Interview · By Stanislav Arnautov · Berlin · 14 min read
Quick answer: Expressive portrait art cares less about a perfect likeness than about what a face carries: tension, contradiction, a feeling you recognise before you can name it. Ziva Hardaway, the artistic alter ego of France-based illustrator and graphic novelist Chadrac Ndombe Lutela, works this way in India ink, charcoal and digital painting. Below, he talks about Egon Schiele, drawing strangers on the Paris metro, his narrative approach Érosion, and why the tall, narrow shape of a skateboard deck suits the human figure.
He was ten, in Angola, when he asked his uncle, a fine arts student, to teach him to draw, and was told he would be taught to observe instead. Today, as Ziva Hardaway, he makes expressive portrait art in India ink, charcoal and digital painting: ink portrait drawing shaped by Egon Schiele and by the faces he sketches on the Paris metro almost every day.
Ziva Hardaway is the artistic alter ego of Chadrac Ndombe Lutela, a France-based illustrator, artist and graphic novelist who began drawing at the age of ten in Angola. Influenced by Egon Schiele and H. Craig Hanna, his work explores the human figure, emotional contradictions and the beauty of imperfection through expressive ink drawings, charcoal and digital painting. His narrative approach, Érosion, examines human tragedy, irreversible choices and the ways people learn to live with their consequences.
We asked him ten questions. His answers are long and considered, so we kept them almost exactly as he wrote them. Follow his work on Instagram: @chad.hardawayy, and see his portfolio.
Learning to observe before learning to draw
To start, could you tell us a little about yourself? How did you first get into drawing, and when did Ziva Hardaway come into the picture?
My name is Chadrac Ndombe Lutela, also known as Ziva Hardaway. I'm an artist, illustrator and graphic novelist.
I started drawing at the age of ten, in Angola, shortly before moving to France with my mother.
I wasn't a particularly talkative child. But I watched everything: people, their expressions, their gestures, the way they behaved when they thought no one was looking. At the time, I wasn't even attending school, but I had already understood that observation was a kind of language I could teach myself.
My uncle was studying at a fine arts school in Angola. One day, I asked him to teach me how to draw. He said something that has stayed with me ever since: "I'm not going to teach you how to draw. I'm going to teach you how to observe. And from there, you'll learn how to draw on your own."
Every two or three days, he would give me small portraits he had drawn on the backs of cardboard matchbox sleeves. I treasured them. That was how two passions that are still part of my life today began: drawing and collecting cards.
I find it rather ironic that my relationship with art began on scraps of cardboard that would ordinarily have been thrown away.
As for Ziva Hardaway, she came into my life much later, about two years ago, when I finally allowed myself to embrace the idea of becoming an artist and a writer. I no longer wanted to simply draw pictures. I wanted to tell stories, create characters, develop graphic novels, and build my own narrative language.
“I'm not going to teach you how to draw. I'm going to teach you how to observe.”
— Ziva Hardaway
I call this language 'Érosion' ('Erosion').
It's an approach to writing that explores human tragedies, the contradictions within individuals, and, above all, those choices that lead us to a point of no return. What interests me isn't just tragedy itself, but how a human being continues to live after making an irreversible decision.
When I write, I generally begin with a pivotal scene. A decisive moment around which the entire story will take shape. From there, I observe my characters, their reactions, and the consequences of their decisions.
That's where Ziva enters the picture.
Ziva Hardaway is my female alter ego. She has a strong personality, sometimes provocative, more daring, and certainly less reasonable than I am. She dares to write things Chadrac might hesitate to say. She challenges my ideas, pushes them until their contradictions come to light, and, in a way, judges me too.
When I write, Ziva takes over. When I draw, Chadrac Ndombe Lutela, or Chad Hardaway, takes back control.
One tempers the other's intensity. They contradict each other, complement each other, and work together. I wanted to explore the duality we all carry within ourselves: the coexistence of reason and impulse, restraint and boldness, what we show the world and what we keep hidden.
Ultimately, Ziva isn't a mask I hide behind. She's a way of giving a voice to a part of me that would otherwise remain silent.
And when I think about it, all of this takes me back to my childhood. I was a boy who spoke very little but observed a great deal. Today, I've simply found two different ways of telling the world what I see.
