Making and Unmaking the World

 As a child, I was always making art with whatever was to hand, even during hard times. What first lit the spark for making art in you?

 I am afraid I found it in the deep darkness, sitting day and night under barrages of shells during the Lebanese war. Without electricity, phones, or friends, I can remember exactly the moment I started creating in order to carry on. A few years earlier, under the same circumstances, that’s how my teacher had started to practise calligraphy. Many artists have similarly had to travel to the underworld to be given their gifts – and their marching orders.

 If there was a time when you mainly used mass-produced art supplies, what prompted you to start making your own?

 Like most of our contemporaries, I never realised it was possible to make one’s own art supplies until I took a course called ‘The Alchemy of Paint with David Cranswick’. It was focused on mediaeval and Renaissance pigments of Western Europe and we learned to crush and prepare minerals, such as cinnabar and malachite, to make solid pigments called lakes from dyes made with madder and cochineal, and prepare gallnut ink.

It was very exciting, as anyone who tries this for the first time knows, but on my way home after the last session, I had a epiphany where I saw what this was really about, beyond the DIY novelty: bringing human consciousness into natural matter to transform it. It was the beginning of reconnecting properly with the true purpose of art. It took a few years to transition to handmade materials, because it’s very difficult to change the entire way you work, and making ends meet took all my attention the first few years. 

The final nudge came from another direction as I went plastic-free and started avoiding as much disposable packaging as I could which  meant most shop-bought supplies, and acrylic Once I could give proper attention to becoming fluent in all the historical techniques I had learned, there was no going back, because the results were infinitely more beautiful, alive and rewarding.

My own journey was similar, after a lifetime of foraging, my interest in ancestral skills and bushcraft began to inform my art practice, as homemade charcoal and badger-dug chalk made their way into my studio. Do you feel one area of your artistic practice is more relevant to you, or are all the different facets equally close to your heart? I am thinking of your making of materials, boxes, calligraphy, teaching, research, translation, painting, and more.

The heart of it is my work with Kufi; everything else circles around that. Kufi is the original tradition of Arabic calligraphy, that has been completely displaced by the ‘standardised scripts’ we’re familiar with today. Kufi was born of the first mystical impulse at the beginnings of Islam and the need to embody the divine Word into beautiful form, and I believe its apprenticeship and practice were very similar to and perhaps closely tied with spiritual training.

In what way does the transformation of matter in your work reflect or relate to alchemical ideas?

 The ‘Great Work’ of alchemy is ultimately the purification and transformation of the alchemist. Outer and inner reflect each other and so the outer practice of transforming substances was a means of bringing about inner transformation. The many processes involved in turning raw natural materials into sublimated colour, whether seasonal gathering, breaking down, washing, sifting, cooking, precipitating, waiting, when done over a sufficient length of time, have that effect.

 Transformation is one of the things that drew me to your work. The processes involved in making art with natural materials are profoundly rewarding, as ingredients are broken down, mixed or refined, there is always the sense that something in the artist themselves are changed in a similar way. Once you have actually ‘mulled’ paint until it is smooth, ‘mulling things over’ becomes a far richer metaphor.

How do the seasons of the year manifest in foraging for supplies for your art? What natural materials are up next for being gathered?

As I write it’s early April, and where I live the grape hyacinths are making their short-lived appearance (a lovely but equally short-lived blue), which means I should start keeping an eye out for irises (green) and wallflowers (red). I missed the best of the daffodil season but gorse is another source of yellow that’s exploding right now. I don’t think I will forage for colours this year as I have a good reserve  but I will gather some nettles, for their deliciousness!

 Do you feel that certain states of mind can only be reached during long, attentive work with the hands? If so, how would you describe it?

 I have experienced that and am still trying to understand it. I can only describe it as the presence of a different consciousness that is completely present, focused on the task yet hyper aware of everything around me. And it’s entirely separate from the mind, which can still be busy running thoughts in the corner but in that moment is so obviously not me…

I feel this work fosters a broader sense of what is considered ‘self’ by the reductionist culture of the present. Movement, my body, what is in the hand, and the wider atmosphere of the studio or woodland where I am working all feel part of one thing.

Is there anything you’d like to say about your teacher of traditional art methods? If so, what brought you to him?

 This question reminded me of the day I went to an antiques shop owned by an old friend of my teacher. I mentioned our connection as I browsed, and the shop owner asked me: ‘Did you choose him, or did he choose you?’ Basically, he chose me. I first met him while I was studying graphic design, and he briefly taught a foundation course for Arabic typography. After the 2006 war he got in touch to ask me to assist him in his work.

 How does imperfection and change enrich your work?

 Imperfections, change, surprises, these are hallmarks of the living world. Even minerals transform over time. Decay and passing are essential aspects of this physical world in which we incarnate for a short while. Eternity and perfection don’t belong here. As human beings, we have a natural longing for them, but when we deny this world’s nature by forcing ‘perfection’’ or ‘permanence’ onto it, the result is only a travesty, the product of unliving machines and materials, and it feels dead because it never had any lifeforce to begin with. 

Much of what makes artworks compelling (whether we’re conscious of it or not) is the energy of the artist that is woven into a painting, a sculpture, a performance, and that can be seen in the imperfections. Although when we speak of imperfections, it’s often in opposition to a model of perfection defined by what a machine might do, a perfectly even result that carries no trace of human personality. Our premise is already messed up that way. Why we didn’t grow out of this adolescent obsession with machines and gadgets after the first excitement of the industrial revolution, I have no idea. The ancients did not think in such terms, they seemed to judge a work in terms of truth.

 Would you say that your materials, sunlight, and time are co-creators of your deliberately fading works?

 Ever since I switched to natural materials, I have felt that my work is done in collaboration with the living world. I only have control up to a point, beyond which I can enjoy being surprised by what a piece turns into.

You have produced a series of richly illustrated instructional books covering a wide range of traditional Middle Eastern paints and inks. What stood out most from your research into ancient art materials for these books?

 Received ‘wisdom’ says that the people who lived before us, and particularly in the Middle Ages, knew far less than we do, but what stands out the most for me from my research is they were infinitely more knowledgeable. What we have is much more information at hand, most of it little better than trivia, but they had real, embodied knowledge of their world. They understood the chemistry of plants and minerals, how to make the most of it and what to avoid. They knew when and how to gather and prepare for food or craft. Their daily practical skills and self-reliance put us to shame, with our dependence on factory-made products that don’t need to exist.

 It is a unique feeling to be connected to our craft ancestors, and part of a living heritage. Do you have a feeling for what might come after you?

 As my understanding of the nature of creativity deepens, I feel increasingly connected to craft ancestors who practised in certain ways. The more I uncover this, the more it becomes my responsibility to be a knowledge keeper for the tradition. Which doesn’t mean I have a mission to revive everything, despite all the teaching I do. I’m just making it easier to find for those who have the love for working with ancient and natural materials , people who have the tenacity to work and be transformed by the process. And if there’s nobody to pick up the thread, it will sink back underground for a while, or forever – so be it.

 Personally, I want to already have a practice which can continue under whatever circumstances life throws at me, which doesn’t require the products of intense industries, oil, or complex supply chains. In practising and teaching low impact methods, I see how often they lead to highly beautiful outcomes, which I think we deeply need to fortify and sustain us in uncertain times. In what way does the apocalyptic era we live in shape your research and art?

 It feels important to bear witness to the unmaking of our world. At the same time, what is still with us equally requires our attention, and I feel most called to reflect an essence that remains unchanging behind our collective madness and that is already birthing a new era.