The Other Lawrence of Arabia

With requisite bush hat pulled low over my eyes to shield my face from the glaring sunlight, my trigger finger poised over the button, I scan the crowd of industrious workers bustling around me. My trained eye constantly focusing and shifting, looking for the right combination. I see it, seize the moment, and shoot. The men with their taut faces and muscular arms pulling on ship rigging may be dead now but I immortalised them in monochrome.

A cloud of filthy diesel smoke fills the air as the fully laden dhow starts to pull away from the dhow moored alongside it and turns its mighty bow towards the creek mouth. Through the cluster of thick masts I catch a glimpse of huge sun-bleached sails unfurling and suddenly a childhood memory bubbles to the surface and I recall having seen this image before. When I was a child basking in the exquisite panorama of Kenya living for a while in a beachfront bungalow nestled among the pines and palm trees lining the white sandy shore of Mombasa. Far out on the line where the infinite and luminous blues of sky and sea met, I'd sometimes catch sight of a dhow gliding like a graceful swan, its sails cupping the Easterly wind. Little did I know back then that I would soon be following that swan to its destination.

My shirt is sticking to my skin; the heat is unbearable. I have filled several rolls of film and decide to head back home to process them in the cool airconditioned makeshift darkroom that my sister and I had set up in a spare bathroom. So many of the large black and white photographs we developed had once adorned our walls but in the shifting sands of my nomadic life much has gotten lost in transit. But I had over the course of my art career in the Arabian Gulf captured and preserved in full colour my experiences of that period of my life. The paintings hang in other people's houses now.  I am left with the memories but as I write this, decades later, they remain vibrant and vivid. I can almost smell them.

“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta

You can view some more of my Orientalist & Arabian Gulf paintings HERE