Egon Schiele inspired art and the honesty of India ink
Your work has a lot of character, with expressive faces and figures and bold ink textures. What draws you most to this kind of imagery?
I think what attracts me most is the uniqueness of human beings. A face, a body, a posture can tell us so much, sometimes even more than words.
I have been deeply influenced by the work of Egon Schiele, particularly his way of representing bodies, their tensions, their fragility, and their imperfections. There is something profoundly human in his drawings. The bodies aren't necessarily trying to be beautiful; they almost seem to be trying simply to exist.
I also greatly admire the work of H. Craig Hanna, an American artist represented by Laurence Esnol Gallery in Paris. His approach to portraiture and the human figure has shaped the way I think about drawing. Both artists have taught me, each in their own way, that a single line can express far more than a simple anatomical shape.
I work mainly with India ink, but I also use charcoal and digital painting. Each medium opens up a different kind of sensitivity.
What particularly interests me about India ink is its honesty. It allows me to intensify contrasts, emphasize certain anatomical tensions, and give bodies more character. There's also something irreversible about it: once a line has been drawn, you generally have to live with it. I like that constraint. It makes you own your decisions.
Charcoal gives me something more instinctive, powdery, almost physical. Digital painting, on the other hand, allows me to experiment more freely with colors, lighting, and atmosphere.
Over the past few years, a large part of my portrait work has also been rooted in a period when I quite literally fell in love with women's faces.
I'm not just talking about beauty in the conventional sense. I was constantly amazed by how viscerally beautiful certain faces could be when you truly took the time to look at them.
A slight asymmetry, a tired expression, a distant gaze, a mouth held a little too tightly... Details that might seem insignificant, yet sometimes give a face its entire uniqueness.
I believe we look at a great many faces without ever truly observing them. We often try to immediately recognize something beautiful, whereas what interests me sometimes only reveals itself after several minutes of attention.
And then there is what a face conceals. An expression can be both sincere and deceptive at the same time. Someone can smile while carrying a profound sadness. It is this contradiction that I love trying to capture.
So I'm not simply trying to faithfully reproduce someone's features. I'm trying to understand what makes their presence unique, what they reveal, and what they seem to be holding back.
Ultimately, my work remains quite close to what my uncle taught me when I was a child: learning how to observe. The difference is that today, I'm no longer simply trying to understand what I'm looking at, but also what it awakens in me.
How a piece begins: ambiguity over the obvious
How does a new piece usually begin for you? Is it a character, an emotion, a story, or simply an image that comes to mind?
Creating a new artwork almost never begins with just one thing for me. It might come from a photographic reference, an emotion, a scene from a film, a silhouette, a gaze, or even a feeling that is harder to put into words.
What particularly interests me are complex emotions, those that almost seem contradictory. I like images that allow several interpretations at once, creating a feeling suspended somewhere between tenderness and discomfort, beauty and tension, presence and absence.
If I want to represent a particular emotion, I don't necessarily want to rely solely on facial expressions, which I sometimes find too obvious, almost too easy. I often prefer to work with more discreet elements, things that are less immediately readable.
It might be a strand of hair falling in a certain way, a slightly unstable posture, the tilt of a neck, an unusual composition, or a detail that initially seems insignificant but eventually suggests something else. Through certain angles or tensions in the body, it is possible to convey a profound sense of melancholy without ever expressing it directly.
I don't like the obvious. I like to unsettle the first reading of an image, or rather, to create the illusion, at first glance, that an image is simple, only for other, more subtle messages to emerge when someone returns to it.
I believe I'm less interested in providing answers than in raising questions. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that answers are always the most interesting part. Sometimes they close something off, while the right questions open up a much deeper space.
I'm quite attached to the idea that certain answers only emerge through new questions. The longer we look at an image, the more I believe it should shift our perspective rather than reassure us.
That's also why my artworks are often built around an inner tension: they appear simple, but they try to hold something else beneath the surface.
In that sense, an artwork rarely begins with just an image. It begins, above all, with a vibration, a disturbance, a silent question that I then try to make visible.
Storytelling, and letting an artwork go
I'm curious about the role storytelling plays in your work. Do you usually have a specific meaning in mind for a piece, or do you sometimes prefer to leave it open to the viewer's interpretation?
