Camberwell College of Art

THE PATTERN CUTTERS

As you’ll have noticed, I haven’t posted anything here on my blog in a long time. I’ve finished the MA now; it’s all behind me. I’ve taken a few weeks to clear myself of the post-MA clutter and take stock of what’s next. And I’ve got a few projects going on, which I’ll be writing about here.

First up is my involvement in a really good new initiative, the Pattern Cutters. Pattern Cutters is a collective, which operates in a a venue that is an ex-pattern cutting warehouse near the Regent’s Canal in the Haggerston end of Shoreditch. The address is 242 Kingsland Road and it’s right on the canal – perfect for a weekend stroll.

Pattern Cutters was started earlier this year by Jake and Oli and it’s a little bit of Berlin here in East London. No, I mean it. It has the same DIY Berlin ethos that I loved when i was there, but with all the dynamic cosmopolitanism of London. It’s about fashion, it’s about art, it’s about collectibles, about books, about table tennis, about food. It’s far away from the tacky Britart vibe of the last decade.

There’s vintage fashion re-presented by guys who’ve worked for major labels; as well as collectible books of great literature and unusual oddities. Records! And yes, art – I’m in business here. Saturday and Sunday from 11 am til – well, as late as we want it to get. And there’s talk about all kinds of activities to come, from screenings to live performance.

So what am I up to there? Firstly, I’m testing different ideas with my potential audience. What do people think – about art, about my work, about life?

Then, I’m trying to get with the economic reality of trying to live as an artist. What do people value? What are they prepared to pay for?

Not only that. As well as showcasing my work to audiences and selling it, I’m occasionally inviting fellow artists to join me and try the same thing.

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And mainly I guess it’s about making contact. I’ve talked with more people, and had more debate, about art, about life and about my work in a weekend at the Pattern Market than I ever did on the MA or in most exhibition. That can only be a good thing!

Lastly, I’ve sold a few pieces so far; not much but enough to keep me coming back. I’ll try to keep it going as long as I can.

Being an artist without capital or family £ behind me – doing it on my own with no backup – it’s kind of like Russian roulette. It’s difficult, and you win some, you lose some.

Anyway, come along and check it out. Eat some Caribbean food, play some table tennis, buy something. Have a good time. See you there.

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Showtime today, July 13 2010.

I’ve now finished my final project, TAKE 7, which will be the main piece in the installation of my MA exhibition on 13 July.

There won’t be any pictures of it until the exhibition, because I want you to come to see it.

The project is a conclusion to my last 9 month encounter with screen printing It crystallises the development in my drawing and the new phase or stage of working on narrative drawings, which is an obsession that has been going on as far back as I can remember.

It’s on piece of work mad up of 64 drawings printed only with black ink on white, thick, tile-like card. The 64 tiles fit together edge to edge creating on piece 230 x 170 cm. It’s influenced by German expressionism, film noir, comic books and graphic novels (like Frank Miller) – yet it’s not precisely any of that and doesn’t look like any of that.

It’s a wall based piece, fronted by a table that has 3 of the drawing books on it. Each book has 1100 drawings and I chose them at random form the 8 drawing books I’ve made.

With this project I am trying to “trap” my audience into spending as much time with my work as positionable, like they might stay with a movie. There are 330 pictures in the books and 64 on the wall so that makes 394 pictures to look at. If they spend 2 seconds in front of every picture they will spend 13 minutes about the time of an average short film. Or they leave like they’d leave a film, in the middle. But surely curiosity will make people want to look into the books. It can’t be just in-out, even for those who hate it. It’s a bit like Scheherazade in 1001 Nights, she stayed alive by trapping the guy in some weird narrative that kept going for 1001 nights.

ON the commercial side of things I’ve made 10 similar boxes, each one of them containing the 64 pieces I’m exhibit on the wall/ There wont be any single prints for sale form this set. I am trying to be “faithful” to film as my conceptual method, so if you want to buy you must buy the whole set of 64 the way you’d buy a whole film on DVD, not one shot. And again, you’ll have to spend at least 128 seconds looking at it, that’s if you flip through them one by one.

The prints in the boxes are cut to the edges and can’t be framed (at least not in the conventional sense). And here I’m also being faithful to the project: discouraging any separation of them.

