On a bright January afternoon in north west London, I visited the 2023 New Contemporaries exhibition. It was my first port of call for finding artists to display in the cafe. The first thing I saw and liked was a charcoal on canvas piece, unstretched and frayed at the edges. It was intense and passionate, abstract but obviously of a gig. In other words, it was good. Aiming my phone to take a picture of the label, I noted the name of the artist (Cai Arfon Bellis) and kept reading. In little grey letters a few rows down were the words Acquired by the Government Art Collection. My eyebrows lifted skywards. Despite doubting an artist in such a collection would give our little cafe a piece, I reached out to him.
As it happens, Bellis was very keen. He knew the park well. He actually lived down the road. And he went to the same school as one of my sister’s friends, out in Bromley somewhere. And he worked in the same building as my sister. Faced with coincidences so compelling they force you to admit it’s a small world, Bellis came to the cafe and agreed to give us his piece 3style3. Intimate, energetic, the work is a bundle of lines until you begin to make out some hats, lights, speakers, jackets, and you realise you’re in a crowd and there’s a stage somewhere in the distance. 3style3 hangs underneath a vinyl sticker saying TOILETS THIS WAY, which sucks, but I guess customers have to know where the toilets are.
I interviewed Bellis in his Lewisham studio, housed in the old Mothercare store near the station. The last time I was there I was being cared for by my mother. Now it’s a vast studio building chocka with artists. Bellis offered me a snack, insisting it wasn’t a dog treat, and then told me he completed his degree at the Slade before going to the Royal Drawing School. In the beginning, he made art mainly for the process. Finished artworks were the detritus of that process, he said. Music was his main passion. Art and music were separate until a transformative experience, late into his degree.
“This tutor came in called Denzil Forrester,” Bellis said. Forrester is an artist famous for making paintings celebrating the culture and community around the dub-reggae clubs of his youth in the late seventies and early eighties. “It’s funny,” he continued, “a lot of people compare me to Denzil Forrester, they’re very correct but right destination, wrong journey. He came in and gave this lecture at the Slade, and it was the first time I’d ever had an artist just be really passionate, being like, ‘this is my community, this is my experience, I really love them, I want to capture them.’ It really opened up my mind to what I could do with my art.
“So yeah, I just started capturing the thing I do the most: going out a lot, experiencing music and communities, meeting people there. At the time there was a promoter in London called Keep Hush, who used to put on these free events every week, who had a monumental impact on the scene. You’d go out every Wednesday/Thursday and meet loads of really interesting DJs and MCs. It reminded me a bit of when I was younger, cos I grew up around here, around loads of DJs, MCs, dancers, it’s really creative. It was nice to be part of a community.”
I nodded in agreement. But I thought, I grew up around here too and my community just ended up living in self-built bunkers in their parents’ back gardens. Bellis went on.
“I think I’m finding it a bit again now, there’s a burgeoning jungle scene that’s very similar. There’s a place called Planet Wax up the road that reminds me of the early Keep Hush days, of going on a Thursday, free entry, which is really important if you’re going out four times a week. You can talk to anyone and everyone, and because everyone’s there for the community, you’ve got quite big DJs that will be in the crowd dancing and listening to music alongside you.”
I asked why it was important for him to capture that culture.
“People in it take it for granted,” he replied. “For me and my friends, I can’t imagine living without being in the music community: being out, going to see live music, clubs and all the rest of it. It was just that urge to capture that. There’s nothing like it, it’s such a unique experience to be in, so all-encompassing in the sense of the word. It’s the individual and the one. In a crowd you become a mass, you become one with the crowd but then also hyper-individual within it, it’s a really weird blending. Especially if it’s four am and you’re a bit past your best, it all moulds into this sludge, and it’s always been really evocative for me. But then I grew up around loads of MCs and DJs and started photographing them, but then I dropped that when I went to art school, mostly because I faded away from those friendship groups. But once I started wanting to capture that community I was going back to those old photos, I was like, yeah, this is the most evocative stuff I’ve done.”
I loved that he called it sludge. It seemed to fit what he was trying to capture. What does a mass of people, a community, bound by music look like and feel like? Bellis started capturing it because he was in the grime scene, in which his favourite events happened. “There’s nothing like a grime event,” he said, “the closest I can compare it to is free jazz, it’s like this completely improvisational, never again repeated event. It’s this real frenetic, everyone involved energy.
“There’s a term I discovered recently that a curator friend put me onto, called ‘musicking’, coined by this writer called Christopher Small. This idea that the experience of music isn’t just the music itself or the players or the crowd, it’s the whole thing. It’s the bar staff, it’s the venue, it’s the journey to it, it’s this whole all-encompassing experience, and I’ve been really enjoying that discovery. But yeah, it’s an urge to capture that unique scene, and the stuff I capture now is more jungle, which is a unique scene in its own way, but my original love is grime, it is like nothing else.”
An inevitable question loomed. If his main passion was music, did that mean he ever wanted to be a musician?
“I get asked this a lot.” Bellis laughed. “Kind of. I still kind of do, in a way, but I love keeping music pure. I reached this point at art school that I think every creative gets to. It’s like, you’re pursuing the thing that was your outlet, was your passion, so if you slip up or you’re starting to pay it less attention or you get artist’s block, all of a sudden you’ve lost your outlet. I don’t have my stress relief, because my life is now all encompassed on that. Anyone who really cares about art sometimes really fucking hates art. And I don’t want to ever have that experience with music… That’s what I say is the reason I don’t do music, it’s probably just laziness!