Storytelling matters enormously to me. I would even say that it lies at the heart of everything I create. But that doesn't mean I want to impose a precise meaning on my work.
When I draw, I construct my own vision, born of a particular moment, an emotion, a thought, or a contradiction I happen to be experiencing at that time. But I also know that whoever looks at that artwork will bring something to it that doesn't belong to me: their experiences, their wounds, their memories, their desires, and their own questions.
And that is precisely what I love about it.
I believe a work of art truly belongs to its maker only while it's still in the studio. In my case, that studio is sometimes simply my twenty-square-meter bedroom, where I live surrounded by drawings, papers, and unfinished stories.
Within that space, the artwork is still deeply intimate. I know it, I touch it, I correct it, sometimes I hate it, and then eventually I fall in love with it again.
But as soon as it crosses the threshold of that room and finds itself before the eyes of others, something changes. In a way, it is no longer entirely mine.
It becomes, in a sense, an adopted child of someone else's gaze. It acquires another existence, another story, sometimes even a meaning I had never imagined.
I find that rather beautiful.
It's a little like a romantic relationship. You can love someone deeply, share part of your life with them, but you cannot decide who they will become once they leave.
My artworks experience something similar. Some may come back to me as a memory, an encounter, or an unexpected conversation. Others will leave for good, continuing their lives far away from me, in another home, through someone else's eyes, perhaps even in someone else's arms, offering a warmth I never imagined they could give.
I don't see that as a loss, but as a form of freedom.
That's why I prefer to leave my work open to interpretation. I can explain what I intended to express, but I would never want my explanation to cancel out what someone else has felt.
After all, why should my interpretation be more legitimate than theirs, simply because I was the one holding the brush?
I believe a successful artwork isn't necessarily one that communicates exactly the message its creator intended. Perhaps it's one that manages to awaken something in a person the artist will never meet.
So I create, I tell stories, I grow attached. And when an artwork leaves my studio, I try to let it be free.
“After all, why should my interpretation be more legitimate than theirs, simply because I was the one holding the brush?”
— Ziva Hardaway
As in love, sometimes you have to accept that what you once loved will continue to live without you.
Illustration, characters and MOBBU STUDIO
Your background includes illustration, character development and editorial graphic design. Do you see these as separate areas, or are they all part of the same creative language for you?
I don't really consider illustration, character development, and graphic design to be separate disciplines. Each has its own techniques and constraints, but to me, they all belong to one creative language: storytelling.
Illustration allows me to capture a moment, character development allows me to give that moment an existence, and editorial design allows me to organize the way that existence will be encountered.
I believe that today, an artist needs to be something of a Swiss Army knife. Not because we can or should master everything — that would be rather pretentious, but to remain curious, versatile, and adaptable enough to give their vision the most faithful expression possible.
I don't want to be confined to one technique or medium. If an idea requires India ink, I use ink. If it calls for charcoal, digital painting, writing, or a particular graphic composition, I try to learn whatever skills I'm missing to bring it to life.
I believe that continuing to learn is a responsibility artists have toward themselves. You have to accept becoming a beginner again, making mistakes, and discovering new practices. Versatility doesn't necessarily have to dilute an artistic identity. On the contrary, it can give it more ways to speak.
In my graphic novels, for example, writing and drawing work together, but they don't necessarily have to tell the same story. A character might claim to be happy while their expression, posture, or the silence of a panel suggests exactly the opposite. It's this kind of contradiction that interests me.
This desire to explore different disciplines also feeds into another project, separate from my personal work as an artist and author: MOBBU STUDIO.
My ambition is to eventually turn it into a fully developed creative studio, with several departments working across illustration, publishing, visual communication, and other forms of creative expression.
But I still consider MOBBU a work in progress, with a great deal still to learn and build.
Ziva Hardaway remains my personal artistic universe, with its characters, stories, and preoccupations. MOBBU STUDIO represents another ambition: to build a broader creative environment where different disciplines can interact and give rise to collaborative projects.
Ultimately, I believe an artist's coherence doesn't come from the number of techniques they use, but from the vision that connects them.
I would rather be an artist who constantly learns to speak new languages than one who endlessly repeats the only language they already know.
