A conversation with Ahmad Abdelaziz on black lines, dark rooms, and refusing to wait for the perfect moment
Ahmad Abdelaziz uses ABA’z as his artist presence and it seems to become a brand. What follows is a conversation with the Egyptian artist about how that limitation became a whole visual language out of a body of work built almost entirely from bad nights.
Translated from Arabic and lightly edited for length and clarity.
On Beginnings
Nour Almoujabber. Do you remember the first time you ever drew something in your life?
Ahmad Abdelaziz. My father used to draw in the margins of a book he had, a collection of Gibran Khalil Gibran's poetry, little illustrations that matched whatever poem was on the page. I loved watching him do that, I loved his drawings a lot. My older brother was drawing too, more of a funky, punk-street style. So, I was pulling from both of them, and eventually I started drawing completely different things of my own. I started with caricature, actually, because I wasn't good at drawing things exactly as they looked, I didn't have the technique for realism yet. I just kept doing that until I finished high school, and that's when I realized I wanted to study fine arts.
NA. Did that ever make you want to draw in the margins of his poetry book, the way he did?
AA. I could never draw what he drew, it was a completely different kind of thing. You know the old Egyptian film posters? The women with the short hair and the open dress, holding a flower, the accessories, the lipstick, the eyes. That's the kind of thing he used to draw. It felt like a style that belonged to a different era entirely, I don't think anyone working today could really draw women the way artists used to draw them on those old posters. It's a completely different style.
NA. When you told your family you wanted to study fine arts, was there support, or was there any resistance to the idea of becoming a professional artist?
AA. My mother supported me, my father had already passed away by then, so he wasn't there for that part. My mother never had a problem with it, “do what you love”, she never pushed me toward anything specific, that was never part of my life with her. I chose it myself, and she just told me: “I'll be here for whatever you need, tools, tuition, whatever it costs, I'll try to help.” And she really did. She was never heavily involved in my artistic path itself, but it meant everything that she covered what she could during college.
NA. Does she still see your work now?
AA. Yeah, she sees it, but only through Facebook, since that's the only platform she uses. I'm careful about what I post there for her sake, some things I'll post, some things I won't. At some point I think she felt like she understood what I was making. Then later she started feeling like she didn't understand it anymore, like, how is this person who draws these things the same person sitting in the next room in our own house.
NA. But he's still her son.
AA. Yeah, still her son. Over time she's realized there's a lot going on with me that isn't about her, problems I go through that I don't necessarily talk about. But she still supports it, she still likes and comments, she's proud of the work and she knows it's mine, even the pieces closest to me.
On Process and Feeling
NA. Walk me through it. From the first sketch to the final coloring, what's actually happening in your head?
AA. Usually it starts with a strong feeling, something intense, hitting me from somewhere, my personal life, work, my social life, friendships, relationships. Most of the time it's negative emotion, honestly, I rarely draw from happiness. If I'm enjoying life, my output drops a lot. When something's really weighing on me, and I don't usually have someone to talk it through with, I'll end up somewhere by myself, a café, or my own room with the lights off and the window open, just the streetlight coming in from outside. Good music playing, Arabic or English, Pink Floyd, Cairokee, anything with real guitar, I love rock bands. Long songs too, not short ones, I want something seven, eight, nine minutes long, I have no problem with that. Something that pulls me in completely, and Pink Floyd's whole discography is like that for me. It’s what puts me in what I call “The Flow State.”
NA. The Flow State. I like that.
On Arab Culture and Inspiration
NA. As an Arab artist, is there anything from Arab culture specifically that feeds into your work? I noticed some of your designs have Arabic text in them.
AA. Definitely, the things that really shaped me, the things I grew up listening to and reading in my own field. Like the piece I sent to Arabiyon based on the poem Fortune Teller (قارئة الفنجان), that poem affected me deeply, it made me listen more closely, understand the meaning more. The whole story of it, as a song and as a poem, is genuinely inspiring to me. And beyond that, in Arab culture broadly, I love the old legends, Antar ibn Shaddad, al-Mutanabbi. I go back to them sometimes. There's a real feeling in that material that I think I could express in a different way than it's been expressed before, not necessarily the old form, or the way earlier artists rendered it, there are new shapes it could take, something closer to a modern touch. I also love folk art a lot, geometric patterns, street slang, the sayings we use day to day, proverbs too. That stuff moves me, because it feels like the experience of people from an older time, and it's still our experience now, just spoken in a different era, expressing the same thing I feel living in the present.
NA. Do you get inspiration from anywhere outside social media?
AA. I listen to a podcast, could be an artist, an intellectual talking about something, even a religious speaker. Whatever the content is, if it makes me think, it becomes material to draw. If what they're saying pulls at something, I'll draw about it. If they're describing a scene, something visual, that inspires me too. Even just walking down the street, looking at the everyday scenery around me, the nature of the country I live in. I know a lot of artists have already drawn those same scenes, but I still feel like I see them differently, and I can express them differently.
NA. When you go to a museum or a gallery, what draws your eye?
AA. Fauvism. I lean toward the spontaneous, the chaotic, the wild colors, strange textures, pop art, honestly anything strange in any corner of the museum. Strange colors, strange feelings, if I sense there's real suffering behind a piece, I'll find myself drawn straight to it, because I know the person who made it was overflowing with something, full of real feeling, maybe something close to death, and this was the only way they found to express it. It's such a simple image of something huge that was happening inside them as a person. I love human experience like that, I love hearing about it, so imagine seeing its trace in a painting or an artwork. That's endlessly interesting to me.
NA. If your work were displayed in a museum, how would you want it shown?
