My art was featured on MTV

As a child, Murtuza Hussain would doodle in his notes and on tests but didn’t get the real opportunity to explore art until high school. During his senior year, he started to experiment with graphic art, photoshop, and make logos and flyers.

When it came time to apply to colleges, Murtuza told his family that he didn’t want to pursue a field in science like his father but instead take up art. Luckily his parents were very supportive and Murtuza is now a senior in Mason Gross with a Visual Arts Concentration in Media.

For the past three years, Murtuza has been working on a specific art form that uses colors on opposite sides of the spectrum to create 3D art. It all started when he was drawing a skull and thought how cool would it be to do the same drawing in three different colors. Murtuza noticed how trippy it looked when put together.

After some research, he discovered that when the colors he used (red, blue, black and white) were merged, your brain interprets them a certain way causing them to look as if they are popping out.

For the next year, he went through trial and error to try and find the correct variation of the colors he needed as well as incorporate math to figure out the distance between them. Murtuza’s first piece that he was able to do this with was Walter White from Breaking Bad.

“I realized that this is cool because it is an experience for the viewer now. Its more than a painting on the wall. Its more than a 2D experience, it’s me and the painting interacting now coming into a 3D world.”

A friend of Murtuza’s who works in the MTV news department reached out to him to see if he minded if she pitched his art work to producers for a story proposal. A few days later, MTV reached out to him saying they loved his work. An article was released on Snapchat and MTV.com the following week for the whole world to see.

“Being asked to be interviewed by them was very humbling because it is something that I have been working on for the past couple of years now,” he said.

After the MTV article was published, Murtuza was contacted by global blogs and magazines, news stations and his instagram account was getting more attention.

(photo above is a Moroccan blog that covered Murtuza’s art)

Murtuza still has to work hard to achieve his art despite all the attention he has recently received.

“Drawing it out in terms of difficulty is really hard because you aren’t drawing it once you are drawing it three times. You have to have it executed in your head before everything and I think people aren’t trying this angle because it is very trippy and abstract. Colors have to be very specific. 3D glasses have a specific color that the artists need to use for it to work. It took awhile to find the paints and brushes that would have the right effect.”

Murtuza can only paint for an hour straight before he has to take a break to relax. The combination of the paint overlay and the glasses will give him massive headaches and cause his eyes to freak out.

The 3D art can be time consuming taking anywhere from 15 – 40 hours to complete depending on the size. Murtuza finds the time to work on his art after classes at the Mason Gross’s painting studio where he sometimes stays until 1am. He hopes to be able to showcase his work in a gallery soon and is in the planning process.

“I hope that people can see [from the gallery] that there is more to art than a picture on the wall. It’s more about interaction, it’s more about experience. Art can be manifested in so many different ways. The goal has always been to be make something different and more unique experience. I think a 2D picture on the wall is great but how can we take that a step further and make that more of an experience. I think art should show people your thoughts , ideas, your personality and I think this is a great way of doing that.”

To see more of Murtuza’s work follow his art Instagram account or see his work on prints, stickers and shirts @TrashwaterInc