Written by Islam Mohammed

It’s a typically grey English day and I’m waiting for my guest to arrive. I make myself comfortable on the largest leather sofa my favourite café—George and Delila—has to offer, in hopes that it will make me less nervous; to be a journalist, I have discovered, is not as easy as being a poet: it’s somewhat much more intimidating.

Ré Phillips (Ré pronounced as Ray) arrives shortly after I have lined the last of my pens in a neat row next to my journal. Her hair is tucked under a purple African head-wrap and there’s an infectiously happy expression on her face. She fumbles with a long, silver tube and lays it down to shake my hand. Inside, I believe, lays the embodiment of the painter, polyglot and performer that she describes herself to be on her blog. Ré confirms my assumption with a few life stories.

We begin in Georgia, Atlanta, in the home of an Afro-American family where Chaka Khan’s soulful voice can be heard blaring out of the speakers of a stereo. It was here, Ré tells me, that she found her love for singing and became the vocalist she is today.  But we don’t linger on the music for too long for art is next on her journey.

Ré animatedly describes a younger self, tucked away in the corner of the art section of a library. I see a fleeting image in my head of a young girl with an open book, tendrils of colours spilling out of it, and I smile to myself; it’s not hard to see oneself in her place, the physical essence of your scope of possibilities pouring out all around you.

Is this where your love of painting came from? This childhood moment? ‘Not necessarily,’ she says, studying the plain ceiling, choosing her words carefully. ‘Painting is a more personal thing for me. I articulate through my hands. I’ve always expressed myself whether through storytelling or singing but with painting you can say what you want without being too explicit.’ As if on cue, she reaches for the silver tube and removes a large scroll from within, unfurling it on the table. My eyebrows rise; I’m not always easily impressed.

Before me lies the manifestation of Ré’s life experiences of the past year. It’s a child of three countries I am told: Palestine, India and England. And the painting holds true to its painter’s words.

There’s an array of themes across the canvas, from faceless, international political figures (war), inspirational figures in history (peace) to continental patterns (culture). But Ré refuses to confirm my assumptions, politely reminding me that her art is open for interpretation.

Dominating the centre of the piece, on a bright orange background, are the religious symbol for Islam, Christianity and Judaism, side by side. I become curious as to why. ‘My painting is an international arena of interfaith,’ she explains to me, launching into a passionate speech of how she dislikes the conflicts caused by religious differences, making prominent references to Israel and Palestine.  ‘These are all the Abrahamic religions,’ Ré states simply, as though all of us are as enlightened as she is.

Will you ever stop painting? She shakes her head. ‘No. Painting is my outlet, how I express myself. It makes more sense for me to do music, but without painting I’d go mad.’

We’ve seen the two stops in Ré Phillips journey that made her the performer and visualist that she is today; and though I’d love to travel a little further with this extraordinary woman and see what other gems she has to share with the world, my granted interview time is up. Her role as a student at Oxford University is calling, and she must respond.

Yes, not only does Ré Phillips’ institutional, new world, ethnographic style of painting inspire, but so does her dedication for the academics. That is what I call the art of the matter.

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While living in India, one thing I learned from an Indo-Japanese artist friend, Yoriko, was about sensibilities. We all have them. They remind us of who we are. We go to them to make sense of the world in the face of uncertainty and tribulation. For Yoriko, who was born Japanese but living in New Delhi with her Hindustani husband for more than 20+ years, her Japanese sensibilities informed so much about her life and her work as a transnational being. And particularly as an artist, her sensibilities are perhaps reminded her of herself, vicariously through her body of art: from the types of materials she uses to paint with, to the traditional Japanese art practices that she draws from to create her own body of contemporary work, and including important cultural values too such as, for example, understanding the physicality of nature– being Japanese has absolutely informed the nature of her work.

An important part of my growth as an artist has been the realization that my sensibilities are the things that I give to a work, and that, in turn, my sensibilities are that which gives back to me. And ever since I began to understand this, I watch my own black sensibilities informing me daily, showing up in life’s random moments, reminding me of myself. And just how do they reveal themselves? It may be in an R&B classic on the radio, like  the Marvelettes’ “I’ll Keep Holding on” or Isaac Hayes’ “You Got Me Going in Circles.” It could also be upon reading twentieth century black writers like Ellison or Murray or Wright or DuBois who write of their own experiences as black folk in a black existentialist conceptual framework to articulate their disjointed encounters with the political, economic, and social milieu of Western modernity. Other times, my sensibilities are provoked by transversing through certain spaces and places: the black church, parts of Alabama, or even the historic Auburn Avenue district.

