Brush with success

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Sacha Jafri’s paintings regularly fetch between $104,000 and $416,000, with some of his more recent works going for as much as $900,000.

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Sacha Jafri’s paintings regularly fetch between $104,000 and $416,000, with some of his more recent works going for as much as $900,000.

Sacha Jafri, the youngest living artist to ever be awarded a 10-year retrospective exhibition, talks to Arabian Business about becoming an artist, sleeping in police cells and why the economic slowdown is a good thing for the Gulf's art scene.

There are times when Sacha Jafri sounds as if he just arrived from Dubai's financial district.

"My value is actually going to go up, because it's going to get rid of fifty or sixty percent of artists out there in circulation," he says of the international recession that has sent asset valuations plummeting. Most of the time, however, it's obvious that a career in Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) would probably have been short-lived for the 31-year old artist.

"I don't really invest my money, I use my money to buy time. That's all I want, I just want time to paint my next collection. Investing money can give you some major headaches," he says.

Good thing that he's been earning plenty of it, then. Jafri's paintings regularly fetch between GBP75,000 ($104,000) and GBP300,000 ($416,000), with recent works going for as much as $900,000. Clients include Kevin Spacey, Bill Gates and Monaco's Prince Albert.

Jafri, who only produces a collection every two years or so, claims the economic downturn hasn't really affected his business. A collection may now need two months to sell out rather than two weeks.

"The people it's affecting is the auction houses, because they have huge overheads and a thousand artists, and only about twenty of them are performing," he says.

Jafri's exceptional circumstances reflect an exceptional career.

This year he became the youngest living artist in the history of art to be offered an official museum-based 10-year retrospective. Recently, he was commissioned by the Prince of Wales to paint the 16 most influential Muslims of the last century, including HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, King Abdullah of Jordan and Imran Khan.

Jafri has been based in Dubai for three months now to work on his collection ‘The Middle East Before Oil', a project that will take him to most of the GCC countries, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. He will be here for another six months.

Much like the bankers in DIFC, he values the city's strategic location. "I have decided to base myself in the Middle East because it's in the middle of the world and from there I can get to anywhere I want to."

Many of his clients are from India and China, and it is a good place to be based out of during the world tour of his 10-year retrospective collection, which will be going to 26 cities in 18 countries.

This week he launches Dubai's annual art fair Art Dubai with a live painting for children's charity START.

Jafri claims he didn't think of painting as a vocation until he was about six years into one of the most stellar careers the UK art scene has ever witnessed. But his interest in art can be traced back to his school days.

"I was very, very dyslexic and the best way to relieve that frustration was by doing a lot of creative writing, which was rubbish, but I just had to do it," he says.

"Then I found that in all the subjects there was a right and a wrong, but in art there wasn't. They would look at my work and say: ‘This isn't what we told you to do, but what you've done is quite interesting so just keep doing it.'"

Of course, going to England's prestigious Eton College helped: At age 16 Jafri and another student were given their own art gallery. He is quick to point out that he went to Eton on a cricket scholarship and that it was mostly because he lived nearby, in Windsor, and not because of the status. His parents, French and Indian, are not "those sorts of parents", he explains.

After getting a degree in fine art from Oxford, Jafri worked three different jobs at the same time to produce his first collection, still not thinking of art as a viable career option.

When it was done, he contacted 30 of the country's top galleries, insisting on a solo show. "I started at the very, very top and worked myself down. Somewhere halfway down the list someone decided to give me a go," he says. "By the second day everything had gone, which is unheard of, so it was in all of the press. It was a really big deal."

Jafri used the money he earned to produce his next collection, but still didn't think of himself as an artist - that didn't happen until six years down the line. "I just thought, I'm going do this until it doesn't work anymore, and then I'll worry about what I'm going to do next."

Jafri insists he paints from his subconscious and travelling has become his way of filling that space with interesting content.

By staring at a blank canvas for up to four hours he falls into a meditative state, he says. In that state he then starts to see and feel things in a different way.

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