So why didn’t I just instead put my drawing on the timeline and make a film? Why am I making this paper based thing? Well, it’s because of the fact that there’s no linear editing. A timeline imposes a linear principle, makes a sequence. I arranged these 64 pieces on the wall based on a total concern with the mathematical calculation of harmony between the positive and negative spaces present in the black and white, regardless of the meaning or subject matter in the drawing itself.

I know a lot of people will find it strange for me to be talking here about conscious mathematical principles since I’ve already said I’ve made the drawing books in a “shamanistic” state of semi-consciousness. And it’s this kind of mix, between the total madness and total control that Leon Golub found to be the reason behind Goya’s genius. (Robert Hughes Goya, Crazy Like Genius)

Also, by putting the 64 pieces on the wall, I’m breaking both the rules of film and the rules of comics: I’m confronting the audience with a whole to of images at the same time and entice them to edit his or her own version of the story.

Me and my MA …

When I first decided to go to do the MA at CCA, I assumed that my long experience in graphic drawing would be an easy and fast vehicle for delivering significant prints. I came in with my drawings and my style, and assumed that my research would be about transferring those drawings, and that style, into prints. It was meant to function mainly as a commercial enterprise.

But this plan was built on false assumptions, and the plan very quickly collapsed when it was put to the test in very early stages of the course, which led me to a very interesting and exciting learning curve and self discovery.

I started by revisiting my drawing back-catalogue since 1989 at least, and tested this catalogue of different styles by taking them into the medium of screen printing. Having to work as printer for myself allowed me to take an objective look at my own work and allowed me to become, more or less, on the receiving side of it.

As I’ve always been interested in black and white, I decided to make this process all in black and white only. Seeing every drawing in jet black on the film allowed me to strip down my drawings to the core which let later to a higher subtlety regarding both shapes and tones. By reducing everything to jet black and losing tonal values made me able to focus on the geometrical structure of my compositions. Drawing became, on a technical level, a mathematical equation of balance and harmony that dealt with only the positive and negative spaces rather than harmony based on a variety of tonal frequencies.

Part of this research was to watch a lot of old movies and film noir, to experience the pure black and white, in a different medium to my own.

Anish Kapoor said that “An artist can not set up to do or to find something beautiful, an artist’s best bet is to go to a place that he has never been to, on the off chance of finding something he didn’t know that he was looking for.”

This was pretty much my journey of experience, through printmaking, to find myself in a totally new place in my drawing.

DRAWING BOOKS

I’ve just completed 8 books of drawings, 110 pages each. Why? Well, I draw all day every day; it’s a full time job and I do it so much that after a time the drawings come out of me in almost a trance state. For the first time now, I intended to capture all the results by working in books. All of my life I have rejected any form of packed paper or sketch books, and I usually worked on separate sheets of paper. By working in books, this change allowed me to see my drawings in context.

For an artist like me, who produces almost 20 drawings a day on average, it’s rarely that I get to look in the bottom of the pile at what I have produced a week before. Working in books allowed me constant access to my work, which entitled me to precisely pin down both my multiple styles of drawing, and the obsessive subjects which always appear in my work.

So I have involved myself in a highly exhausting routine of daily drawing (more than 800 drawings over 2 months) and by doing that, I was able to focus and concentrate my subjects and lose all unnecessary details, as well as understanding both the emotional triggers behind it and their significance to me.

At the outset, I made a few conscious decisions:

1 – use only brushes (enforced a connection between drawing and painting) ;

2 -use books rather than separate sheets;

3 – give up conscious ideas about subject and proposal

It is immersive work, about 1 book per week to exclusion of all other work. I was drawing when I didn’t feel like it, drawing when I was tired, bored etc. Gradually I noticed that there were changes developing in my drawings.

I wanted to find a way of working though the reality of my being an Egyptian artist now working as a British artist, and being able to navigate my way though both. This is important because I have always been interested in the question of how to move away from the Aristotelian observational and idealised approach to drawing in figurative drawing. With these drawing books I have attained a new understanding about my draughtsmanship through exhaustive repetition (of the act of drawing), a process which is something more associated to “Eastern” thought – yet I have managed to apply it to my work.

In Egypt there is this practice called Zar; it’s very ancient and underground; it involves creating a trance state. In my drawings I exhausted myself in drawing like you do in the zar. When the zar subject suddenly sits up and screams he is healed, and so it’s the same with the books; I suddenly finished them and found I had my work.