DEGREES UNEDITED

# 14 [27 August 2010]

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.

—————–

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.

# 13 [13 July 2010]

Showtime today, July 13 2010.

# 12 [4 July 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.

# 11 [30 June 2010]

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.

# 10 [28 June 2010]

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.

# 9 [6 June 2010]

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

# 8 [6 June 2010]

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?”

# 7 [31 May 2010]

 Anarchy in the UK

This morning on my way to college suddenly there came on my pod player one Sex Pistols song. As soon as I heard the first line "I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist" I went to the menu and pressed "repeat track." I kept this song on for the whole day.

By time I arrived at my studio, I took the player off my head and plugged it into my speakers and got on with my painting.

I'd heard of punk rock for the first time about ten years ago, on a sunny day in beautiful Alexandria. My English friend put the Sex Pistols on and although I regarded myself most of my life as a hard rock fan, I had never heard anything like that. No single punk rock track had ever entered the Egyptian market. And as a guy that always thought British music meant Pink Floyd, Sabbath, Motorhead, I freaked out. It was terrible.

Now, as a British citizen and a student at a British art college, and right now, after half a day of the Sex Pistols looping on the speakers echoing in my room as I paint, I admitted to myself that, now, I LOVE the Sex Pistols. Now, and only now, their music makes sense to me.

British art schools often have produced radical bands and radical musicians. Only by studying art here I started to get the point. I often feel a sense that all around me are emotionally disengaged, from each other and from the art that we're all supposed to be making. But now I understand - making this kind of music was the answer of people who couldn't do this noise with art.

But I don't really understand why. I understand that the art students-turned-musicians wanted to take their work to the working class. I want to take my work to the working class too. But why does it have to be music to go to the working class?

"I don't know what I want, but I know how to get it."

I wanted to produce a painting that captures the Johnny Rotten energy. I dealt with this painting differently than I usually do: I splashed dirt on it; I spat on it; I hammered it with dry old brushes and I mopped it with the broom that the cleaner left in the corner of the studio.

If I want to be as loud as Rotten, the performance of my painting has to have the same spirit: physical, aggressive, loud and carrying within it total disregard for what's acceptable, especially for the London audience.

7:30 pm and there seemed to be nobody left in the building. The middle-aged always-angry security guard came to lock up the studios. He walked in to my space as Rotten was still screaming. He looked at my painting. "I love that, man" he said. And he pointed at the speakers with a big smile. "This is the sort of stuff I grew up listening to," he said. He looked at me and he said "Good man" with a big smile. "I'm here to lock up seeing as what you're doing I'll leave you here for a bit."

Just before leaving the room he looked into the corridor and pointed as though he wanted me to come and look. His smile was gone and the angry, middle aged look was back on his face.I left my painting and went to see what he was pointing out. I found two of the students putting an enormous cardboard box in the middle of the corridor. It was full of garbage and they were arranging it.

"Do you think that's enough, or should we put more rubbish?" one of them asked. Her friend said warmly, "No, it's fantastic like this."

The security guard and I looked at one another wordlessly.

It was time for me to leave. I switched Johnny Rotten off.

On the bus home I felt like I could do with a less angry song to help me on my trip home, and that's when I discovered that, in my shock at the cardboard box, I had forgotten my headphones in the studio.

God save the Queen.

# 6 [29 May 2010]

PRECIOUS 

While I am was hanging my first paintings on the wall, I asked one of my colleagues to help me, which she did. We stretched the large paper on the wall and I started to nail it using my powerful German staple-gun.

"What I like about you is that you're not precious about your work," she said.

I didn't now what to say at the time, though we talked awhile, for almost half an hour before she left.

But her comment didn't leave me. What she likes about me is that I am "Not Precious" about my work.

I was troubled about that, because I, and every single person who really knows me, would know that there is nothing more precious to me than my work. But I understand what she meant, when she saw me hammering my painting to the wall with a big piece of German steel.

But let's think about that for a minute. Painting was a spiritual, sacrificial act much earlier than recognising "art" as a concept. What we regard as "art" is a concept that more or less wasn't really established before Aristotle. And if you look a the "primitive" practices in which art was rooted you will understand what I mean. Take for example something like the "voodoo-type" doll known in Egypt since the ancient Egyptians as "Fasokha."

You'll find that the creation of the fasokha doll is not any Aristotelian mimetic representation, nor is it a manifestation of beauty. The doll is always a representation of a negative, an evil eye, an evil person, evil spirits. And although making the doll involves effort and some level of craft, and takes place within ceremonies, yet it is not an object for preservation. It will be poked with pins and needles and set on fire. Because the whole ritual is about either healing the self or healing others. This includes both the process of making and the process of breaking.

Now, I'm not saying that I'm going to set my work on fire like a fasokha doll, or a Wicker Man. What I am saying is, that my work is often a representation of the dark corners of the soul, and for the soul to heal, this dark corner has got to be exposed to the light.

And the evil or the negative elements that were once lurking within have got to come out into the light and - like the ancient classic vampire story - by exposing it to the light you finish it, and then you get on with living.

That's what I think Art was meant to do. But my dear colleague and most others in this contemporary art world, was talking about art as a commodity product and the artist as a commercial enterprise. And so then I think that my answer would have to be, "No, I'm not precious."

# 5 [26 May 2010]

CONCERTINA BOOKS

During the last 2 months I have become really involved with book art; I’m really excited about that; it’s like finding a totally new outlet for drawing

I can’t say much about it now as usually I find it really difficult talking about work that I’m still trying to configure

Last week I produced 2 concertina books, which is a really exciting thing for me. I feel that there is a great range of possibilities to what I can do with that.

I don’t know, take a look and tell me