AA. I'd want it in a cozy place, comfortable for people, somewhere they can walk on the floor easily, a rug maybe, not one of those cold all-white rooms. More like a room in someone's house. I want being in the space to feel comfortable, and I want the work itself to not just be a visual experience, I want there to be a smell, a sound, the room's own scent.
NA. So what you're really saying is you want anyone looking at your work to feel what you were feeling with you.
AA. Exactly that. There's actually something that surprised me recently, I never expected people to react this way, but I keep finding comments from people saying they come back to look at a specific piece again and again, that they'll just leave their phone open on it. I was so happy to realize my work isn't just something people scroll past, like it, and move on. There are people who actually sit with it. Even for me, if someone spends more than a minute looking at something I made, that means a lot. If someone wants to live inside my experience, or just feels calm looking at my work, I'm happy about that, and I want to build on it even more.
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Objection by ABA'z
NA. Why comic book style specifically? Why did you land there?
AA. It has a real origin story. My family couldn't afford the materials I was technically supposed to draw with, they did what they could, a sketchbook, a pencil, an eraser, a basic twelve-color wooden set. There wasn't really another option, if I wanted a drawing to look good to someone who'd never watched a YouTube tutorial or knew anything about art, the most important thing was that the line art looked good. The black outline that defines the drawing. That had to be strong, the coloring itself was secondary, nobody minded if that part wasn't perfect. That carried into school later, I'd use whatever pen I had for my class notes to draw with too, and I just kept getting stronger at line art specifically, not painting. So naturally, when I started looking at French comics and things close to what I already loved, I gravitated toward whatever had the strongest line work, and comics had plenty of that. You can find comics that are entirely black and white, no color at all, and that's completely fine. I love inking, American comic inking especially, the way they'd shade using a mix of hatching and these big solid black shapes to represent shadow. That's what pulled me into comics as an actual medium. But as an idea, it started even earlier, back in college, when I wanted to express myself, tell my own story, and I didn't know how to do it in words or writing, but I knew how to do it in drawing. I'd draw a sequence of images side by side to show people what my day had been like, and later I found out that this thing already had a name. Comics. I genuinely didn't know that until college, after I'd already been doing it.
NA. If you'd trained in a completely different medium, what would you have gone toward?
AA. I don't feel like there's anything outside comics I don't know how to do, honestly, I learned all of that in college. I painted in oil, in pastel, I did ink wash, I did watercolor. I know the properties of all of them as materials, I've gone through the experience of each one. I genuinely enjoyed it, the idea of layering color on top of color on a real canvas, it's such a calming, beautiful process. If I hadn't ended up a comic artist, I think I'd have gone toward painting, but leaning heavily Fauvist, loud, jarring colors, strange shapes, things that aren't necessarily comfortable to look at for everyone.
NA. If you'd become a musician instead, what would you have played?
AA. I love rock a lot, I'd love electric guitar, and drums. I do wish I'd get the chance to learn them someday, I do have the opportunity in theory, but I just don't have the time for it as a hobby. Drawing is both my hobby and my job, if I added something else on top of it, it would eat up all my time. I'm planning on it for retirement, honestly, learn guitar once I'm not working anymore.
NA. I love imagining you drawing in your free time and learning guitar once work slows down.
AA. Life isn't easy, you need to draw to make money, if I don't draw, I don't get paid. Life in Egypt is hard, most of your thinking ends up going toward money, and toward the kind of social life you want to live. The idea of a hobby just isn't available to every social class here, not unless it's something simple you can do quickly, anywhere, anytime. But buying a guitar, and setting aside real time for it, whether that's a course or teaching myself on YouTube, either way it takes effort and money. My priority has to be increasing my income somehow, or honestly just resting from work, sleeping, watching something. But yeah, in another life, I'd have been a musician.
On Starting
NA. The painting titled “I’ll Start When I’m Ready” sounds like it came from a period of procrastination, or at least a period of waiting. Do you struggle with procrastination in general?
AA. Constantly, honestly. Back then I was thinking about how there were so many things I really wanted to start, so many things I wanted to make, and it always came down to the same trap, telling myself, to start this, I need to study this first, I need to read that first, I need to have these specific tools before I even know how to do it. But no, you don't actually need all of that, you just need to start. And your first attempt is going to be bad, it's going to be wrong, it's not going to be what you wanted, but at least you'll have stepped outside the circle of I need to start, because at that point, you'll already have started. That first attempt is the first step toward getting somewhere higher. You need to start in order to know how to start. To start, you need to start, you don't need to gather things first, you don't need tools first, you don't need to study or educate yourself first. To start, you just need to start.
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I'll Start When I'm Ready by ABA'z
NA. Where did that idea come from?
AA. It came from a piece of advice, from a show called El Daheeh, they were talking about exactly this. The idea that you don't have to wait for a specific time, or the clock to hit exactly a certain hour, to start doing the thing you want to do. Just start. Start at ten to three, or 3:50, it doesn't have to be exactly on the hour. Start, because if you keep procrastinating, you'll procrastinate forever, the whole thing is simple, you just need to start, and you're procrastinating on the starting itself, so you'll never start. By the time you feel ready, you'll be old.
NA. You'll be a skeleton by then.
AA. Exactly that.
NA. Do you think your art changes, or stays exactly what it is?
AA. It changes, for sure, completely. […] It could end up looking totally different, a totally different direction, because I believe I'll be a different person too, I don't think I'll stay the same person forever. The only thing I know will stay constant is the need to express myself, that'll still be there even as I get older. I'll still want to say what I'm feeling, whatever shape that ends up taking, whatever feels current to me at the time, because taste, and style, and fashion, all that shifts over time, and I know my own mind shifts along with it.
Prints of Aba'z's work are available now on arabiyon.art.
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