Melting Pot.

This piece is called Melting Pot. It’s a story about the modern face of the UAE, and It’s not a crowd pleaser. It’s something unique, real, and also a turning point for me – a change in perception of my own work, and my experiences of this region.

I came to Dubai from New York in 2011. My friends who’d never been here joked that in the land of Malls, Hotels and Sand, I’d either hate it or get arrested. In my first month I started going to a Hip Hop night. There, I met Lebanese, Filipino and British graffiti artists who’d been earning their craft illegally outside the region for decades,  but who found plenty of opportunities to pick up a can here without causing any harm.

I had given up painting after Art College and chose advertising because I thought Art couldn’t pay the bills. On a sweltering night in Festival City in 2011, these boys put their own cans in my hands, and let me have a shot. I did a terrible picture of a two-headed snail, but they taught me how to use a can. I hadn’t learned that in Birmingham, or New York, but Dubai for me now was this – freedom to try your hand at anything, and openness to mix with people whose lives have had entirely different journeys, and let them add colour to yours.

I have to stress I’m not a graffiti or street artist – I never earned my keep by learning to spray in bridges, tunnels and abandoned sites the way that they did. But I fell fast for this medium where there’s no going back. It’s a mini explosion. Italians call spray-cans “Bombolettos” – little bombs. And this was that for me.

I started by doing faces – and they always became energetic and linear, but then the lines and colours became more of what I was excited about than getting an exact likeness.

Because of years in Advertising, and being opinionated – I’m always compartmentalising – drawing lines around things that don’t necessarily demand it – mapping out opinions, reasons and often conclusions that aren’t always correct. I love maps. I can’t understand a place until I’ve got the map in my head, and with people or animals – I’m mapping out a character, or energy through a face. This led me to abstracts.

My art didn’t show it, and for the first two years as a professional artist I was jumping through hoops. One problem with Art commissions across this region is that most brands and marketing folks request the same things: Calligraffiti, the City Skyline, 3D Art, or Art in another person’s style. It’s frustrating because there are hundreds of professional artists here developing massively different styles, from completely different backgrounds.

There are no art colleges here, but there are still artists. We can’t spray in the streets, but we still spray. I got into commissioned murals, and my work was ticking boxes and taking me away from my natural style. In any city, regardless of the stimuli, the galleries, peers, or legalities of where you paint, you still should paint – you should drive yourself because nobody’s going to make you. And of course you should share it, but don’t do it for Likes. If we let popularity sway us from the styles and narratives we want to develop, nothing original will ever be made. That’s a curse of the public vote, and a terrifying trait of the times we live in.

A major new hotel and residence was being built on the outer frond of the palm and had a ‘Graffiti brief’. They wanted abstracts because faces can always be a more difficult subject in this region.

Within a portrait I’d made of the Guitarist “Slash”, I saw this pattern I liked and expanded on it. In the different colours, I saw energies, types of people. I saw this mish-mash of complimentary, but also contrasting energy that made a bigger force overall. And for me – it embodied the whole town. Dubai is not just concrete, glass and sand, or straight lines and sea. It’s Pashtun drivers telling you about Buddhist temples in their backyards. An incredible Ugandan band in the club in Bur Dubai, the Ukrainian Jazz Singer, the Italian Truffle-celebrity, Eritrean Fashion Designers, It’s Levant divas with sculpted cheekbones and designer babies, Syrian Art Directors, Labourers who would rather have understanding than condescending pity, or its the Turk calmly explaining why one nation’s version of democracy might not work elsewhere. It’s not black and white. It’s not prescriptive, and it’s not like anywhere else.

The job took a year to agree on, and 15 rounds of concepts. I spent 3 months on a construction site, painting half the time in the day, amidst shouting, drilling, dust and chemicals and lots of staring from men who were thousands of miles away from their wives, And then at night when the shouting stopped, the hotel was eerily quiet, huge and empty. I had to summon the energy of this piece, around either a cacophony, or incredible emptiness. The Labourers around me made their way into the piece too. Sawarnal, Satnam, Mohamed and Bilal, who called me Madam and made sure I always felt safe.

As I was painting, the fight for the concept continued. The management that had approved the piece were happy, but as I was adding the layers, and as the piece was adapting to the space, one member kept holding up the digital drawing and saying – “it doesn’t look like this – why doesn’t it look like this?”

He was right, it didn’t. A concept for a painting is exactly that. It’s not a design – or I would have been making the whole painting twice in different scales and it wouldn’t have reacted to the space. And if you want a piece designed perfectly beforehand, print the whole piece – why bother painting it?

It was this reactive process to the space, that lead me to find and bring out these shapes that twisted, jutted, receded or attacked, and just as my abstract had elements fighting with each other, I was fighting for the whole thing to exist. After thirty days of painting, I finished the piece. A piece I wholly felt was about the layers, intricacies, friendships, contrasts and surprises of my life in UAE. A piece that was not methodical, or predictable – and is one you will never see – because the piece has been destroyed. It proved there’s one thing that makes Dubai just like anywhere else – nothing is permanent.