“But there is something in that, keeping it pure. This [art] is my way of engaging with music. My work is really very quite heavily about dance, and something that was really useful in spotting that has been doing these little hyperlapse videos when I’m doing my drawings and stuff, and realising how much the rhythms of dancing and the physicality of drawing is, and so, yeah, it’s all these practises in one, dancing and music and experiencing music and art and trying to capture them all.”
Bellis told me about a tutor who gave a talk about dance theory at the Royal Drawing School, who said that “drawing is just fundamentally a mark that you make when you move. So you can take dance theory and bring it into the way we draw, which as you can tell is obviously gonna be very impactful to me. It’s a big part of the way I understand my work. It’s a direct movement, like a conductor charting, and you can definitely see that in the early stages of the work, where there’s lots of these finding, striking lines.”
“Does the look of the work change when it’s a different genre you’re looking at?” I asked.
“100 percent. Each work is titled after a song. So the title of every work will be named after a song that either sounds like it captures a moment or its a musician that I was listening to at the time of the work, so you can kind of pick apart the genre paintings a lot of the time.” He pointed to a huge canvas behind me, colourful and jagged. “So yeah, this one behind you is very much a jungle painting, very frenetic, grasping and finding.” He directed his hand high above my head, to some charcoal pieces. “Whereas the ones up there are a bit more romanticised, my garage paintings at the moment.
“Every piece comes from the sketchbooks, drawings inside clubs, observational drawings. Other than my watercolours, which are a different thing, none of my main pieces come from one single drawing. They’re hyper-specific, I could flick to any page in a sketchbook and tell you what night it was. With the main pieces, the big paintings and drawings, they’re never really from one night. It’s more about capturing a mood, an essence, each one is almost its own fiction, where I’m getting elements from these things, so a big part of whenever I make my work is going through the sketchbooks, setting up the individual pages to curate a line-up of the night. It’s this real sense of listening to the music, responding to the music, almost what I’m listening to is more important, because I’m literally almost dancing with the brush or the charcoal, but it’s like, informed abstraction. I’m making the marks and they’re making sense, but I’m looking for reference points as I’m going along, and a lot of the time, when the work is building up, it tends to get to the point when its a jumbled mess of lines, you almost do that thing that you do as a kid, you squint to try and find a face in something abstract. They all feed into one another and become this really interesting mould of stuff.
“My favourite artist is [Jean-Michel] Basquiat, it always has been. I’ve just really loved what he said and the way he made work, and that had an impact on my studio practice. There’s this amazing clip in one of his documentaries where it’s like, him in the studio, he’s got two tellies on, he’s listening to a jazz record on vinyl, reading a book, and painting at the same time. You can see it in the work, it’s that stream of consciousness, taking everything from your environment and sticking it in, and that’s what has spoken to the way I make work in the studio. Even way back in my foundation, I insisted on having all my work up all the time, because it’s self-referential, it’s almost like sampling, like sample culture, which is so important to the music I love, it’s a nice nod to that.
“I’m always looking for ways that my work can be connected to the sound I love without it being too simplified. Like the barman’s handshake, you know? What this thing is referencing, you’ve seen that cultural signifier, you get it. Throughout my art school experience of doing this work, it’s interesting to hear the reception I get because most tutors I’ve spoken to think it’s really aggressive, they find it off-putting, aggressive, and angsty. Whereas the people that go to the places I capture, the communities, the culture, they don’t see that at all. They see the camaraderie in it. I think that really annoyed me the first time, especially at the degree, I was 21 and like, ‘all these fucking tutors think I’m an aggressive angsty painter,’ whereas really I was capturing something much more passionate for me. It’s grown in the opposite direction, I actually really like that ‘if you’re in the know you’re in the know’ thing. I’m always searching for ways to continue that handshake from me to you.”
To finish, I asked him whether he wanted to talk about the work he’s given the cafe, 3style3.
“There’s this artist called Jeshi,” he said, “who’s a quite grungy, UK rap style-thing, a bit grime influenced, he did this night at the George Tavern. He’d just announced it, it was free, and Jawnino, who’s a grime MC, came down. It was a community feel, a lot of the MCs and the support acts came in and were on stage and were listening, and yeah so 3style3 is from Jawnino’s set. The one I gave you was actually the first one I’d ever done that was a small charcoal on canvas, they tend to be reserved for my large scale works, gallery show works, mostly because it’s all about big gestural, striking across the page. So I experimented with that on that one, and it turned out really well. I think its interesting and the scale inspired it, it’s much more intimate, you can see the backs of people’s heads, its almost like a snapshot into the night rather than capturing the rhythms and the vibes. It’s charcoal on canvas which is my main practice at the moment, which is something I discovered on my drawing year course. It seems like such a small change from paper to canvas, but it really opened up my work in a way that I’ve not really recovered from, it’s so lovely and velvety, the texture of it, it’s so raw and it has such an effect on the work that like, inspires, it seems like its more in line with the thing I’m trying to capture. It feels much more spontaneous and rough and also quite rich in a way that paper doesn’t quite manage. There’s such a viscosity to the charcoal on canvas that’s just so lovely and velvety, so yeah, its been nice.”
That felt like enough to me. I thanked Bellis for his time and went home. Really, I am so pleased to have one of Bellis’ pieces in the cafe. It still feels like a coup, despite our physical proximity. Dancing to draw in a studio where everything is visible, Bellis pours his community into his work and watches as a velvety, raw, viscous sludge emerges. And we have one on our walls. So come have a look.
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You can see Cai Arfon Bellis’ (b. 1997, London) artwork ‘3style3’ at the Mansion Bar and Cafe, Beckenham Place Park, south east London. If you want to get involved with the art in the cafe, message me.