Proud Pots, Paintings and Prints

- Rima Farah : Definitions at Dar d’Art, Tangier 2012 -
I grew up with Rima Farah.  Not literally for we aren’t nurtured of the same soil and we weren’t student fellows, but as young artists we shared the post-art-college years of hope and struggle, we shared our first studios.  Together she and I formed a business and over 20 years we collaborated on hundreds of prints and paintings.  We exhibited all over in all sorts of guises; at fairs, corporate shindigs, in lobbies and galleries; we had dozens of showings in London, Europe, Japan, the USA, and across the Middle East.  That ended in 2000 and in the years since our work and lives have spiraled apart, touching here and there, occluding and eclipsing and colliding.  

Definitions, is Rima Farah’s first major exhibition since Dubai in 2003.  It has been a long time in the careful maturing and her path has brought her to sufism, calligraphic complexities, paintings on ceramics, and in the while to establishing herself in Tangier.  

I must refrain from attempted critique as my history with Rima compromises any objective view of the artist’s new work, but I do have insight to the backstories.  I know the moves, her exhibition routine, for her moves and mine are born of our moves together.  I know well the pre-exhibition busyness of mustering finance, timing, of the printing, framing, photography, transportation, of hanging and pricing; and preparing spiel for the catalogue, for online, the invite, the press and gallery’s pet clients; a different spiel for friends and yet different again for artist colleagues and rivals.  Executing the tasks seems endless, like that list, exasperating and there’s an opening deadline and post-exhibition party to arrange, success to prepare for, and a brave face put in reserve for disaster.  
Exhibiting is an intrinsic part of an artist’s job, if a job artist be, yet exhibitions are infrequent and an entirely different activity to the seclusion of studio working.  Exhibitions need rarely used and unpracticed skills of personal presentation.  The work is given public chance to speak, but the artist in public has to be looking good, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to glad-hand all comers with the real right words ready pat on demand.  Every detail matters; of looking good, hair, teeth, face, wardrobe and shoes; an exhibition is a performance, an act of not seeming anxious or tired even while you are fraught and stressed.  
Exhibitions are the artist's main chance and chance plays the hugest part in the success of any exhibition.  
I opened one that coincided with an outbreak of Gulf hostilities, Rima and I contended with an earthquake in Cairo, and this summer in a tempt of fate I launched a show the night of the Olympic Opening Ceremony which worked surprisingly well.  Unwittingly competing for attention with Gulf War 2 was haplessly grotesque.  
The artist cannot second guess events but you can curse your luck.  

Definitions opened to thunderous rain which added to the drama and dampened a fine opening attendance.  Rain didn’t stop the professionals, the press and TV crew, and it didn’t stop the success, or the party.  The artist cannot second guess either people, or the elements. 

 

  

Pigeons, or Doves - painting in anger.

Mickey Raymond, 81, mover and shaker at Colefax and Fowler lives in stately home style in a spacious bungalow in Tangier's Marshan, the plateau west of the Casbah, the hill before the Old Mountain where it gets truly Surrey-like, beyond and above which are the palaces of the King of Morocco, the Saudis and the Emir of Kuwait, and those of their wives.
The Marshan is a district of faded grand residences, one-time legations, a football stadium, hospitals, schools and the King's Tangier town house or 'office', where York Castle crumbles, the Phoenicians entombed their dead and the hip hang-out Cafe Hagh tumbles down the shady northern cliffs facing Tarifa and Spain.
Mickey's bungalow is at the eastern city end as the hill plateaus out and Tangier reestablishes back into more hectic hilly familiarity. He is hedged between a print works and an apartment block but once inside you'd not know. His seclusion is absolute, the calm disturbed by a grandfather clock and a visual assault of furniture, furnishings, pictures, murals, and objets d'art, that should but fail to preclude elegance.
Each piece and every detailing, kitschy or fine as maybe, stands alone on examination.
High windows open onto a shady and entwining garden that utterly deceives in belying its tininess.
How such a densely arrayed mish-mash fails to be the mad grotto of an eccentric is Mickey's miracle.
It is the canny gaps between the pieces that form and define Mickey's gift, and it is on two such gaps that I've been invited to paint.
I think, 'Is this wise?' On Mickey's part, wise, to crowd the space further. Wise of him to ask me, wise of me to contemplate the task and agree.
Mickey is not a scary man. Generously hospitable and urbane, he is shruggingly tolerant as you have to be to live in Tangier, but in truth he scares me a little. He is of the suave, alert, well educated, society-monied establishment that I am not. Colefax and Fowler, designers to an age and class that may have a resonance in the dreams of my parents and grandparents, are unknown to me. He refers to places I know only on the map and to folk, nay, personalities I don't know of at all. If he's testing me I'm failing but what the heck, money isn't involved and they're his doors that he wants me to adorn.
Mickey doesn't know I haven't picked up a paintbrush in anger for two years.
I tell my friends, and they tell me 'You can do this'. I have brushes, packed in a reflex for a journey that had no painting intent, and the same friends supply me with the rest of the kit.
Crowded and surrounded at Mickey's I blunder around trying to water colour wash with acrylic on a vertical surface. Astonishingly this works although it is not a recommended method and had no right to work at all. I always was a crap painter. I know nothing about and mistrust acrylic paint, I know nothing about painting opaquely impasto, or on panels, or vertically, but in two sessions and two entertaining lunches cooked and served by sweet smiling Fatima, Mickey is pleased as punch and I'm astounded.
The work is done, and now I see what he wanted and why. Freshly painted they may be, but the new panels sit in the overall scheme as if meant to be there all the time.
We are more relaxed now, both more confident and Mickey Raymond isn't finished yet.
A Noel Coward CD plays through a happy third session while we ponder the angle of light and nuances of green for trompe d'oeil roundels.
Fatima pats me lightly on the back as she serves us lunch, approvingly I believe, and drinking a lovely Moroccan wine I marvel at what has happened here.
Before I'd moistened a brush, Mickey Raymond saw it all.