And while sensibilities may inform one’s way of life or body of work, they do not necessarily dictate it. We are formed by our experiences, our cultures, our histories. It goes without saying that these are a foundational part of who we are. But simultaneously, there is so much else that transcends these foundational elements: the ever-evolving selves we are striving to become, novel experiences we have out in the world, multicultural fluencies we may develop, or higher education we may obtain. We are changing all the time. Eventually, we may be shaped beyond recognition; but the fact still remains that by the end, our sensibilities play an important role in shaping who we are.

What are your sensibilities? Where, when, and how do they reveal themselves to you?

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Five months ago, I entered into a relationship with a set of ideas which would manifest in painting form– ideas that would move me, command large amounts of my time, and require obsessive attention. These ideas emulated from specific set of life changing experiences I have had in the last few years; however, the Origin of ideas is not important, but rather, the ripple of effects that these experiences have had on my psyche, my choices, my world view, and my art. These were the kind of haunting ideas that had that ‘can’t eat, can’t sleep’ effect– the kind of effect that allows notions to have a kind of omnipresent, ubiquitous visibility in everything you see, read, and listen to.

But I suppose this compulsive obsession with ideas is what makes for good artwork, because for me, art is simply the physical manifestation of one’s relationship with a set of ideas. I have found that the more I grow as an artist, the more I define my work as periods in which I enter into an intense relationship with something. And I go through every single aspect of life with that thing– whether it’s a thought, an actual object, a new theory, or a fanciful imagining. It’s very intimate. It’s spatial. And once you’ve hit the climax, once you can no longer stand it,  you know it’s over. Everyone knows when any relationship is over. You just know when it’s finished.

And so around February of 2012, I decided ”to elicit every facet of my current thought life, however digressive, onto the pantheon of [a] canvas.” I knew that I would have some ideas/ themes/ topics in mind: ”disfiguring figures, decoupage, President Obama, Sudan’s Al-Balabil (3 nightingales),” and xenophilic inspiration ranging from “Mackenzie-Childs patterns, East Asian floral patterns, Nubian politics, animal print, eyes, & Ethiopian iconography.” The ideas came bit by bit, in different spaces and places. In France, I created the leopard print border. I gathered political newspaper clippings– ones about Sarkozy’s immigration policies and symbols of francophone colonization. I purchased senneliers. In India, I finished the border. I remained patient. Soaked up the vibrancy of Delhi. Bought more paints. Looked for more newsprint. Then in England, I regurgitated all the months of theories and conceptual frameworks about imperialism & colonialism, and all the other -isms I’ve been fed at my institution of higher learning– spewing all of my questions and frustrations about development, as well as the dichotomous reality of life in the ‘underdeveloped world’, as colorfully and boldly as I could. A messy montage is what started to emerge. And although I authored this montage of themes and designs, I can not purport that I had prior understanding of how the puzzle pieces would inlay and coalesce into the painting.

Consequently, something else that I have realized is that, just as much as I am not in control of choosing the cards I have been dealt in life, I am equally out of control of how things symbolically unfold on the canvas, or why some things get painted and others don’t, or why I am fiercely drawn to particular tropes, symbols and themes. I now understand that as an artist, you don’t always get to choose. In this sense, I view my work as a spiritual commodity. For example, with this painting, I reached a beautiful place, which has taught me that if you are willing and if you are obedient, Something greater can work through you, metaphysically, to produce and relay critical information, ideas, and messages to an onlooker and allow them to have a dialogue with a new nexus of notions. I now like to gently refer to it as the  ’spirit work’ which is underway in my artistic process.

But let’s take a step back. When you look at one of my paintings, here’s what happens: From the outset, I lure in onlookers with markers, symbols, and sign posting and trap them in the jungle of uncanny visual aesthetic. But there’s more to art than what meets the eye. Beneath the surface, art is a game & to experience it, you have to be willing to play. Once I’ve trapped you, if you’re willing, you can  occupy a space that will allow you to confront the quandaries etched into the canvas. And just when you perhaps felt devoid of that which is holy, just, or pure, if you play the puzzle right, the array of lines, colors, and symbols will erect a still peace inside of you. Because stillness begets stillness; hope inspires hope, and purity demands itself.