Paris, the metro and the faces in between
You're based near Paris. Does the city, France, or the environment around you influence what you create?
Yes, enormously. I would even say that Paris has become one of my most important studios, almost in spite of itself.
I draw a lot on the metro, almost every day. It's a fascinating place to observe people. You encounter hundreds of faces, lives that brush past one another for a few minutes without ever truly meeting. Everyone carries something: exhaustion, joy, anxiety, sometimes simply the desire to get home.
I've fallen in love with Paris, both its qualities and its imperfections. It's a city with this strange ability to amaze you and make you sad within the same day.
From one neighborhood to another, you can experience two completely different human atmospheres. Sometimes, just a few metro stops are enough to take you from a place where people seem profoundly exhausted to another where everything feels lighter, almost carefree.
This closeness of exhaustion and contentment fascinates me.
I find Paris profoundly alive, but also terribly melancholic. There are people who seem to have everything they need to be happy, yet carry a sadness that is difficult to explain. Others have very little and radiate an almost defiant kind of joy.
These are the contradictions that interest me. They stimulate my imagination, but they also move me, sometimes with a kind of sadness.
So when I draw, I try, in my own way, to make all of this a little more beautiful. Not by prettifying reality or concealing its difficulties, but by looking for a form of poetry in the things we eventually stop noticing.
A tired face resting against a metro window, two strangers exchanging a glance, someone standing alone in the middle of a crowd. These are ordinary, almost insignificant situations, but I believe they sometimes contain extraordinary stories.
This also connects to my approach to writing. I'm interested in individuals, their contradictions, and the way their environments gradually transform them.
But I wouldn't want to limit my perspective to Paris. I'd love to discover other major cities, such as Berlin or London, to spend time wandering through them, observing their inhabitants, and understanding their particular atmospheres. I believe every city has its own way of telling the story of the human condition.
I want to continue traveling, drawing on public transport, in cafés, in the streets, and letting all those silent encounters feed into my future graphic novels.
Ultimately, I believe Paris has taught me one thing: a city isn't just made up of buildings, monuments, or beautiful avenues. Above all, it is made up of all the lives that cross paths within it.
And if, through my drawings, I can bring a little beauty to some of those lives, even fleetingly, then perhaps I'll have managed to tell a story that rings true.
Expressive portrait art: emotion and silence
What matters most to you in a portrait: likeness, personality, mood, or something else?
What matters most to me in a portrait is emotion. Not necessarily the kind that immediately catches your eye, but the kind you sometimes recognize without being able to explain it.
I don't believe a successful portrait has to be one in which a person recognizes themselves perfectly in a physical sense. What moves me much more is when someone looks at their portrait and says that they don't entirely recognize their face, but they recognize exactly what they were feeling at that particular moment.
I find that infinitely more interesting than flawless resemblance.
Of course, anatomical knowledge and observation remain essential to my work. But I allow myself to distort certain features, exaggerate a posture, or intensify the tension in a neck, a shoulder, or a gaze whenever doing so helps me better communicate what I want to express.
I don't distort things for distortion's sake. Every decision must have a reason, even if that reason isn't immediately apparent.
A face can be perfectly proportioned and evoke absolutely nothing. Conversely, a portrait whose proportions seem almost uncomfortable can sometimes express something profoundly human.
I think particularly of Egon Schiele, whose work has greatly influenced me. There is a kind of truth in his bodies and faces that goes far beyond simple anatomical representation.
But beyond all of that, there is another criterion that matters enormously to me: silence.
I like to imagine someone standing in front of one of my drawings and remaining silent for a few seconds. Not necessarily because they're trying to understand what I meant, but because something in the image has made them stop.
Perhaps a memory, an old emotion, a feeling they thought they had forgotten. I don't need to know which one.
In an age when we consume images at an almost absurd speed, I find it rather beautiful that a simple portrait could make us pause, even if only for a few seconds.
I think that's ultimately what I'm searching for.
“Resemblance allows us to recognize a face. Emotion, on the other hand, can allow us to recognize ourselves.”
— Ziva Hardaway
And if an image manages to create that small moment of silence, then, to me, it has already done something essential.