 

Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

I went first in 90 or 91.

I was told to by La Directrice of the gallery hosting my exhibition.
‘You’ve got to go and have a look’ she said, and La Directrice liked bars.
‘I’m not coming I don’t like’ she’d concluded shortly.
She didn’t tell me why I should and when I went, I was none the wiser. Then, there were other bars in Tangier, wilder, rougher, funkier, classier, some Moroccan and La Directrice and I liked those better, drinking with dangerous people drinking. I didn’t understand the fading echos of Tangier’s edge of law haven heyday time; wild, exotic, cheap, corrupting, corruptible, accessible and easy to escape to and from. I saw the old guard around town, a trifle distressed I’d thought, elegant in their outmoded suits. I saw a few that evening at Dean’s Bar and more at my opening.
I’d imagined never to come back to Tangier. The world is huge, there are places else I haven’t been and I’d liked it here so why overlay the good memories by returning?
It wasn’t Dean’s Bar that brought me and it isn’t painting, but paintings I have painted of this city beckon anew with the self-same allure. It is the accident of a vacant available apartment, poor planning and so to Tangier, winter 2010, humid, cold and ready with rain.
The Medina smells of wet wool the night I go to Dean’s Bar again.
Two small rooms knocked into one. The bar still occupies one side of the first, to the right as you enter through a bead curtain. Tiles clad the walls to shoulder height, white and blue in the main, rather public lavatorial in a way and cool against a hot summer night.
Tables range down the left and all around the back space. The side tables are taken by Tangaoue, all men of course and my friends are ensconced at the back far left corner. There’s no choice but to take a seat facing them so there is less chance to observe. They are drinking, they have tapas and what bliss, they are smoking cigarettes. I order a bottle of Guerrouane which is brought to the table. Being Brit, any service in a bar catches me unawares. By my glass by the ashtray, more tapas arrives including delicious piping hot whitebait. Young Spanish fill up the remaining tables, one woman very drunk very loud, and my American friend sucks in her cheeks saying ‘Oh dear.’ She disparages the day-tripping Spanish from Algeciras and Tarifa, calling them ‘The Boat People.’ There are other boat people in Tangier all traveling one-way, strapped into blacked out high-speed inflatables and paying desperate fee for a one in x chance of gaining entry to Europe. Captured craft line the police jetty in the port.
Dean’s has, I am told, the cleanest facilities this side of the Minzah, ‘spotless’, but I had no call. The Moroccans look coolly interested and mildly unimpressed, but coming to a joint like this at all, and in a city like this, they know the score. I sense they would like more action, better entertainment and more to have to talk about and that’s pretty much how I feel about it. This is the trouble with pubs where famous people drank and famous times were had, they aren’t there now and we bring our ghosts and eke them out of the bottle.
We’re happening now and it we make it in Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

duologue

the gallery of asemic writing.
'Document' a duologue by Aude Hérail Jäger and Kevin Jackson....


AHJ

v GOSSIP (AWAY)

I am being walked and talked around this strange town I used to know. The gossip is a morass of names without faces. I lag, wading in clods of incomprehension. Different people share the same name and I sink over my boots.
It is so simple - she lives here, he did, they do, he’s, she’s - understand?

No. I’d hazard a yes in hope, but … no.
Not yet, I need more time on the gossip treadmill, incline-talking to fit me for social purpose.
No room for me to interject me, my I is unnecessary, I’m easily identifiable as the one who’s new and knows nothing and no-ones names.