Artists' Talks

Onsite artist and current LOEWE FOUDATION / Studio Voltaire Awardee Babajide Brian spoke with Dot Zhihan Jia (Curator) to discuss his ongoing practice as well as his current and upcoming projects.

This event formed part of Studio Voltaire's Open House 2024 programme.

Full Transcript:

Dot Zhihan Jia: So next, we have with us, Babajide Brian, who has been a resident artist at ActionSpace in our studio since 2018. He primarily works with drawing using pencils and fineliners on paper, and directly from life, photographic imagery and memory, and the detailed drawings fall into distinct area of architecture, portraiture, and football shirt designs. Through very extensive research, Brian documents a diverse range of football players, capturing the history of each football club, its identity, supporters, and the city that it represents. You'll see a lot of details of the logos, the different architecture, as well as the sponsorship branding in black and white drawings and collage. Brian used them to examine the culture of the sports, how it has evolved, as well as highlighting anti-discrimination and racism within football and beyond. And recently, Brian has been involved in a show called Art is Part of the Equation at the Royal Academy. I will be here in conversation with Brian and just to ask you some questions. Okay. Cool. Let me know when you're ready to change a photo. Okay, so Brian, welcome. Maybe start off telling us – when did you start making art and how did it come about?

Babajide Brian: Thank you very much for having me. Very nice to meet all of you. Let me answer the first question. I started taking up art when I was eight years old. That's actually now 20 years ago, to be honest.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Okay, now we know how old you are. When did you start drawing? Is it from the beginning?

Babajide Brian: From the beginning, originally, I started doing pictures of buildings. It was mainly imaginary ones, and I didn't start drawing real-life pictures until five years later.

Dot Zhihan Jia: When did you start doing the series on the Premier League?

Babajide Brian: This started on July 17th in 2014. So that's 10 years and just over three months ago.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Very nice. And do you know how many works in total you have done within that series of work?

Babajide Brian: I believe I've just gone over the 200 mark.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Wow. And do you have all of them in your studio?

Babajide Brian: Yes, yes, I do.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Oh, very nice!

Babajide Brian: Except for a couple that, unfortunately, I never managed to recover.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Okay. Well, make sure you check out Brian's studio today. And let me just flip through some images. So we see here a lot of your drawings are monochromatic. Is there a reason why you engage with black and white drawings?

Babajide Brian: The reason I decided to do these in black and white was because of the time scale involved. If I added colour in, it would have taken a lot longer. Sometimes I'm prone to making mistakes if I actually do use colour. That's why I opted against using colour.

Dot Zhihan Jia: But I assume that it would still take quite a substantial amount of time to make the drawings.

Babajide Brian: The pictures usually take between one to two weeks, although one or two of them did take me a full two months to complete.

Dot Zhihan Jia: How do you pick the player or the shirt as the next drawing? Is there a structure or approach?

Babajide Brian: There is a bit of a structure involved. Basically, it involves doing a lot of primary and sometimes secondary research, but mainly it's just finding out, for example, how old the club is? When did it start? Was it ever involved in competitions, for example, outside of England, such as in Europe? All of those details. And once I did my research into the club and even sometimes into the player as well, depending on how long they've been there or even the manager I usually have it all stored in here [gestures to head] and then I can just be able to recite it as I begin the developing process.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Very nice. And do you remember the first ever portraiture that you've done?

Babajide Brian: The first ever portrait I did was of Son Heung-min, the South Korean captain who currently plays for Tottenham Hotspur.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Very nice and was there a particular reason you picked him?

Babajide Brian: Very good question.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Sorry, I'm just being nosy.

Babajide Brian: No, it's okay. I chose him because I think for some reason, he is very much almost well liked by rival supporters. He is very cute to some!

Dot Zhihan Jia: To you?

Babajide Brian: Yeah, he's... Who cannot like Son Heung-min? Unless you support Arsenal, of course.

[laughter from audience]

Dot Zhihan Jia: Amazing. And what's the most recent one that you've done?

Babajide Brian: Well, there were a couple of recent ones which I did do before the current one, which I'm working on at the moment.

So two which I recently did last month because it was obviously Black History as well. One was of John Barnes, best known for playing for four clubs, Liverpool, Newcastle United, Charlton Athletic, and Watford, back in the 1980s. The one here on screen, this is of Kevin Campbell, who was best known for playing for five clubs. Arsenal from 1988 to '95, Nottingham Forest from '95 to 1998, Everton, West Bromwich Albion and Cardiff. He recently died in mid-June, just a day after the UEFA Euros 2024 tournament began in Germany.

Dot Zhihan Jia: From this image, as an example, we see different mediums.

Babajide Brian: Yes. There was a lot of different mediums that were used for this one. There's a lot of pencil work that was involved, and there was also a bit of fine liners. How I shaded him was I used a new process called graphite powder, where you sharpen the tip of the pencil, but you use different sandpaper or something like that, and it just creates the powder effect. Once that was done, I just shook it all up in the container and just using a dry paint brush, applied it on and then I used tissue to just blend it in.

Dot Zhihan Jia: You mentioned that it takes a few days.

Babajide Brian: It takes a few days. I think if I'm doing work that involves, for example, Black footballers, it will usually take around about two weeks. It depends on how much detail there is that's involved.

