[2] Renowned for his ability to incorporate expressive realism with elements of Cubism, Impressionism, and Surrealism, his works, deeply rooted in the local environment, reflect the people, traditions, and transformations of Qatar from the 1950s through the 1970s.

[3] From 1964, he attended the Baghdad College of Fine Arts, where he received mentorship from several prominent Iraqi artists, including Faeq Hassan, Hafidh al-Droubi, Ismail Al-Shaikhly, and Atta Sabri.

[3] Zaini sold his first painting to the Ministry of Information when it commissioned him to create a piece of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan to commemorate a Gulf Cooperation Council meeting.

[4] In 1971, as the art movement in Qatar began to mature, the Al Jasra Cultural Club took on the responsibility of uniting talented artists.

Through his position and involvement in Al Jasra Club, Zaini gathered many emerging talents, providing them with guidance in aspects such as color, line, and space.

[10] Zaini's art, which he defined as 'advanced realism', was largely based on his local environment and included themes of social bonds, rapid modernization, and Qatar's cultural heritage.

His work captures a specific era in Qatar, from the 1950s to the 1970s, during which the nation transitioned from a pearling and fishing backwater to a rapidly developing and thriving country.

From the 1990s, Zaini produced works incorporating collage techniques that combined realistic and expressive elements with everyday objects like boxes, wood, bottles, nails, fishing nets, and old tools.

Additionally, Zaini used paper pulp to create textured, geometric circular shapes arranged in equal intervals, adding depth to his artworks.

Despite his diversity in form and style, each painting bears an unmistakable signature of the artist, using color to elicit the intended moods and emotions.

He expressed his emotions in the painting The Sad Summer, depicting a towering Lebanese cedar tree with deep roots emerging from a bullet casing.

Zaini combined realistic and symbolic elements to create a three-dimensional effect, with the use of vivid primary colors contributing to the overall visual impact.

[3] Some of the more well-known of his paintings created from the 1970s to 1990s include titles such as The Branding, Discovery, Portrait of My Daughter, Moonlit Night, The Lost, The Artisan, Henna Night, Erasure, Girls' Play, Official Procession, Procession, Debran, From the Cave of Hira, Dream, Hunting on Land, Safe Harbor, Net and Fish, Going to the Market, and Appetite of the Salty Cat.

[12] One of his works, Knights of Poetry – a compilation of portraits for over 60 local and regional poets – was shown at an exhibition in Doha as part of the city's selection as the 2010 Arab Capital of Culture.

Zaini rendered each scene with technical precision, employing appropriate colors, designs, shapes, and backgrounds to convey the intended meaning.

[3] Zaini's experience with Cubism dates back to a series of early artworks he produced as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad.

[3] Zaini continued his exploration of Cubism, creating works that combine cubist elements with abstraction and composition, such as Fish Seller (1977), Medal of Arts (1984), and Generation Conflict (1987).

For instance, in his painting Fish Seller, he did not distort the proportions of forms as Picasso did, who believed that every natural object could be reduced to its geometric equivalent (square, rectangle, circle, prism, or cube).

Instead, Zaini's Fish Seller is built around the unity of the triangle and diamond shapes, with arching or circular rhythms in the background, maintaining harmony and balance between the figure and the ground.