interesting for myself to make it fun, but then also discover new aesthetics? One of the things with digital art is that it's frowned upon, but a lot of people also frowned upon pop art and pop culture art when they were first bubbling up.
So, I'm doing both. The digital art in a fine art space. It's difficult to gain rapport in certain spaces because of the openness of it. There's no exclusivity. So when NFTs were kind of circulating, they gave digital art a platform. Some merit people can invest in, own it.
NASHID CHROMA: Afsha and I had done a collage workshop at this magazine store in Toronto and that was the first time where I had tried to cut things out and then draw on a pop up. And that led to me wanting to execute a more refined, polished version of that concept with the flowers you saw out there. And then it clicked that I can maybe try to do that. I feel like I'm in a really good creative space where I'm executing ideas that I'm tapping into. I really want to re-explore fabrication techniques. I was super into that in architecture school, like 3D printing, laser cutting, and Grasshopper.
Parametric design is so fascinating to me. And I was always thinking about how I can bring the two things together. I've done this piece – I don't think I've published it anywhere – I show it to people who I like. But this is a parametric surface. And I've found a spot that has full color 3D printing.
So, I projected the piece onto the surface, and I'll have to print it out. And this was iteration one of that idea. I still haven't mounted it, but I don't know how to mount it. I want it to be on the wall. I want it to be a surface because it then also alludes to an acoustic panel for sound dampening.
And then that speaks to my love of music. And I was like, ‘what if I did this series of really cool abstract flowers that are also music dampeners that you can see in the studio space. Yeah, I don't know. It's all these ideas, but I finally have the mental space to execute them.
RINGLEADER: I'm sure you get the question all the time about artists that you want to paint that you haven't done yet. If you could pick anyone – a musician, an artist, an architect, who would you want to add to your collection?
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, I feel like there have been pieces I’ve always wanted to do. Like Burna Boy is someone that I really want to paint. And I have done a piece of Burna, but it was in an older style and it would be really cool to explore a piece again with some of the new technical skill sets that I have.
I want to do some tennis pieces. I grew up playing in high school, and I was on the tennis club at Waterloo so that is something I’d like to explore.
And one of the drawing series that I had done in undergrad was – I don't know if you're familiar with this artist – is name is Ivan Shavrin. He does these, like, really distorted, anatomical drawings and paintings of his friends. And it speaks on the human condition as if we’re all creatures.
I was also drawing athletes in signature attack positions in that style. And it would be really cool to hone in on tennis as something meaningful to my experience, but explore it with all of these art tools that I have discovered and created along the way.
I also wanted to paint Anthony Bourdain and some other chefs because I'm a foodie and it’d be great to celebrate culinary arts through visual art. One of my first digital pieces before the Daily Challenge, was of this guy named Chen. He has a restaurant now, but back then he was working out of this open kitchen in a bar, and he does Nashville Szechuan hot chicken.
And so I had done this painting of him, and this was before, you know, I had any kind of rapport as an artist. But yeah, that was something so naturally inspiring that I acted on it. It was one of those things where you can't rest until you do it.
I think it'd be sick to like actually invite artists into my space that I really respect. I would love to do a portrait of The Weeknd, but have a kind of interactive process. Like this piece would be a co-production between myself and him. That would be really cool to actually work with these people that I draw so much inspiration from.
One of my other goals is to be the resident artist of a music festival. Design all the merch or if I could even design one of those really big sculptures on the grounds. I would love to make that happen in the next five years.
So yeah, the sweet spot of getting work done, which is stuff that people want to see me make, while also making sure that I carve out time to have fun and explore new ideas. I always want to feel like I'm being authentic.
RINGLEADER: For sure. You're gonna feel it in your art if you're not, you know?
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, exactly. I don't want to feel like a factory or a machine, just doing stuff for other people's likes.
RINGLEADER: If you start to explore chefs and athletes like you just talked about, I think in that space at least, you’ll get a little bit of reprieve from feeling like you're producing a lot of the same stuff that people want. It’ll still feel new to you in some way, refreshing to you.
How did your like family take it when you decided to change paths from something more traditional and structured like architecture to art?
NASHID CHROMA: When I was studying art, my parents were so angry. They hated that. They did not trust the vision, and respectfully so. Sure, I'm telling you some crazy far-fetched idea, and I get the skepticism that comes with that.
While I was working, after I graduated, I had talked to a bunch of people at the firm, ranging in ages from, you know, a few years older than me to much, like 10, 15, 20 years older than me. Just to see what their experience was like? Is it generally happy? Have you enjoyed it? Do you have any regrets? And the general sentiment was not happy. Obviously, the bias is that this was a particular type of firm. So, I don't know what that experience would be like at a different firm.
But, with that data, it strangely made me feel a little more secure. Like, ‘if I leave this. And it doesn't work out, it's only a year of my life. No one's gonna take an architecture degree away from me. I could find another job.’
My relationship with my parents is a little bit strained. My dad is very proud now and sort of talks to everyone about what I do. But then he will also still make sure to remind people that I was an architectural engineer. It’s like, ‘you can't have your cake and eat it too.’
RINGLEADER: Parents are tough. First generation parents are even tougher. And parents that moved from another place for new opportunities are bound to be the toughest when it comes to their children’s career trajectory and stuff like that.
NASHID CHROMA: I think being born in Bangladesh is what also creates this ethnic confusion in me because, I don't know, even though I have no idea what the culture there was like when I was born – or what it's like now – I do know that it's also a completely different landscape. I have this connection to it. I think just out of this loyalty to being born on the soil. So, that's something that I wish to explore as well – my identity and maybe more geopolitical stuff.
RINGLEADER: When was the last time you went back?
NASHID CHROMA: The last time I went back was 2012. It's changed so much. I'd like to go back again soon though. One of my friend's cousins is a teacher there, and she has some interesting connections to artists, prolific artists in the country. So we had a conversation about having me go out there to speak at the university.
RINGLEADER: That would be an amazing opportunity.
NASHID CHROMA: Yeah, for sure. Potentially a little confusing for everyone, but it would be special. Aside from that, plenty of other things I want to continue working towards and a lot of cool work hopefully coming soon.
RINGLEADER: Well, we’ll keep an eye out. Thank you and Afsha so much for hospitality and showing us your home and studio.
NASHID CHROMA: Of course. Thank you guys for coming to my home.