The complexity of my work is that it hopes to recapture & reanimate that which has been lost or undermined by powerful worldly forces, such as development, colonialism, imperialism, and the rest. Subconsciously & metaphysically, creating art for me is thinking and toiling with my hands in order to reweave the eternal circle which has been broken. And in the process, I don’t always anticipate the discourse being created with my own hands. What I experience during my artistic process is truly supernatural. My words fail me. My intellect can not fully understand. It’s a process of bodily knowing and doing that supersedes space, place, and time. It knows no now and then or here and now. It lives in the ancient world, and occasionally visits our modern one. It wears the mask of an angel, and flies high above our stratosphere with golden wings. I am not in control of It. That’s how I know it’s not me.

Let me give an example. Last month, I was invited to dinner with an emeritus professor and scholar of ancient Nubia, and I took my painting with me to share with his family. When he saw the painting, his eyes lingered a long while, roaming the canvas, and after some time, he remarked about its peculiar similarity to wall paintings he witnessed fifty years ago in Egyptian Nubia. He told me that many of the tropes and symbols in the painting I showed him– including the star of David and the Ethio-Orthodox angel from Abyssinia– were colorfully drawn all over houses in that period and space in Egypt. Sadly, though, the Aswan Dam  flooded the area and now all of those paintings which graced the walls of colorful mud houses are gone forever. Needless to say– I was shocked. I had no prior knowledge that this similar aggregation of ideas and colors and symbols existed in any other time or place. But that’s just it. There’s something about creating that goes beyond the physical act of doing & that obscures time and space and place. I am left in awe of the spiritual experience of human beings and the myriad of ways we can connect with the Creator.

This is what I wanted you to know about my paintings: I pour into my work an untainted pure energy, and submit my paintings as active, holy prayers which bear no answers, only questions and hopeful imaginings of peace, agape, justice, and freedom.

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All of a sudden, or perhaps not so all of a sudden, I’ve been fiercely drawn (back) to the tradition of African American art.

When I reflect back on my interest in art, African-American art has never been that which has most or primarily inspired me- nor was it that which I actively sought out to unpack and understand. As far back as I can remember, Spanish and Mexican artists like Picasso, Jorge Arcos, Marco Razo, have been the artists that have inspired me the most because of their abstract style and powerful command of color and line. Then, post-2008, it was the iconography of East Africa, particularly of Ethiopia, which captured my heart and dazzled my imagination. Since then, my work has been preoccupied with imagining and re-imagining the sacred “wide eyed” angel, who, somehow, looks like me. Why do I choose to paint these angels– angels that bear afros instead of halos? Well, I am sure there is something deeply spiritual and psychological, which plays on my identity and also my affinities. Whatever the reason may be, this particular aspect of Ethiopian iconography is here to stay as a dominant theme in my work.

I’ve wanted the angels to play a different role in my art lately, though. In my subconscious, I think this desire may be related to my attempt to render a place for myself (in the real world) as an African-American working in Africa. I want to make sense of it, to forge connections, to discover similarities, to find something more substantial that unites me to her, besides the former part of my hyphenated identity. Christianity & features of the Black aesthetic remain prominent similarities. The antiquity of Abyssinia (and particularly of the antiquity of Christianity in Abyssinia) remains the prominent allure.

So, in searching for where and how these black angels would fly in my paintings, I decided: what better way than to anchor our mutual iconographies together in one painting? I imagined elaborate reinterpretations of these angels flying high over novel modes of symbolism which would represent the southern Black church– a church symbolically represented by crosses, short and fat and skinny and tall women in large floppy hats, waving fans and the like. Churches filled with pews, glass windows, and the charismatic shouts of the congregations. And the podium, the preacher, and the pulpit would, of course, be there, too. This is my experience after all, shouldn’t I channel it, together with other kinds of iconographies, in order to make new spaces for imagining and creating transnational dialogue across the African diaspora?

I should. But the first step, I realized, is to do what maybe I could have done first: ground myself in the rich, historial framework of African-American art. Contextualize myself, and thus, perhaps making my art– which is transnational, conceptual, and imaginative art– more accessible to my communities. I want to, more tangibly, manifest a body of work which seeks to create and facilitate dialogue between two great nations in one single canvas. I think traditionally, what’s been done, is that African-American artists do the profound work of opening a unidirectional channel which interprets and re-imagines ‘Africa’– masks, full figured women in African garb, often carrying babies on their backs, and the like. . . but where has one person allowed the two to dialogue, rather than one simply depicting the other?