Why the skateboard deck suits the human figure
You immediately noticed the tall, narrow shape of a skateboard deck. What interests you about that format, and why do you think your work could translate well onto it?
What immediately interested me about a skateboard deck was its shape. That long, narrow, almost organic silhouette already possesses something very expressive, even before an illustration is added to it.
It naturally makes me think of the human body, a standing figure, a posture, a movement.
And since so much of my work revolves around the human figure, portraits, and anatomy, I see it as a particularly interesting space for experimentation.
I can imagine bodies that follow the shape of the deck, silhouettes that seem to stretch across it, fold into themselves, or escape from it. Playing with proportions, negative space, anatomical tensions, and the contrasts of India ink.
I also find it interesting not to systematically fill the entire surface. A partially represented body, a hand, an interrupted face, or a silhouette that gradually disappears can sometimes tell a much richer story than a composition that fills every available space.
But what I perhaps enjoy even more is the idea of taking art outside its traditional frame.
I love paintings, galleries, and studios, of course. But there's something rather appealing about the idea that an illustration could leave a wall and travel through the streets beneath someone's feet.
A kind of moving painting, really.
The artwork would no longer simply be something to look at. It would accompany the movements, journeys, and experiences of the person who owns the deck. It could be hung on a wall as a collectible piece or actually live within the urban environment.
And I love that duality.
There's also something interesting about the fact that a skateboard deck, when used, eventually accumulates marks, scratches, and signs of wear. Its appearance evolves alongside its owner. The object almost acquires a story of its own.
That also connects to my relationship with erosion, the idea that time and experience gradually transform people and things.
I believe my work could adapt well to this format because I wouldn't simply try to reproduce an existing illustration on a skateboard deck. I would want to create images that genuinely interact with its shape, its constraints, and its function.
To me, the medium shouldn't simply carry the artwork. It should become part of its narrative.
And I find it rather delightful to imagine that a drawing might end its day either in a gallery or after rolling through a few streets. Those are two very different lives for the same artwork, and both appeal to me.
A deck with no restrictions
If you were creating a piece specifically for a skateboard deck with no restrictions at all, what would you want to make?
If I had complete creative freedom, I think I would start with a human silhouette, probably a female figure. But I wouldn't want to simply draw a beautiful body on a skateboard deck. What would interest me is telling a story through its presence, its posture, and even what is missing from it.
I imagine a figure stretching almost the entire length of the deck, with certain parts of the body deliberately distorted, elongated, or interrupted. The anatomical lines could gradually dissolve into ink marks, fragments of urban landscapes, or more abstract shapes.
At first glance, I'd want people to see an elegant, almost peaceful silhouette. But as they look more closely, certain tensions would begin to emerge, along with contradictions and perhaps even a kind of silent violence.
I'd want to explore that ambiguity between beauty and discomfort, fragility and resilience.
I could also imagine the artwork evolving symbolically as the deck wears down. The scratches and marks left by its use would no longer be mere damage; they would become part of a second reading of the piece.
That would connect directly to my philosophy of Érosion: we are all transformed by what we go through. Some experiences wear us down, others build us up, and sometimes both happen at once.
I'd also find it interesting to develop a series of skateboard decks, each representing a different emotional state. Individually, each would tell its own story. Together, they could form a larger narrative, almost like the pages of a graphic novel.
Above all, I wouldn't want to create an illustration that exists separately from its medium. I'd want the deck's shape, curves, verticality, and even the way it's used to become part of the storytelling itself.
And there's something rather amusing about the thought that my artistic journey, which began when I was ten years old, drawing on little cardboard matchbox covers, might now continue on a skateboard deck.
“Ultimately, I think I'd want to create something that looks beautiful hanging on a wall, but doesn't lose its soul when it meets the pavement.”
— Ziva Hardaway
What comes next
And finally, where would you like to take your work next? Is there a project, collaboration or format you've been wanting to explore for a while?
I think my main ambition is to keep building an artistic universe that genuinely reflects who I am, without necessarily confining it to a single form of expression.
There are so many stories I want to tell, particularly through my graphic novels. Some of these projects explore human relationships, loneliness, irreversible decisions, and that strange ability we have to keep living with the consequences of our choices.
These are themes I explore through my approach to writing, which I call Érosion, and I'd like to develop them further in my future work.
