Web site of international multimedia artist, Abdala Faye
Art is My Voice
I'm Abdala Faye, artist. I'm from Senegal, born and raised. I spent most of my life doing art. I started when I was 12 and my career has taken me to places that I never thought I would be. As an artist, my focus has been to research the meaning of life through what I'm doing everyday.
My focus in art is more of a researching new meanings and new ways to present art as a tool to help society understand its own soul. And it took me to chemistry because I spent the last 10 years searching for a new medium. I am going to show you pretty soon what I came up with. It took me to the understanding that art is not only painting or carving but we need to look for new mediums like sawdust for instance. It is the medium that I love to use and I've been using it for over 9 years now and its working.
So when it comes to my style I don't see my art is belonging to any style or movement because its soul purpose is we need to reflect the power of the mind. The power of the soul. The power of being honest to what you're doing. I try to be as honest as I can just to follow the stream of inspiration. I don't see why I should be calculating what I do, so I just do as I go. Like writers or singers, I follow my heart to do what I do best, which is art.
Every single person I have met everyday has an impact on the way I think, on the way I live. I can't do anything else but to give them what I can to give them what I possess and that is art. So that's me. And art is my voice.
This is a piece that I really love. It's really surrealistic and its called "Ode a Dali" and it's really something that I feel I should give to the man. That incredible human being that passed through. I wish I knew him. I wish I could shake his hand. I wish I could pay him a bigger tribute than this but this is all I can do. This is me telling the world that Dali is a thinker. And this thinker, that even though life has been hard to him, people misunderstood him, he kept on going. To be that guy is a big example of how society should be. Never have boundaries in the way you think. Never be restrained on one single thing. Always explore.
I don't want to depend on prefabricated things. Which I am not against but I like to see my product from start to finish so I build my own structures. I stretch my own canvas. I have my own way of prepping my work. Like the canvas itself. This is a frame that I have made, like a stretcher at home. I happen to have a workshop downstairs that I use to build anything, any structural thing I want to do. This is one of my stretchers that's homemade.
That one that I just stretched and 10 more are going to be part of a collection that I'm working on for next year. It is going to be about Price Hill. Price Hill is the place I live, it's a neighborhood in Cincinnati that really interests me because of the dynamic that drive people to bring them to nice things that I've never encountered with all my life.
What I'm doing now is I have my sawdust ready and if you believe it or not I use regular elmer wood glue, just a little tiny bit so it doesn't affect the color when I put it in because its going to turn really translucent but I don't want that to affect it in any way what I am doing.
This is what we got. This is the mixture I am going to use as the background before I start painting in a couple hours, or three depending on how it is here.
This is me in my studio and this is how I live. My whole life is about art, my own life is simple as it is and I'm happy doing this. Thank you for taking the time to watch the video. Hopefully you like what I do. You can check out my web site. God bless. Peace on earth.