Article published in September edition of Masquarade magazine - new style and fashion publication in the Middle east. I took all the photographs also.

THE HORSE - FROM THE ARABIA TO ASCOT

Early risers in the British racing town of Newmarket can glimpse something magical as the sun rises over the paddocks – strings of thoroughbred racehorses passing almost silently through the still slumbering streets to be exercised on the surrounding heath.

Those on the heath to see this equine nobility in action can, on rare occasions in the months from April to November, also glimpse the hawk like profile of the owner of many of the finest steeds.  

Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, often wearing tweed while surveying these dawn gallops, has two Newmarket stables housing the Maktoum family’s famous Godolphin thoroughbreds.

The ruler of Dubai and Vice President of the UAE is not only the world’s most successful racehorse owner, but also a man who values horses in a very special way. When it comes to understanding people and the challenges of government, Sheikh Mohammed believes much can be learned from horses.

In his book “My Vision – Challenges In The Race For Excellence”, the Sheikh writes: “If you know how to please horses, you know how to please people. And if you know how to respect horses, you know how to respect people. And if you are good at raising the morale of horses, you’ll be able to do the same for human beings. ”

Sheikh Mohammed, himself a world class horseman, devotes an entire chapter of the book - not yet translated into English – to horsemanship and politics with a reminder of the value put upon horses by the Prophet Mohammed himself.

In the Qur’an horses are described as a gift from God. “When God created the horse, he said to the magnificent creature: I have made thee as no other. All the treasures of the earth lie between thy eyes. Thy shalt carry my friends upon thy back. Thy saddle shall be the seat of prayers to me. And thou shalt fly without wings, and conquer without sword; oh horse.”  

Horses have been exalted – and highly valued  - in the Arab world since ancient times. They enabled the early warriors of Islam to spread the faith across the entire region. Their prowess in war lasted until 20^th century armaments made horsepower valuable only in motorised vehicles.

But the importance of the horse to mankind endures and its position in the Arab world, revived across the Gulf region in recent decades, is the subject of: “The Horse – From Arabia to Royal Ascot.” an exhibition at London’s British Museum until September.Those unable to get there, can visit the House Of The Horse Museum closer to hand in Dubai’s al-Shindagha district.

The London show marks the Diamond Jubilee of one of Britain’s most passionate horse enthusiasts, Queen Elizabeth the Second. At 86 she has now forsaken the saddle but is still a passionate racing enthusiast.

The ruling classes have long enjoyed equine sports of many sorts – from horse racing and show jumping to the ancient – though now illegal - sport of fox hunting. That spectacle with riders in hunting pink and packs of Beagles can still be seen in the English shires. But no ultimate kill is allowed.

Across the Gulf region horses are also used for falconing - another popular hunting pursuit. The founding father of the Emirates. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan said one of his earliest childhood memories was of his ancient sport.

The first verified record of the domestication of horses is in Kazakhstan around 5,500 years ago. But Nigel Tallis curator of the British Museum show says: “It is in the Middle East that it was first used to it’s fullest potential and you see these incredible inventions appearing. The horse becomes part of these urbanised, civilised societies.”

One exhibit suggests that the relationship between humans and horses may have originated far earlier, in the southwest of what is now Saudi Arabia. Some years ago a farmer digging a well came across a cache of carved stone artefacts including one appearing to be of a horse with a bridle. Scientists have not definitively verified its age, but think it could be 2,000 years older than the Kazakhstan finds.

The uses of horses in agriculture, war and sport are well documented throughout the exhibition – stone fragments with Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian war chariots and Furusiyya manuscripts detailing Islamic ideals of horsemanship together with more modern racing paintings.

Horses have played a crucial role in the development of human societies around the globe. Probably the earliest horses with Arabian bloodlines to reach Europe came indirectly through Spain during the era of the Caliphate. Later others would have arrived with returning Crusaders as spoils of war.

Another major infusion of Arabian horses into Europe occurred when the Ottoman Turks sent 300,000 horsemen into Hungary in the 16^th century many mounted on captured pure-blooded Arabians.  After the Turks’ defeat at the gates of Vienna many of these animals provided foundation bloodstock for major Eastern European stud farms.

Interestingly no horses of any sort were known in the Americas until the arrival of European settlers. Aztec warriors thought Spanish conquistadores on horseback were fabulous creatures. Cortes is known to have brought some sixteen Arabian horses with his army.

Today the Arabian remains the most highly prized of all horses – a pure bred whose qualities were first formally recognised soon after the Hejira.  Its distinctive features are finely chiseled bone structure, concave profile, arched neck, comparatively level croup and high-carried tail. The Arabian has the high spirit and alertness needed in a horse used for raiding and war, combining willingness and sensitivity.

They’re the stuff of myth. It is said, for instance, that the only horses that survived the Emperor Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow were Arabians.  Both the Emperor Napoleon and his nemesis at the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington, rode Arabian steeds.