Dot Zhihan Jia: What's the structure like when you're working with the different brandings and logos?

Babajide Brian: Basically, after the portrait of the player or manager or the shirt design is finished, the logos are applied on accordingly. I start mainly from top left and work down to bottom left. It's the same thing on the right-hand side as well. Basically, the Premier League, the UEFA Champions League, Europa League, the FA Cup, and EFL logos were applied on first. Then afterwards, the clubs, crests also featured down just at the bottom. I just made up a little bit of a slightly long slogan, which I took inspiration from reading newspaper adverts or stuff like that. This was actually made up from scratch. I've also used some past and present slogans which have been used by Sky Sports as we'll come on to shortly. Then just as we go down, the Premier League, the UEFA Champions League and vice versa, their logo placements follow in small boxes. For the Premier League, because this work is based on anti-racism, anti-discrimination, Kick It Out, the PFA and FIFA are also included as well.

Dot Zhihan Jia: Great. Well, I'm making a very bold assumption that you're a football fan.

Babajide Brian: Yes.

Dot Zhihan Jia: And for you, what's the meaning of engaging with that as a topic or exploring its culture?

Babajide Brian: I felt like it was very important to try and look at it from a very different perspective. But I think what I wanted to try and do was, when I started this project, I didn't even know how long it was even going to go on for. What I wanted to really do was I wanted to create something that wasn't just myself, but I think something that could resonate or strike a chord with those who support football clubs, those who watch the sport, those who might not like the sport but are into art, it's a bit 50/50, really. You don't know who likes what. So I just threw my hands in there and just decided to see what I could come up with.

Dot Zhihan Jia: I think I've been learning a lot from you about football. Cool. And then recently, you've started working with colours, actually, right?

Babajide Brian: I recently did start working with colours, not on the original artworks themselves as they're kept in monochromatic black and white form. But for the screen prints, the club's original colours were implemented.

Dot Zhihan Jia: How do you find that process has an impact?

Babajide Brian: I think that helped make the artwork, that helped breathe more life into the work, to actually make each club's identity different, to make sure that they all look different.

So they're not just of the same group, because all of them have their own different unique identities. I wanted to make sure that every single one of them had a different look and a different pattern.

Dot Zhihan Jia: And we know that you currently have a studio with us, but you also work off-site at Leek Street?

Babajide Brian: Yes. I think it is exactly three years last month. So this was a year after Coronavirus. It was It was on October 30th, 2021, I believe. That was when I started drawing at Leek Street Arches, the graffiti tunnel underneath Waterloo Station. I started creating the works there. It was very therapeutic. It was also very helpful as well to just build confidence because obviously, as an artist, to go through what was a year of difficulty, to not really do some of the things that you used to do. I think it was just the only way I could be able to reconnect with my passion for making art.

In fact, this photo is from... Sorry, my voice is a bit different sometimes. But this is from the summer. So this one that I'm holding up here is of a Crystal Palace shirt, obviously based on their blue and red colours. And this is from the season after they were relegated from the Premier League for the third time back in 1998. In this one, on the top left, you could probably say top left, there's a of the Selhurst Park stand, the new Selhurst Park stand that they were trying to do. And on the opposite side, I think the right-hand side, there's the old Crystal Palace Eagle and some of the ‘South London And Proud’ banners and stuff.

Upon making these screen prints, because I've made just over 60, it was actually really good to really play around with the colours and just see what happened. I hadn't done screenprinting, believe it or not, for 15 years. The last and first time I actually did screen printing was when I was involved in an art class called HubArt, which was based in Lambeth North at the Oasis Centre, where the Oasis Academy is based.

Some of these other photographs, this one, for example, is from the private viewing in October of last year. So this was one month after I moved-in to start the two-year LOEWE programme.

Dot Zhihan Jia: That's in your studio. It looks very different now.

Babajide Brian: It has changed a lot over the last few occasions. Well, it's only happened on the couple.

Dot Zhihan Jia: I think this is also another aspect of your recent work.

Babajide Brian: Yes. Recently this summer, I had the opportunity to work with two local schools here in South West London, of course. One is based in Clapham Junction and the other one is based in Brixton, the Centre Academy and Lansdowne Academy. I was passing on my information to them on how I approached making my work. I also got a chance to see what each of the students from those two schools could do as well. It was one of those sessions where it was... How do I put it? Just to see what they can create. There were no set tasks or briefs involved. It was like ripping up the rule book for a day, letting them get away with whatever they could and then just looking at their works afterwards and actually really taking the time to properly really look at what they've done and take yourself out of your comfort zone and put yourself in there. Just visually see what they were trying to make or trying to convey.

Dot Zhihan Jia: I know they both went really, really well. And Lansdowne was your old school as well?

Babajide Brian: Yes. I obviously joined them after, I think it was five and a half years or something. It was after five and a half years because I was at Lark Hall in Stockwell, which is literally three minutes from here. I had five good years there. Lansdowne, my old primary school, definitely did play a very good role in the development of my artistic journey. And had it not been for them, I don't think any of this would have ever happened.

Dot Zhihan Jia: I think that's end of today's Brian's talk.

Babajide Brian: Thank you very much

Dot Zhihan Jia: Thank you, everyone.