Paul Dash in studio, July 2024. © Cameron Amiri, courtesy of Felix & Spear Gallery.

My career in art and design started during the Windrush era and while I was still at school. I felt isolated from other kids as the only Black West Indian student of my age there and arguably in the whole of Oxford. My parents knew most of the West Indian people in the city as my father cut hair at the weekends and was the only West Indian ‘barber’ in the city. Black people were sensitive about exposing their hair to the gaze of white people then, including barbers, so we got to meet in our home on a regular basis, most 1950s / 60s West Indian men in Oxford and their families.

I became absorbed in painting as a fourteen-year-old. You could say it wasthe only friend I had, and the art teacher, Mr Goodwill, allowed me to paint whatever I liked during his lessons.

My mother and I went on the bus to shop at Cornmarket in the centre of town each Saturday morning - she would be on the lower deck while I was on the top one. From there I feasted my eyes on the ancient architecture of the university buildings, and was fascinated by the complexity and beauty of it and then the people mingling and interacting with each other: students wearing their long colourful scarves, the various postures many visitors adopted when relaxing or just talking, etc. I drank it all in.

Many years later while visiting a friend in Holland, I saw an exhibition of Eritrean art in Amsterdam and was struck by the aerial views in which most of the compositions were set. They echoed that experience of my travel into central Oxford on the upper deck of a bus. I loved the work and enjoyed the way it allowed the viewer to attain a more complete view of each figure represented. I worked some of their technique into my art.

I have always tried to define myself as an African Caribbean artist and have resolved to make work that speaks from my African identity. In that regard I am inspired by other artists in the African Diaspora who make work in different media, particularly music and the visual arts. I think of musicians who use improvisation as a key factor in making music as in the improvised rifts, say, of John Coltrane and in the ‘street art’ of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I never work from sketches though I sketch a lot, so you won’t find enlargement grids embedded in my work. Instead, I start from a scheme of semi-abstract mark-making. These could be based on cross-hatching when making large drawings, or a mass of dots and dashes when starting a new painting. Such open beginnings allow me to work freely from what I find in the abstract forms already inherent to the marks in each work. In that sense my art has more in common with Jazz than with traditional European approaches to composition. It also means that each piece is truly unique in that I cannot replicate the route taken to the development and completion of it.

Paul Dash (August 2024)

Opening Hours

Wed – Fri 11.00 – 18.00, Sat - Sun 12.00 – 15.00

Location:

 71 St. Mary’s Road,
London W5 5RG

Text and pictures, copyright felix and spear and the artist