For some people it’s hard to know when they decided to become an artist. For most, it just sort of happened. Perhaps, if you concentrate hard enough, you could remember a formative experience – being taken on a school excursion to the Art Gallery of NSW in Year 3, being taught how to draw by your father, or just a fascination with making a mess. Whatever it is, not many people can remember the precise moment they decided to become an artist. Not so Cherine Fahd, an artist who is riding high on the publicity generated by winning the $30,000 Women and Arts Fellowship. With laudatory articles in The Wentworth Courier (A Most Collectable Artist: award winning Kings Cross photographer has her eye on the homeless, Wednesday, August 10, Page 14) and an interview inThe Sydney Morning Herald (A Light on Night Souls, Friday August 12, Page 15) we can now learn of her very conscious decision. And it is a remarkable story:
At high school Fahd wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life her life, but ended up studying art at school because “it was kind of a bludge.” But then, in years 11 and 12, she found herself becoming absorbed in art. Although she focused on painting, Fahd struggled to I find her medium and voice. “My final work was a mishmash of stuff and styles, sooooo HSC,” Fahd says. […]
She was still searching for her medium when she studied painting at the College of Fine Arts in Paddington. In her last year of university she dabbled in sculpture and discovered she didn’t want to paint. “I couldn’t actually get what I wanted in a painting,” Fahhd says “It always seemed about the paint, as opposed to an idea” After graduation her anxiety about her future snowballed until she felt herself paralysed. So she stepped sideways and enrolled in a law degree. At least it was a focus.
Three weeks into her degree, Fahd was sitting in the university library dutifully highlighting a pile of notes when her eyes strayed to an office building across the way.
On the desks in the building, she could see stacks of manila folders. Her gaze drifted down to the road, where bicycle couriers dodged in and out of traffic. “I used to ride a pushbike back then, and 1 just kept looking at the manila folders, then looking at the bike couriers, and I thought, ‘Oh not I can’t he a manila folder I’ve got to be a hike courier! It was if there were two choices in life, the bike courier or the manila folder.”
In that moment, Fahd knew she wasn’t a manila folder. So she filed her discontinue slip, and committed herself to the much riskier life as an artist.
Makes you wonder if Simon Cooper – an artist who has an exhibition of drawings on manila folders at the Australian Galleries Works on Paper shop – started life as a bicycle courier?
