Charmaine Hussain is a contemporary visual artist and interdisciplinary thinker whose abstract paintings explore the unseen terrains between fracture and wholeness, perception and reality.
Calling herself a liminal cartographer, she paints maps of fertile voids that exist between binaries—spiritual, psychological, and cultural—inviting viewers to linger in the charged spaces that resist simple resolution.
ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES
Hussain was born into an esoteric branch of Islam rooted in Egyptian Fatimid-era philosophy. Her worldview is shaped by a lineage of astronomers, Sufi mystics, mathematicians, and poets—each of whom sought knowledge not merely as information, but as illumination.
This intellectual inheritance, paired with her analytical training—a BA in English Literature and Social Psychology from Stanford and an MBA from Kellogg—ground her practice in both critical rigor and spiritual curiosity.
FROM STRATEGY TO STUDIO
Before devoting herself full-time to painting, Charmaine spent two decades leading branding and strategy at firms like Clorox, Bain & Company, Franklin Templeton, Armor All, and Coca-Cola.
Here Charmaine honed her ability to decode cultural patterns, emotional truths, and archetypal narratives—skills she now uses to construct conceptual frameworks for her art.
Her mixed-media paintings, often anchored by rippled circles and void-like forms, serve as visual meditations on what we fear, forget, or fragment in the search for meaning.
These days, Charmaine paints from her studio in San Francisco Bay Area, built directly on the restless seam of the Hayward Fault.
This geography of instability—tectonic, cultural, and personal—infuses her work with tension and transformation.