Risan’s beginning trials with one-of-a-kind volumes were conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1980s, where he worked closely with Ismail Fattah, Faiq Hassan, and Walid Sheet. At the Baghdad art school, he created installation art, sculpture, graphic art, and painting. Although he explored book art in small scale, he incorporated text, drawing, and collage in multi-panel documents, producing dozens of examples. Executing his books in stages, Risan layered their surfaces with diverse media only after determining their specific layouts, a method that allowed him to connect individual pages as a complete work of art. The artist’s outlining of his subject matter over the sequence of several folios was most likely instrumental to the progression of his painting technique, which defies conventional narrative structures by including several moments in time within the same composition.