But I wouldn't want those stories to remain trapped between the pages of a book.
I'd love to explore other mediums, other ways of bringing my characters and illustrations to life. That could mean publishing, art objects, collectible cards, animation, or collaborations with brands and studios that genuinely value artistic expression.
A collaboration with DeckArts would fit naturally into that vision. I love the idea of an artwork leaving its traditional setting and becoming something people can carry, collect, use, and eventually give a history of its own.
There's also another project that's very close to my heart: MOBBU STUDIO.
It's separate from my personal work as Ziva Hardaway, but it represents an ambition I've been developing for some time. I'd like to gradually build a fully fledged creative studio, bringing together different disciplines and allowing artists, illustrators, writers, and creatives from different backgrounds to develop projects together.
I'm still at the beginning of that journey, and I know there's an enormous amount left for me to learn.
I'd also love to travel more, discover new cities, meet other artists, and immerse myself in different atmospheres. I believe our perspective changes with the places we experience and the people we encounter.
But deep down, I don't necessarily want to know exactly where my work will take me.
I'd rather keep a certain degree of uncertainty. It forces me to remain curious, take risks, and avoid endlessly repeating what I already know how to do.
There's something rather sad about the idea of an artist reaching a point where they consider their creative language complete.
I want to keep learning, making mistakes, changing my mind, and creating things that can still surprise me.
And above all, I'd love for my stories and images to keep finding people who discover something in them that I hadn't necessarily intended.
After all, if I already knew every answer about where my work was heading, I think I'd eventually get bored.
And boredom would probably be a rather poor reason to keep drawing.
Why expressive portraits suit a skateboard deck
Ziva’s point about the deck’s shape is worth taking literally. A deck is long and narrow, closer to a standing figure than to a canvas, and a portrait built around posture, a tilted neck or a turned head can use that format instead of fighting it. Hung on a wall, a deck reads as a single vertical gesture.
At deckarts, every deck is printed by hand in Berlin by Stanislav on Grade-A 7-ply Canadian maple, pressed in Butzbach, Germany, and ships from Berlin. The decks have nothing on the back and are not ready to hang out of the box: a wall mount is sold separately, one per deck.
FAQ
What is expressive portrait art?
Portraiture that puts emotion before likeness. Ziva Hardaway puts it this way: what moves him is when someone does not entirely recognize their face in a portrait, but recognizes exactly what they were feeling at that moment. He allows himself to distort features or exaggerate a posture when it helps express that feeling, never for distortion’s sake.
What is ink portrait drawing?
Drawing faces and figures in ink, usually India ink. Ziva Hardaway values ink for its honesty: it lets him intensify contrasts and anatomical tension, and once a line is drawn you generally have to live with it.
Who influenced Ziva Hardaway?
Egon Schiele, for the way he drew bodies, their tension, fragility and imperfection, and H. Craig Hanna, whose approach to portraiture and the human figure shaped how he thinks about drawing. His first teacher was his uncle, a fine arts student in Angola.
What does Egon Schiele inspired art look like in his work?
Bodies and faces that are not trying to look beautiful but to feel true: distorted or elongated features, tense necks and shoulders, uncomfortable proportions that still express something profoundly human.
What is Érosion?
Érosion (Erosion) is his narrative approach to writing. It explores human tragedies, contradictions within individuals and choices that lead to a point of no return, and above all how a person keeps living after an irreversible decision.
Who is Ziva Hardaway?
The artistic alter ego of Chadrac Ndombe Lutela, a France-based illustrator, artist and graphic novelist. He describes Ziva as his female alter ego: when he writes, Ziva takes over; when he draws, Chadrac takes back control.
Where can I see more of his work?
On Instagram at @chad.hardawayy and in his portfolio.
Are deckarts skateboard decks ready to hang?
No. The decks have nothing on the back, so you need a wall mount, sold separately: one per deck. See our display accessories.
Watch Ziva Hardaway on Instagram
Four short reels from Ziva Hardaway’s Instagram, @chad.hardawayy. Swipe or scroll sideways to see all four →
Where to follow Ziva Hardaway
See more of the portraits, drawings and graphic novel work on Instagram: instagram.com/chad.hardawayy, and in his portfolio.
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