The Arabian is a versatile breed. It dominates the discipline of endurance riding, a sport in which both Sheikh Mohammed and some of his sons, have excelled and competes today in many other fields of equestrian activity.

Perhaps the greatest is horse racing, the so-called sport of kings. No racing event in the UK is more gilded than Royal Ascot every June, a highlight of the social calendar though race meetings are held across the country throughout the year and long ago transcended class barriers.

And of course some of the finest racehorses are Arabians. Sheikh Mohammed’s horses from Godolphin have won the world’s richest race, the Group One US $10-million Dubai World Cup, on six occasions from Almutawakel’s win in 1999 to Monterosso this year.

And they notched up another triumph at this year’s Royal Ascot when the Sheikh’s leading jockey Frankie Dettori won the Gold Cup aboard Colour Vision, narrowly beating another Godolphin horse, Opinion Poll, into second place.

For most of the world horses are now seen primarily in the sporting arena. In war and agriculture, they’ve been largely eclipsed by machines. But in the Arab world they are still accorded a special place in the social order.

Sheikh Mohammed says: “The back of a horse is not just somewhere to sit, but a platform from which the rider feels he can take flight to the heavens. This feeling opens up wide horizons for vision, it gives birth to new ideas and it purges the mind of the routine and the commonplace. It enables the leader to see the way that lies ahead of him and his people, so that he knows where he is going, what his goals are and what the far horizons will bring him on the morrow and what it will bring his people.”

Feature in The national weekend supplement - published June 1st.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/stamps-to-high-art-queen-elizabeth-ii-is-the-uks-public-face

To see the fully illustrated version go The national's website

and as written......

Queen Elizabeth is out and about touring Britain this spring to mark her Diamond Jubilee. And as always, wherever she travels she invariably wears an outfit in some brilliant hue. For her first stop in Leicester it was a lurid pink and black affair.

Royal biographer Robert Hardman says she once said she wore bright colours because:  “I can never wear beige because nobody will know who I am.”

The Monarch was obviously joking. This year Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor has been on the throne for 60 years. At the age of 86 she is surely the world’s most recognisable woman.

The changing face of the British monarch in the 60 years, marked this June by the Diamond Jubilee of her Coronation, is the focus of a major exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery – “The Queen: Art and Image” until mid October.

Paul Moorhouse curator of the show says that while Queen Elizabeth is: “Familiar to millions around the globe, for the man or the woman in the street, she is seen from afar.

“The impressions of her in the minds of ordinary people are not based on reality, but on innumerable visual representations. Her thoughts and opinions on many subjects remain undisclosed.”

And, while many believe that the Mona Lisa is the world’s most reproduced artwork, that honour actually belongs to a little picture of Queen Elizabeth by an artist called Arnold Machin.

He is hardly a household name, yet at the time of writing more than 220 billion copies of his image used on British postage stamps have been produced in the 45 years since it was first introduced.

And the Queen’s face has also adorned every UK coin since she came to he throne and all banknotes since 1960.

Jubilee year is jammed with events with a range of other exhibitions showing off some of the tsunami of royal images created over 60 year by artists, photographers and cartoonists.

Queen Elizabeth was born on April 21^st 1926 when television was an experiment. She has since become the first mass media monarch. She now has a Facebook presence, her Christmas broadcasts are also seen on YouTube and she even has an indirect Twitter link.

Her visibility started with a childhood trickle of officially sanctioned and sedate photographs and paintings of her with her sister Margaret at play or in posed portraits by such society snappers as Cecil Beaton. The first known painting was by a Hungarian artist called Philip de Laszlo of the Queen at the age of seven.

But early in Elizabeth’s childhood, her uncle King Edward The Eighth abdicated over his love for the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. This made her father George the King and Elizabeth his heir. As Queen she has since witnessed an era of dramatic change including the transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth and her own role as ruler become an ever more symbolic one.

Today royalty still exerts a huge public fascination and there is great public affection for the Queen. This has prompted amiable parodies in satirical TV shows such as the puppet show Spitting Image, film portrayals including Helen Mirren’s Oscar winning portrayal in The Queen and innumerable newspaper cartoons.

The avant-garde has sometimes been crueller. Graphic artist Jamie Reid’s image of her with a safety pin through her nose became a defining image of Punk when used by The Sex Pistols and the extreme conceptual artist Genesis P.Orridge received a suspended jail sentence for juxtaposing her face with pornographic images.

Even some established portraitists have upset the nation. After Lucien Freud – grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and acclaimed as Britain’s greatest modern portrait painter – portrayed her in 2000, one critic said the resulting image, included in the NPG show, was so ugly Freud should be imprisoned in the Tower of London. Another said it made her look like a Royal Corgi that had suffered a stroke.

And all the while representations of the Queen have proliferated – from family snaps and official portraits by such Royal relatives as Lord Snowdon and the Earl of Litchfield to today’s paparazzi pictures for the tabloid press and popular magazines.

