NASO Contributors: Oliver Farrell Interviews Jeddah-Based Artist Ahmad Sofi

Beginnings:

“I began drawing in elementary school. As a child, I usually drew a lot of war scenes of stick figures shooting and tanks. I think this was because we saw a lot of terrorist acts in the 90s and the early 2000s.

I really enjoyed the art classes at school and then I started taking it seriously in 2015. I was in San Francisco when I saw a documentary on YouTube about Gerhard Richter, the German painter. It was about him sliding and pushing the paint. I didn’t have any knowledge about being a professional artist, but I was really interested in the process and seeing something new for the first time—pushing the paint. It was not necessarily the results. Some of them, to me, are just smudges. It was the process that intrigued me.

Two of my sisters used to be quite artistic: the elder one used to draw and do colouring, while my other sister used to make oil paintings, but she abandoned that. So, when I saw her work, I was inspired. I enjoyed her work. I think I took the torch after they abandoned it, so now I’m the artist in the family.”

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Process:

“I don’t really know myself in terms of process. How do I make a work? The idea just comes to me, and I do a sketch - I now sketch on graph/grid paper. I take a lot of photographs, but they are just reference photographs for the work.

I work almost exclusively on oil paintings. I like the medium a lot. There is something about it that gives a lot of creative space—oils, turpentine, chemicals. I like how it takes a long time to make a painting. I can make a painting in a month or two.

I used to meditate, to really sit down and bring the images to me. My work used to be more geometrical, so the images used to come to me more slowly. But now that it’s more figurative, the image comes as a flash - one time.

I feel form is more important to me now. I don’t really consider colour until after I have completed the form of the painting. The colours, while I’m painting, come naturally. I think about the background colours more because I can control that. The subject, though, is natural.

I have a couple of paintings that are taken from dreams, but they are not my main body of work. But I like when I have a strong image in my dream—I wake up and sketch it right away.”

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Studying:

“I wanted to make a shift in my career. The truth is, I wanted to get out of Saudi. I didn’t like the routine here, I was working in construction for a year, and I really hated it. I was sick of living here in Saudi. I wanted to go and do what I liked.

I think about it a lot—I always want to run away from here. It's too hot. Three years ago, I remember not turning on my AC for the entire summer, living with the heat—a conscious decision to live here with the heat.

I went to the Glasgow School of Art for the Master of Letters (MLitt) in Fine Art Practice. It was an intensive 1-year program of practical studies and no theory. We developed our work for three semesters. After each term, there was a show. The focus of the program was: ‘Find your context in the contemporary art world.’ So, each of us developed our own style. The tutors in the program nudged us— ‘Don’t go here, go here.’

I think going from more abstract to representative is what I did during this time. I don’t know if they influenced me. I did a couple of geometrical paintings—I didn’t like them. The tutors were always telling me, ‘Bring something from your culture,’ all this orientalist stuff.

I didn’t like it at the time because I see art not as a political statement, but a universal statement. A philosophical thing—at least this is how I do it. But they nudged me more toward my culture and my heritage.

At the beginning, I found that difficult. They were always asking me about the candles. I did a lot of candles—the swirling ones. They were asking me, ‘Why the candle? What does it represent to you?’ It didn’t represent anything. It was just a solution to a problem. I like to have this double meaning, this surrealist element in my work, so I used the candle. They wanted it to be more relatable to me. I felt they wanted it to symbolize something when I just used it as a solution to a problem.

But coming back here, to Saudi, I thought about it a lot. I saw the exhibitions and the art scene here, and it is all related to culture. It's not a general thing. It's not open or abstract. It's specifically related to something—a specific object—so I drew from my past and from the stuff I use, the stuff around me.

That’s why I made the teapot, the shisha. We used to camp a lot and take this teapot. Now I see and can relate the thinking of my tutors to the candles. I can see what they were speaking of. I bring stuff from my surroundings.”

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Recent Works:

“Two months ago, I started working on a painting of a mubkhara (incense burner). I was just sitting here in the majlis, using it as an ashtray, and I wanted to make a painting—I saw the image in my mind. I did two or three sketches and constructed the scene in my head.

Scale offers me a challenge. That’s why I like the time frame of oil painting at scale. It is a long process. The bigger scale gives me more time to work. I attended the talk of a Saudi director, Ali Alsumayin — He is one of the pioneers in the emerging film scene. There is a sentence that has stuck in my mind—he said he wanted to shoot on film as a means of extending the process of his photography. I really like this.

I like to keep the artwork in process, to have something to do in life. The other stuff—the engineering, the career stuff—I don’t consider my work. But painting is my work. I can make it a project. Come home and really do my work.”

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YSA Exhibition:

“I saw the YSA open call on Instagram, applied and got accepted. I had the work for YSA sketched and ready for a year before the open call, but I had it at a really huge scale, and I didn’t have the finances or material resources to do it.

I really don’t like the work now. When it was a sketch, I wanted to do it. But the result of the colours and the form was really simple, and I didn’t like it. I think I didn’t like the process of tracing the work either. I wanted to come up with a concept, so I combined two things together, by extracting or adding stuff. It was soldier brand lacquer thinner – an image of violence. I don’t know what I am saying in the painting. I look at it and say: ‘I don’t understand myself.’ I threw concepts on it and nothing landed. I think I was bullshitting myself.

All I was thinking about while painting was the music of Fela Kuti. In real life, I am very political—but in art, I am not. I don’t know if I can bridge these things.”

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The Future:

“I will present the teapot in the Summer Exhibition at Misk Art Institute. I’m thinking of focusing more on my artistic path rather than a career in engineering.

I need to develop more work. I need to increase my output of paintings and build out my portfolio. The paintings I have are big, but there are not many. The mubkhara took a lot of time and began to get annoying after two months. I actually want to explore more oil techniques and glazing. I think after the mubkhara I will scale down and make a series. Not forever, but just for now. Glazing takes a long time, so I can’t experiment on a large scale. I need to work on a smaller scale.

I am more comfortable with people seeing my work and opening it up for interpretation. The meaning comes later. That’s something I learned during the masters. I was really concerned about justifying why this artwork exists. My tutors said, ‘You don’t need to be concerned with this—the meaning will come after.’

So now I am open to interpretation and being informed by the audience.”