began this project with the heart of a person who grew up in Bahrain, who has learnt intuitively how it works and who marvels at how such a socially and culturally diverse group of people can live side by side, negotiating difference, welcoming it, and generally sticking together by the glue that is the island.

 

I wanted to find a way of celebrating this idea, and found it by means of drawing people’s portraits, sharing their lives in three to four hour slots. The premise was that these people would have nothing in common, save that they live on the island. Portraiture, by definition, is the art of representing the physical likeness of an individual. But in its dialectic with the dynamics of identity, portraiture accomplishes a seemingly impossible feat. It seems to have the curious ability to fuse the external appearance of the sitter with his or her inner self, marking the body as the meeting point of life and thought. So, in drawing all these people, my hope has been to bring together faces, and with them inner selves as it were, ideologies, beliefs and individual wisdoms, in an effort to represent the multifaceted fire and brilliance I feel Bahrain possesses.

 

My first sitter arrived at the house with a bundle of books and his glasses. We put some music on and I began, expecting that he would read, and I would draw, and that would be that. But we talked, and he told me things about his life, and read me passages from the Bible.  I realized that the experience of sitting in front of someone for three hours, observing and being observed, is something inexplicably rare and powerful, and it fascinated me how different people might handle the same situation. So I started to record my experiences of each sitting, and found that these recordings became a fundamental element of the process. The two began to work hand-in-hand; the drawing would enable the writing, which would in turn, inform the drawing.

 

Since that first sitting, I have drawn businessmen and housemaids, politicians and activists, royals, and people who sell tissues by the side of the road. I have drawn athletes, and musicians, and photographers, and writers, entrepreneurs, officers, bankers, cobblers, fishermen, labourers, and artists. I’ve drawn Bahrainis and expatriates, Shiites and Sunnis, men and women, young and old.  I have been into homes into which I would never have imagined being invited, introduced to people I would never have usually met.

 

And I have discovered things about Bahrain that I have never known in the nineteen years of being here. People have talked about politics and their views on the coming elections, about religion and the differences between Shiites and Sunnis, about the Al Khalifa dynasty, and how they came to rule. They have described how Bahrain once was, when the sea was the sea, and Exhibition Road did not exist. And they have talked about how it is now, about its pros and its cons. They have reminisced on the past and they prophesized about the future and their hopes for their children on the island.

 

They taught me practical things as well, about what they do in their lives. One day I would learn all about photography, and lighting, and the positives and negatives of ever-growing digital technologies. The next I would be taught how to be a model in six easy steps, or about the effects of g-force in the exhilarating world of motor sport. I now know how to train a horse, how to run a business, how to raise a child, and how to cook. I’ve learned other things too. I’ve learnt that men are, in fact, more vain than women, that spouses are hardest to please, that seeing one’s portrait for the first time takes some getting used to, and that lots of people like to talk about fruit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More importantly, though, I have had the honour of learning about what makes sixty individual people tick; what turns them on, turns them off, aggravates them, fills them with joy. I have, in the past months, considered sixty modes of thought, sixty systems of survival as it were. We have spoken of faith, and of morals, and of what they feel is important in life. Religion is religion, custom is custom, tradition is tradition, but no two people think in exactly the same way. This has undoubtedly been the most thrilling part of the ride.