Every British embassy, Consulate and High Commission around the world displays an official portrait. The latest, created a few weeks ago is by the photographer John Swannell.  He says: “I’ve photographed all the top members of the Royal Family over the years. Princess Margaret was the only one I didn’t do. It’s been good fun.  They’re very easy going. I had to shoot the Queen Mother, the Queen, Prince Charles and Prince William all together, and they said, ‘You realize when you shoot this it’ll be the most important photograph since Queen Victoria was photographed with her family?’ I said, ‘Oh great, how long have I got to do it?’, and they said ‘10 minutes’! You’re allocated a time slot because they’re so busy, and you’ve really got to work fast.”

Another painted portrait, included in the National Portrait Gallery show, is by the Florentine-born artist Pietro Annigoni. It is said to be one of the Queen’s favourite paintings of herself and she liked it so much that she purchased it in 2006 for an undisclosed sum. Annigoni said: “ I did not want to paint her as a film star. I saw her as a monarch, alone in the problems of her responsibility.”

But portraiture is no longer limited to painting and photography. In 2004 holographic artist Chris Levene was commissioned by the Island of Jersey to create a portrait to mark 800 years of allegiance to the crown. It has just been given the National Portrait Gallery.

Two sittings were involved using a high-resolution cam, a 3D data scanner and a standard medium format camera. The resulting and most publicised image is startling – showing the Queen with her eyes closed.

Levene says: “The Queen had a great knowledge of photography – by the time we had finished I had a genuine sense of warmth for her. She is a quite extraordinary lady. As a model she has done many sittings and she is really radiant.”

But for all of these billions of images, how just how much do we really know of the Queen? She never gives interviews and the artists and photographers who’ve created portraits from life are dutifully tight lipped about any conversations in the studio. A familiar facade conceals a very private personality.

The closest recent portraitists have come to spilling the beans on conversations during the work in progress sessions was the Australian born TV Presenter turned artist Rolf Harris. After he finished a painting in 2008 he said that The Queen had confided: "I'm only too happy to be sitting absolutely motionless, doing nothing."

Artist from Dubai

Short piece published in The National in February 2012

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/dubai-artist-adham-faramawy-spearheads-elite-uk-student-show

Adham Faramawy feature

You get a little shock of the old when you glimpse the lecture theatre at the heart of the Royal Academy Schools in London’s Piccadilly where the young Dubai-born artist Adham Faramawy spends much of his week.

Drawings by venerable artists adorn the walls and a life-size model of a horse so old and fragile it cannot be moved dominates the room.

It is hard to imagine how Faramaway fits in here. He is an artist who fizzes with imaginative ways of using new media – a creator at the cutting edge whose provocative collaborations have been part of London’s avant-garde scene for some time.

But he is among an elite of just 17 postgraduate students culled from some thousand who applied to study here.

The young Arab artist who grew up in Dubai, Sharjah and London, is now poster boy for a show of work by these students. A still from his digital piece “Between Two Suns” is being used to publicise this show: ”Premiums Interim Projects”.

Faramawy works in digital media, photography and performance. “When I was at school I did painting and drawing and I wouldn’t rule that out again at some point,” he says. “But by the time I was doing my A-levels I was already experimenting with video and with performance.”

His background seemed to have destined him for the creative life. His mother is a magazine writer based in Dubai’s Media City and his father is a political cartoonist in Cairo. Faramawy did all of his art studies in the UK – at Norwich in East Anglia and then the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London.

In April his work will again feature in the Academy Schools in a show organised by the Red Mansion Foundation that promotes artistic exchange between Britain and China. It will draw upon a month he spent in a suburb of Beijing. ”It was fascinating discovering how people navigate the realities of living in this city and issues such as the Internet and people’s relationship with authority.”

Faramawy won’t reveal his age “It is irrelevant. I don’t discuss it” (though Wikipedia says he was born in 1981.) And nor will he explain what his art is about. “I don’t mean to evasive, but really if I could explain what it is about I wouldn’t need to make it.” But he says one theme running through recent work is the issue of consensus – how people agree that something is the case.

That is certainly one level of meaning explored in the video work “Between Two Suns” - a science fiction based piece inspired by such UFO cults as the suicidal Heaven’s Gate group in California.

But his life experience and background does flow into the work. He had a period exploring Egyptian history and mythology and he is a Muslim. He says he has the full range of emotional responses to the turbulence in various parts of the region at present. But none of this is dealt with in any specific way in his art.

“It would have been wrong for me to go to Tahrir Square. I have Egyptian roots, but I live here now. I am a Londoner.” His fame is already growing in wider avant-garde circles with shows in Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and Ireland under his belt. But so far nothing in the Emirates or Egypt.

“I would love that to happen but I have no-one I work with there …-no one who knows me yet. “

“Premiums Interim Projects” runs at the Royal Academy Schools in London from March 2^nd to March 15^th 2012

Dawn.....

Hockney - as published

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/art/david-hockney-i-am-addicted-to-art?pageCount=0