Lewisham
For all the narratives and plot lines that paint big cities as places people can go in order to find themselves, one of the main draws are their ability to offer the total opposite: immersion to the point of liberating ego loss. Subsumed into the cut and thrust of capitals, it’s possible for sensory overload to take place, images, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile touches melting together into an Impressionist whirl of colour, heat, sweat and din. Late at night, London can become a vortex in which things get blurry and confused, the city suddenly a fairground waltzer with 9 million riders.
It’s these moments that the Lewisham-based illustrator and artist Gaurab Thakali has an ability to capture, his tandem loves of jazz, skateboarding and nightlife translating into drawn, painted or printed work that is rife with vivid, alien colour, public intimacy and – most prominently and surprisingly of all, given the medium – motion. “I tend to listen to a lot of music, before and during,” explains Thakali, when asked about his creative process and the way in which he’s able to trap movement in his drawings. “The main thing I’m trying to capture is the music. You can’t really see it but I try to put down what it would be like to be in that space, back then, when the music was playing. I find a drawing from back in the 1960s or 70s, and that’s probably the thing I aim for – being able to sense what it’d be like to be in that space, at that time, just from looking at the art.”
Thakali got into jazz and drawing concurrently, while studying at Camberwell College of Art. He was living with friends at the time who were obsessed with the music, and he absorbed it as he was making his first forays into illustration: “I was surrounded by it. They’d be listening to jazz or practising it all the time, so I kinda had to get into it or I’d go mad.”
From there, things began to bubble, as Thakali became obsessed with the timeless sleeve designs produced by Blue Note Records’ resident artist, Miles Reid. “It definitely kind of grew from there, got me into the space where I knew this was what I wanted to be doing,” he enthuses. “Moving on to now, a lot of my friends are musicians and I’m constantly going to see them play. It’s all jazz-influenced music. Some of them sing, some of it’s purely instrumental, but they inspire me too.”
Thakali was born and raised in the Nepalese capital of Kathmandu, and he grew up in awe of the ancient temples, palaces and sculptures dotted throughout the city he called home before his family moved to London when he was 15 to provide he and his brother with better educations. He’s since returned to the country of his birth – in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake, for an exhibition he put together with friend and documentary photographer Tom Caron-Delion – but he’s mainly spent recent years moving around Lewisham and the neighbouring borough of Greenwich, skating, eating jerk chicken, making art and going out to house parties and jazz nights.
“There’s a guy who runs this thing called Moving Parts at a few venues in South,” he says. “One is the Royal Albert in Deptford, another’s in Kennington – he puts on bands from round this area. I go up to North London a lot, too; places like Total Refreshment Centre in Stoke Newington. A lot of the artists went to music school in Greenwich and have kind of blossomed into proper musicians now – there’s Oscar Jerome, who I just helped shoot a video, then others like Poppy Ajudha.”
He once tried to pick up the musical side of things himself – “my friends tried to teach me the trumpet but I didn’t really have time to learn how to do it properly” – but like a great music journalist he feels better placed to express his ideas on music at a position of remove. One of the most immediately eye-catching elements of his work is the idiosyncratic use of colour; they just aren’t colours that you’re used to seeing anywhere else these days, midnight blues, hot mauves and institutional greens bound together by an appreciation of shade and artificial light that would feel uncanny were it not for the surreality of the scenes he paints. Gaurab says his colour palette is inspired by Matisse and Gauguin; it often feels in its richness like a portal to a more vivid and romantically humid world.
As East London has been corporatised and regenerated, South has replaced it as the main repository for young artists looking to surround themselves with life, booze, ideas and each other; the college in Camberwell joined by Goldsmiths University in New Cross at the city’s most productive and exciting artistic nexus. Galleries like Arcadia Missa and The Sunday Painter have provided the scene with walls and cash; various late-night bars, pubs, shebeens, student houses and pool halls the social glue and disinhibitors. Amid this nocturnal tempest, there’s something appealing about Thakali’s reliance on his friends and the private pleasures of skateboarding and jazz music for inspiration. It makes him seem, once again, adept at locating a kind of stillness in the endless kinetic flow that characterises London life.
“Do you know Mark Gonzalez?” he asks, referring to the man who is widely credited as the godfather of modern street skating. “I remember watching him for the first time, a film of when he was younger – in the video they use a John Coltrane track, which I remember thinking was really cool. Just a saxophone blaring and this dude going crazy with a skateboard. There were no structures to it – music feels the same to me as well. That was quite a key point for me, I guess.”