I’m consciously going back to my roots. I actively want to unpack the narratives of African-American art. But in hindsight, I must admit that African-American art has been there all along, but it has lurking in the level of my subconscious. It has lined every single wall of momma’s (and nana’s) house growing up. From my youth, I can recall specifically African-American art depicting a specifically African-American experience: hot combs on the stove, a young kappa boy and a young aka girl running through an open field, grandmothers straightening young girls’ heads of natural hair, folks playing jazz, the charisma of the Black church, Sunday afternoons at grandma’s house, and more. This genre of art was a part of the visual propaganda of positive Black imagery that filled my mind as a child. One prominent example that comes to mind is Varnette P. Honeywood’s commissioned art on the Cosby’s, 227, Amen, a Different World, and others. (Remember the episode of the Cosby’s where Mrs. Huxtable buys back that famous Black painting?)

Consciously grounding myself in the artistic tradition of African-Americans will be exciting and will prove necessary for the future development of my work, as part of the reason I paint is to cast unity, where there seems to be none, & to create spaces for transnational dialogue. Again, as you can read in the aesthetics section of my blog, I am an artist who does not arbitrarily create. I am an artist who does not believe in art for art’s sake. Art is living, breathing, moving, alive– and we must utilize it and make it instrumental as much as possible.

I was reading one of W.E.B. DuBois’ works a couple of weeks ago- Criteria of Negro Art. A very interesting and provocative work it is, indeed. In it, he demands that art should not only embody Beauty, but on the way to achieving Beauty should instrumentalize Truth (“not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaiden of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding”) and also of Goodness ( “goodness in all aspects of justice, honor and right”). He also puts forward his normative conception of art saying that all art is (and for the oppressed coloreds of America at the time, necessarily so) propaganda:

“Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.”

Well said.

I digress. The point I mean to make and to drive home, is that art, for me, is instrumental; it’s a means to an end rather than an end in itself- always. Even the most unsuspecting abstract painting of mine often takes on deep meaning that is almost always meant to encourage, inspire, & ignite revolt, change, dialogue, & action. As such, this new body of work I hope to create which will attempt to bridge the gap between the African diaspora in North America and the nation of Ethiopia, is deeply rooted in this DuBoisian view of art.

I’ll conclude this post with a few images I really enjoy from the African-American art tradition:

Romare Bearden

Archibald Motely

Varnette P. Honeywood

Varnette P. Honeywood

Murray Depillars

Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean Michel Basquiat

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I have never struggled to paint.

I have never failed to find inspiration.

But lately that has changed.

I want to do it.

Because painting, for me, is like taking in breaths of air. It is as necessary to my life support as oxygen is.

I have everything I need. Paints are there. So are the brushes.

The materials required are not lacking.

The crux of the problem is that I find the space I currently occupy to be one that blocks inspiration, rather han encouraging it.

In this space, that which is applauded is that which is normal and normative, that which is safe, and that which conforms to the dominant discourse, aesthetic, and feel. Fancy rhetoric articulated with a poker face… all talk and no feeling, no human connection, no action. This is what gets you ahead in this world.

If I choose to color outside the lines just a bit, I am quickly popped back into place, to drudge on replicating the same old thing, working on the same old assembly line, oiling the same old powerful machine. Any dissent that sustains a purport that is strange, that is weird, or that is non-conventional is looked upon with a disdainful glare.

But disdainful glares aside, the space feels lifeless. Where is the color that brightens my world? Where is the community? Where is humanity? I can’t find it, and I have been trying for months. I suppose I can not expect to transition from a space as full of life and living color as the Subcontinent to the belly of her colonizer and find it easy. This belly is stone as cold. Old. And steeped in a tradition that conditions, informs, and permeates every aspect of intellectual, social, political, and everyday life.

I mustn’t lie. I do witness some small glimpses of humanity every now and again. I see humanity when I am walking down the street, in the faces of  the homeless men and women I encounter on every other corner. I see it in the two Slavakian immigrant workers I met today at the crepe stand. I feel humanity when Penny talks to me about her husband and the experience of raising mixed race little women in this space. I see it on the East side of town, in the eyes of the grocer that sells me halal meat and in those of the mother and daughter who run a family-owned health food store that I frequent. Humanity radiates from the community center where the refugees come to break bread on Thursday and even from the restaurant just across the street– the one harboring a Jamaican man, whose story is only known by the walls that incapsulate him and those who are bold enough to enter those walls and brave his sting.

Sadly, I find humanity among those who I feel are the least privileged by this space, which prides itself on old money, concentrated wealth, & tradition.

I am struggling to encounter truth, humanity (everywhere), color, warmth.

In the midst, I am forcing myself to paint not what I feel, but what I imagine could be.

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