A devastating fire in my studio forced me to approach painting and life in a new way

Two weeks before the first lockdown I was in my studio putting the finishing touches to my most ambitious body of paintings to date. The studio was packed with hundreds of works of art. For the past four years I had been working with the Syrian writer Professor Ali Souleman and the documentary filmmaker Mark Jones. Ali lost his sight in a bomb blast in Syria in 1997 and we had been attempting to translate his experiences of war and displacement into a collection of paintings – to make the unseen seen. Ali and Mark were coming the very next day for an unveiling. The studio was overstuffed, no pause or resting place for the eye anywhere. It was, in hindsight, a self-portrait of a restless mind.

I’ve always been driven by obsessive-compulsive tendencies: counting and control, endless tinkering, seeking a never-coming calm. A patch of work caught my eye. Could it be a bit more darkened and burnt? I felt an itch behind my eyelid, a twitching fidget. I should have waited until I could move the boxes. I couldn’t wait. I switched on the blowtorch and passed it over the surface. It would only take a moment. A moment was all it took.

Continue reading…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You May Also Like

Met police apologise to brothers stopped and searched after fist bump

Force agrees to pay damages and costs in settlement with Dijon and…

QAnon and on: why the fight against extremist conspiracies is far from over

Far-right conspiracies ran unchecked online in the Trump years. It’s all gone…

Hoard of 1,000-year-old Viking coins unearthed in Denmark

Artefacts believed to date back to AD980s found by girl metal-detecting in…

Jay Blades: ‘I talk a lot about black history, but I also love black future’

The Repair Shop host tells of the satisfaction in putting broken things…