Kitchen Talk 11
marsi rex

“I was in a taxi the other day and the driver asked me “Where are you from?”. Everywhere I go people ask, “Where are you from?” I always wonder why people ask, because for me, even though I was born in Kosovo, I have been raised in London and I lived in Berlin for a number of years. So I don’t know how to answer that question because how can I know where I am from? Where is it I am from when I feel like I am constantly longing for home? My practice uses painting as a medium to question, can the journey itself be home?”

Introduce yourself, list three things we need to know about you or your practice.

 I mainly make Paintings, I just graduated from Slade school of art and I live in London.

What’s your creative process?

I draw while I’m on the move most often. In trains, buses, cars and planes. I also like drawing in bedrooms, whether it’s my own, someone else’s or a hotel room in this country or another. I listen to music while I work and I dance when im working, in this way the painting and I move together. I feel through different textures and use those as moments to move through. Thick stiff straight out of the tube oil paint is sculptural historical and ready for imprinted memories to flow. When you look at the water in a river that’s flowing you never see the same water twice. Making paint thin and flowing reminds me of washes of movement and emotionally being perpetually changing while looking for a moment of solidity or structure.

The cityconstantly makes and remakes itself, smells are often coming from different food vendors and people, lights go on in the mornings and off late at night, unless youre in a club or up at night where the lights remain on but swathed by a darkness which surrounds the night. It’s difficult to escape feelings of high and low pressure. The film High and Low shows this well in that nothing is ever really black and white, In the sense that when we look at a situation we have to understand it from the inside in as opposed to the outside in. My heart tells me more about how and why the decisions I make come in to being.

Homer, The Odyssey
The invisible child
Moscow on the Hudson
Scarlet street, fritz Lang
Germinal, Emili Zola
Crime and Punishement, Dostoyevsky
The logic of sensation, Deleuze
Gangstas paradise, coolio

I use acrylic and oil paint, oil pastels and oil bars, as well as different mediums that I can use with oil paint. I like changing the texture of the paint and think about its thickness, consistency and body. My dad was a painter and I grew up with paintings literally surrounding me, I used to pose for my dad for his paintings and he used to teach me how to draw. Painting is the first time I fell in love. 

I used to live to work. I thought the purpose of my life was to work. I didn’t really know how to stop. When I had time off I felt confused, like what am I meant to be doing? But recently I have found ways to relax with friends and family while maintaining my avid interest in making work. I think having a work life balance is really hard but I have a supportive structure of people around me that actually help me achieve more. Most of the time I don’t know the boundaries between life and work and I like it that way. I want to work with my friends and I want people I work with to be my friends. I think the best work doesn’t really feel like work because even when you have been working for 18 days in a row and your super tired you’re really happy to see a certain person, happy to spend time around a certain painting even when it’s bothering you. By you I mean me.

The best thing I have to offer is experince. How can I speak for any experince other than my own? I can only see the world through my own eyes although I try to understand it through others.

How do i improve the relationship i have with myself?

What kind of meals can I make so that the food im eating is more colourful?

What’s going on with my current studio? Should I look for a new studio?

How can I plan ahead ?

How can I control my own emotions ?

How come trauma I have faced makes me so good at thinking one the spot?

Should I buy a winter coat or a winter jacket?

Where can I find a super cute affordable pink handbag?

Where can I buy a very small medieval hand drawn bible I can carry around so that even the dullest days are bright?

How can I have more time to paint?

Buying rip off fake balenciaga is even more meta than balenciaga putting their name over  Gucci monogram wallet.

How can I unhook from unhelpful thoughts?

Should I learn to swim?

Can I get the tea I love at a cheaper price?

Should I get fillers?

I wish I had a cleaner

How can I feel through colour when I’m not in the studio?

How can i stop my hair from thinning?

Can’t believe I actually paid £5 for a coffee the other day, what the hell? It wasn’t even the best coffee I have had

How can I make sure I get myself to write in my diary everyday?

Why is my wifi extender box so loud?

Outside the studio i watch a lot of films at the cinema as often as i can otherwise i watch them at home, read or listen to audio books. I love cheese burgers and fries and my favourite is a place in town right by a book shop I like going to as well so that’s convenient.  Outside the studio feels like somewhere the work of painting also happens. I don’t think of my studio as just the literal space In which I make my paintings in. The studio can also be being on the bus or walking down the street. I’m more and more interested in bringing my life and spaces outside of the studio to the inside.

i want a film a performance I have been doing.  

to never stop wanting- I’m simultaneously satisfied and well as hungry for more.

Fried with a runny yolk