Camberwell College of Art

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.

THE DEATH OF THE SHAYKHA

a eulogy for Louise Bourgeois

While I was drawing in my studio in the early hours of June 1 2010 with the radio on, the last item on the news stopped me in my tracks. It said that on the day before 31 May 2010 the great – and oldest – artist Louise Bourgeois, had departed life peacefully in her sleep from a heart attack. And before I knew it, the newsreader finished his paragraph by saying that Louise Bourgeois was an inspirational figure for feminism and feminist art.

I felt a bit upset for two reasons, firstly and mainly of course, the fact that Louise Bourgeois was dead, I would not draw for half an hour, or I didn’t want to. I felt personally that the death of Louise Bourgeois deserves that we all put down our pens and brushes and bow our heads for a few minutes.

The other thing that upset me slightly was that final statement about Louise Bourgeois and “Feminist” art and “feminism”. Louise Bourgeois herself refused to accept the label in her lifetime. As well, I felt that the statement somehow denied me (and other male artists) Louise Bourgeois’s influence. I also felt offended for Louise Bourgeois, when the BBC managed to reduce her 98 years of life and work into an “ism” that came into being so late in her lifetime.

What made the whole thing much more painful came later on the 10 pm news. In reporting the death, the BBC decided to choose Tracy Emin to mourn Louise Bourgeois, despite the existence of many female and male artists whose life and works could actually be related to that of Louise Bourgeois. Artists such as Paula Rego, or the sculptors Nicola Hicks or Cornelia Parker to name a few….

Yet out of all British artists they picked Tracy Emin. Now I personally know 3 things about Tracy Emin: I know what her bed looks like, I know the names of some people she slept with and I know that she’s one of the most artistically talentless individuals in this business, yet who has been pumped up by 21^st century media branding.

Actually, I digress; I don’t want to talk about Tracy Emin.

To be honest with you I hate the notion of art associated with any type or sect. Terms like “feminist” art, “Black art”, gay art etc – what do they actually mean (and by the way, I write this as someone who is not “white”) ? To me art is art and there are only two kinds: art, and bullshit passed as art.

Art is one of those things where the identity of the artist and the identity of the audience really is totally irrelevant. Do we really when we look at a Bacon or a Michelangelo, think “How gay or straight is that art work?” Even though sure, we know that both artists were gay.

The power of artists such as Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, James Brown and Stevie Wonder is that they made people from different colours dance together in the same room, defying the social segregation that existed at the time. But it was their work that did it; it was powerful enough to move people.

But enough of that; I really want to talk about Louise Bourgeois. On the night Louise Bourgeois died, I found myself jumping to Google images and typing “ Louise Bourgeois”. I found enormous numbers of pictures ranging from a very young Louise Bourgeois in her early years of studying, copying a classical Graeco-Roman head, right through to portraits of Louise Bourgeois the shaykha, the Witch-In-Chief, the woman with the scary eyes that only someone like Picasso had. Eyes that say “I know it all; I’ve seen it all; I’ve done it all. And you will never know what I know, unless you work as much as I’ve worked, and live as long as I’ve lived.” I did a right click and saved this picture as my desktop background.

– continued in Part 2 below

Part 2

I just called Louise Bourgeois a “shaykha .” What is that? In the part of the world where I come from, it’s a word coming from the root “shaikukha” which means “old age.” It’s an Arabic word used to mean the eldest member of whatever social group, a person that all the community highly respected. It’s part of a broad “eastern” tradition of elder wisdom that stretches all the way to Japan. It’s not associated to either religion or gender. The shaykh of the fishermen is the eldest of the fishermen, etc. The main thing that makes the expertise of the shaykha special is that they have seen too much; if you make it to 90 for example you’ve witnessed several whole generations – that’s a lot of wisdom.

Officially, Louise Bourgeois was the shaykha for all artists on the planet.

This morning my partner about the subject and she started to tell me her memories of seeing Louise Bourgeois at the Tate. Unfortunately I wasn’t in London at the time. I’ll bet that seeing an artist like Louise Bourgeois filling the Tate was such an inspirational and life changing experience to any artist. Even more, knowing that the work on show was much of it produced by a woman in her 90s would make any decent artist feel a mixture of aspiration, humility, jealousy and shame. The same kind of feeling you get when you see Michelangelo’s David and you learn that he made that when he was just 26 years old.

She said: “I didn’t go the show because Louise Bourgeois was female, I went because she’s a great artist, but yes I was fascinated by her explorations of the female world and female point of view. I also saw that she struggled with this and its relevant dichotomies throughout her life and that’s something I can relate to.

“ I loved the most her perfect marbles, the infinitely smooth works that she polished and polished until they became something celestial, yet they were all sculptures connected to the body, to life in all its messiness. Such a wonderful transformational of stone to flesh and back again.

I was particularly interested on one piece, called Fillette. At first I saw that it was a penis and balls and I thought, ‘Oh no, not dicks’ since I had seen that done to death – either laughing at penises or execrating them – and was frankly sick of it and I thought ‘when will women grow up?’ but then I looked again and it was marvellous. Monumental yet fragile; proud yet vulnerable. Then I read the accompanying text (I rarely do this but was glad I did) Bourgeois talks about how she considered “the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate; they’re objects that the woman, thus myself, must protect.” She also noted that “everything I loved had the shape of the things around me – the shape of my husband, the shape of the children [all sons]. So when I wanted to represent something I loved, I obviously represented a little penis.”( Bourgeois, Tate catalogue 2007) It’s amazing but this piece is the “other half” of all the “phallic” architectures and attitudes that we see around us. It’s the “other half. Bourgeois understood Jung’s idea of the anima and animus and her work really explores that.”

She also noted that at all the Louise Bourgeois shows, the widest gathering of the public was there. Louise Bourgeois, like Picasso, brings everybody regardless of race, age and lifestyle. Everybody is there, paying a ticket. Unlike the narrow slices of “arty” audience you see in most galleries, especially in London.

That’s because real art is like water. You need it. It’s not elitist anymore than water is elitist. It’s needed by everybody, all humans. Culture is not elitist. Elites can use it, and abuse it, but art itself is not elitist.

Louise Bourgeois could be an inspiration to a lot of women, feminist or not. But she’s an artist who is inspirational full stop – inspirational to everybody regardless of gender.

An artist is always an open potential, right up until the artist dies. So now we have been handed a sealed and complete portfolio with the face of Louise Bourgeois on the cover pointing at us and saying “Which one of you, man or woman, can match THAT?”