The Studio as a Subject
Around 2018, while living in Cricklewood, in North London, I began to find my subjects in the most ordinary corners of my studio.
It was a small room full of the practical clutter of daily life: a kitchenette, a fridge, a bathroom, furniture, and everything else that slowly accumulates. Nothing remarkable. But after enough time among these things, I started to see them differently. I stopped looking beyond those walls for inspiration. The studio had become my subject.
I was drawn to the corners we overlook because we encounter them every day: a bathroom sink, a shelf, a few bottles and tubes. We use them without thinking, and through habit they become almost invisible.
One drawing from this period shows a sink against dark green tiles, with a bottle of hand soap on one side and a tube of Colgate on the other. The arrangement was nothing special. I saw it every day.
But drawing changed it. The sink tilts towards the viewer, the tiles fan out in hatched green, and the soap glows a more intense orange than it ever did in the room. The scene took on a character of its own.
Distortion has always been part of how I draw. I don't add it to make an image more expressive. It comes from the way I interpret what I see, or what I remember.
I have never been interested in reproducing reality as faithfully as possible. Drawing isn't a way of proving how accurately I can render an object or a place. Reality is where I start; what happens afterwards is what interests me.
Sometimes I draw from observation, and sometimes memory takes over. I don't need the object in front of me. Shapes shift, perspective bends, and proportions lose their original relationships. None of it is planned. It's simply how I draw.
Maybe drawing lets me refuse things as they are without knowing what I want them to become. I take my starting point from reality, but I don't feel obliged to preserve it.
What interests me is turning something familiar into something else. That something else is hard to define. It isn't necessarily more beautiful, more meaningful or more extraordinary. It's just something that didn't exist before the drawing.
Looking back at my Cricklewood years, I can see how much that small room shaped my work. It was where I worked, and also what I kept looking at, remembering and reinventing. During that period, I felt little need to look elsewhere for inspiration. A sink, a tube of toothpaste or an overlooked corner could become the starting point for an entire drawing.
That's what I find most interesting about drawing: it can take something so ordinary that we've almost stopped seeing it, and give it another existence.
After all, I'm not drawing to reproduce what I see.
What I see is just an excuse.
The Sink, 2018
Coloured pencil and acrylic on paper
70 × 50 cm
You can also explore more original drawings in the Artwork and Shop sections.
