Ismail Ucci

You describe your art as constantly changing and full of variety. What gives such a diverse body of work its underlying sense of continuity?

My work occasionally entirely gets spun out of my head, from my imagination, starting off from extraordinary images that dropped into my mind, ‘like a slide show’. Sometimes I feel my emotions are neurotic and almost hysterical both imagined yet observed with my own interpretation of the visceral energy. I always tend to put things as directly and rawly as I can. Somehow I want to combine the compelling sense of reality that could also be found in the greatest paintings of Egon Schiele and Klimt with the sense of imaginative effects. It has to feel truly fresh as figurative narrative has to be searched and decoded. I want the spontaneity in the way paint goes onto the canvas or paper, not in a direct layout of the picture that I had priorly visualized. In my work the viewer can be brought much closer to the surface of the posing model’s skin that one would be in a normal social encounter.

Ismail Ucci | The Dance

Your practice combines a search for order and harmony with spontaneous, energetic mark-making. How do control and intuition interact while you work?

I believe each time beginning something a testament forms in its intimacy in everyday physical, psychological and emotional. I’ve developed a idiosyncratic way of working almost captive for the others yet unknown to my own realization. When I am engaged in drawing or painting the subject must be kept under closest observation  so that he, she or it could manifest everything silently about themselves. It happens unconsciously through capturing movements and attitudes through variation from one moment to another.

Many of your compositions are built through overlapping lines, figures and areas of colour. Do these layers record different stages of thought, memory or time?

When I begin at a starting point a vague and blurry vision appears and I start to execute on my easel, peering intensely at the model posing, as well as its surroundings. I jostle down faintly the atmosphere of the drawing and its nervous tension. The strangeness in which every nitty gritty details are studied with mesmerizing attention, so that it becomes as beautiful as the enriched layers of pigments painted by such as the renaissance master Titian. The leaf is as much of importance as the figure, every sharply angle treated as individual. I usually set myself a task that is how to combine a sense of greater gusto and thicker, juicier paint with my own artistic style of depicting the distinct from and texture of each individual figure with tones of colour. For example if I am drawing or painting from life it doesn’t give me the time, that I require and it continually bugs me too express that the art work is not yet finished and I must work from memory if needed be.

Ismail Ucci | Reflections

Human figures frequently appear fragmented, repeated or intertwined with their surroundings. What does the figure allow you to express?

I think and emphasis that to draw is a life long passion, an almost unattainable ideal, because the standards I set myself are so high.  It is very challenging to learn sensibility, hence I aim to draw with a full sense of poetic reference and a real sense of belonging and holding on to it. It is as if the figures in my drawings somehow turned into a pigment, great swirls, scoops, ropes and layers of thick graphite marks. It seems to go through heaven and hell, falling in love with every happy mark-making passing all the obstacles and distortions.

Ismail Ucci | Alice Day Dreaming

Space in your work often resists conventional perspective, with foreground and background merging into one another. What interests you about creating this kind of spatial ambiguity?

What really excites me and directs my way of working is using both the pictorial and spatial ratio on the surface of the paper. The spontaneous mark-making gives my work a sort of exhilarating energy creating a sort of merging boundary. I observe both with imagination and sense of presence within given space of time. I intend for the viewer to find focal point surrounded on all sides by darting and zinging blurry lines. The elaborate confusion of lines are spurted with colour and seem to appear fierce and fascinating subjects for me to unravel and depict without thinking too much of an end result.

What role does color play beyond describing what you see? Can a work begin with a color relationship before its imagery becomes clear?

The color is too important for me in all its guises and forms as the warmth of most lovely browns, and warm grays and reds with chalky surfaces giving it that odd kind of softness. I use color it its purest form, layering it where necessary breaking away from the rules and creating my own sense of expression, toying with emotions. I patiently and gradually add one fragment after another, and moving it painstakingly until I achieve a balance that I seek. The juxtaposition of forming texture, pattern and color create an interrelationship where nothing is segregated yet form in its entirety as one picture plane. The characteristic of bold originality incorporated into the design as a whole using color as the basis of its formation.

You work with brushes and rags, applying paint both thickly and thinly, How do these different physical approaches affect the character and direction of a painting?

My focus remains both on the surface and beneath the layers, hence it takes up lot of energy to keep it raw and clean.  I intend to retain a harmonious coherence working stage by stage on each and every layer. The pigment and my handling of paint, keeps a combination of warm and cool colors in a limited palette to achieve a soft, velvety and chalky texture. My studio becomes a melting pot for experimental techniques keeping a swathe of samples and studies to take into a more refined works.

Sometimes it takes days for it to settle down into my mentality and can take awhile to dry for the next layer to be applied, until I begin to see it loosely worked on and progressively complete.

Ismail Ucci | Artist Studio

After years of experimentation, are there any artistic habits or assumptions that you are currently trying to unlearn?

My temper and occasionally an impatience leads me to break all the rules and create through unconscious realization. A more refined and a professional approach keeps me at an edge to not over work. I would instantly know it if it has become tightly orientated, hence I should move inbetween finishing a work and leaving it half complete, which I can return to at a later stage, whilst I can look afresh at another. I always priorities an immediate effect that I want to achieve over preservation. The referenced sketches and research bring me back to the beginning of a relationship between what I imagine and intended at the start. I am currently engaged in the practice of drawing dance and motion at the Topolski Studio. A place where I feel to unravel great mystery of drawing movement instead of static images.