Maria Badshamiah didn’t set out to fit any single mold. Her work is a reflection of a restless, deeply attuned creative mind—one that moves easily between mediums and ideas. From collectible glassware to fine art pieces, to custom fashion collaborations like those with Mr. Eikel Venegas, she’s never limited herself to one type of expression. Her recognition by The World of Interiors and the East Midlands’ Regional Heritage Award highlights the range and seriousness of her practice. But what sets her apart is not just skill or accolades—it’s the depth of her emotional approach. Maria, who identifies as neurodiverse, channels sensory perception and feeling into her work in a way that invites viewers to slow down and feel more. As a mentor, she encourages others to follow their emotional impulses in art, valuing mindfulness and creative exploration as much as finished results.
Maria’s mixed media image titled Cutar, in Malaga captures a sun-drenched hillside town in Spain with a loose, expressive style. Sized at 210 x 297 mm, the work uses oil pastels, colored pencil, and white pen to construct a vibrant tribute to a place that clearly left an impression on her. The piece reflects her frequent inspiration—travel, landscapes, and the act of looking carefully. Her layering of textures and color feels almost tactile, as if the town itself has been pieced together through memory and sensation rather than strict observation.
At first glance, Cutar, in Malaga is energetic. The roofs, walls, and towers are drawn in confident lines and shapes, but Maria avoids rigid realism. Instead, the architecture twists slightly, leaning into the natural rhythm of the hills. The terracotta roofs pop against bright yellows and deep reds. There’s joy in the inconsistency—a red wall meets a loosely drawn staircase, and windows float slightly off-center. This isn’t a town drawn to scale. It’s drawn to feeling.
Maria doesn’t aim for photorealism. She builds her scenes by layering different materials until the image feels right. In Cutar, the white pen lines add crispness where needed—on tile ridges, building outlines, tree leaves. This use of white both sharpens and lifts the image, letting it breathe. You can sense her hands moving across the surface, testing combinations, trying new textures until a balance is found.
The background mountains pulse with cool purples and green-gold shades. They don’t fade into the background—they lean forward, pressing into the village. This keeps the eye moving, almost like climbing the winding paths of Cutar itself. In this way, the piece is as much a sensory map as it is a landscape. It invites you to trace the view as if you were walking it.
Maria’s process is one of exploration. Color and texture do the heavy lifting, more than exact shapes. This makes her work feel intuitive and close, as if she’s building a connection between her internal experience and the outside world. Being neurodiverse, she speaks of connecting through sensation, and this artwork delivers that directly. You don’t just see the town—you feel its warmth, its closeness, its layered charm.
There’s also an emotional stillness that anchors the work. For all the energy in the colors, there’s a quietude that runs underneath—like sitting with a coffee on a sunlit terrace, just watching light move across the tiles. Her work often acts like this: an invitation to pause.
Though Maria’s practice stretches far beyond traditional painting—with projects in glass, fashion, and even mentoring—Cutar, in Malaga shows what happens when she brings everything back to the basics of place and memory. It’s deceptively simple at first: a charming Spanish village on a hill. But the more you look, the more you pick up—on the layering, on the choices, on the way the scene hums slightly under the surface. This is her strength: creating work that moves visually and emotionally at once.
Maria Badshamiah’s art doesn’t try to overpower. It resonates. Through her careful layering of media and attention to how a place feels rather than just how it looks, she offers something lasting. Cutar, in Malaga is not just a postcard moment—it’s a memory shared, a texture felt, a glimpse of a world that’s both familiar and made new by her hands.
