You are? 

Umer Murtaza: A British born Pakistani and a Londoner. By day I dish out drugs (legally of course) and at night I paint and write.

How do you define your work? 

I don’t like to box my work but it is Islamic fine art. It’s been 20 years since I serendipitously doodled a Sufi aphorism into a DNA molecule. It’s Islamic because I think its palette - its ideas, history, its contribution to the world - is a very rich one. There’s Islam the religion and faith and Islam the culture. There’s 1001 nights, the fascination with the stars, the alchemy, the poetry or tales of the coffee trade. Islam made first contact with the West Neoplatonically and its culture developed Greek Philosophy into proto-sciences which were distilled into their current forms by the later Enlightened Europeans. It’s like walking through a forest of berries where chocolate hangs off every tree and lemonade fountains sprouts forth from the earth. You can never tire or go hungry. But I also want to connect to my Human species. I think the questions that start off the process that leads to the artworks, those questions are very human. Muslims – especially Sufis - talk of Divine Love, for example, but love itself is a very human thing. And you can’t master the etiquettes of loving an Abstract Entity if you haven’t practiced loving those around you first.

Technically, your work is?

2D – canvas mostly, oils acrylics, enamels etc. I try to preserve the traditional facets of Islamic art – words, numbers, calligraphy, geometry, order and respectfulness – without giving into them too much. It’s subtler than that. It’s about the idea, not the style per se. It’s opinionated artwork like that coming from the West and it’s about things that affect us today. Islam was against intellectual laziness. I think hashing out the same style of work, artistically speaking, is a little like that.

There’s modesty in Islam and nothing’s more modest than when I create a painting that doesn’t shout out its credentials. There’s nothing “Islamic Art” about four peeled pomegranates until you realize that the pomegranate is Adam’s mind, the exposed seeds the boundaries of his intelligence and the whole thing’s inspired by a Muslim Philosopher’s writing. But again, celebration of the genius of the Human mind, and the drive to push at its limits, is a universal thing. Adam’s everyone’s Grandpa - we’re all physically related - and every time we use our brain, we’re celebrating our collective awesomeness. Go Homo sapiens!

Why Islamic Art and why is Science so influential to your work?

Identities are like the clothes you wear. You wear what’s right for the occasion but nothing’s as close or as defining as your skin. You’re also what you eat and there was a time when I ate a lot of hard science. I was trained in it so the sweat on my skin was naturally going to taste a little scientific. I didn’t realize that my first painting was of a cosmological phenomenon, my second was based on chemistry and my third piece was illustrating a biological event. I didn’t realize how strongly I was going to see things through that filter. Creative folks make a lot of comparisons and if you’re going to study a science, then you’ll be carrying a lot of scientific models for future analogies. 

Then one day you experience an epistemological crisis and conclude that you’re almost 40 and you know absolutely nothing! You’ve got to be philosophical about it so your filters change. Suddenly, you’re painting poems penned by philosophers, or painting hats as an expression of your desire to be closer to your larger family of Humans. You’re painting 100 switches as a prayer because you’re not even sure you possess a will strong enough to define your identity. These things are purer, more personal, than science.

What is the meaning of it all?

What is the meaning of anything? Perhaps hindsight will tell one day. Maybe it depends upon the eye with which you see the world or the organ with which you reason. I still struggle with the definition of Islamic Art not least because I am its flawed messenger particle. 

I seek patterns and I make patterns – that is to say, I seek meaning and I wish to create meaning. The first requires organs and the second needs tools. In the creative act there is both the intake and synthesis of culture. 

Among the pattern-seeking organs – our faculties of reasoning – is the mind. The knowledge it metabolises, the culture it synthesises, comes from statistics and observations and debates. But the art? It starts elsewhere in another organ. Here, culture is delivered. It’s a gift rather than an effort rewarded. And this organ lies wrapped within faith, trust, belief, risk, softness and the goodness of action. Remove the wrapping and the organ hardens. It can’t stretch and accommodate for the greater workload, the sustained effort, required for art. Goodness of action can only be realised in public and this has a transformative action upon the artist. Hopefully it'll make him better at doing his job.

Maybe that's what it's about. That's the first brush stroke anyway.  

​Umer M.