Ben Wakeling
Ben’s work, resonated so powerfully when I came across his artwork at the Other Art fair, a few months ago. His palette of colour choices, that include an array of bright blues, soft pinks, and gentle hues of soft pastel yellows, with an epic black scratch of shapes and lines revealing large scale nude self portraits, a dialogue of colour and raw emotion, depicting an erotically charged power of rage tempered with the elements of hope, sort of like a clarity of shape that emerges from a sea of mist. Out of the quagmire of confusion is a labyrinth of feeling and the all encumbered self portrait of honesty. The freedom of his individual figurative abstract expressionism, Ben’s paintings, express the freedom of action, with elements of a rush self portraiture, emotive frustrations, and abstract eroticisms set back in a tranquility of a lucid kaleidoscope of positive colours. It’s where his love affair began, a fascination with colour mixing, he recalls a boy at school who mixed blue and white to make light blue. This allure with colour and what can be achieved with it is attributed to his style, along with the spontaneity from the constraints of repression and frustration, opening up his own dominion of reality.
Ben is predominantly a self taught artist, his voyage is a story of self destruction that took him to become one of the most interesting and talked about emerging contemporary artists in the UK. It embodies hope, and positivity, as the poignancy of our chat is the journey that Ben has travelled to find his place as an artist, and it was not easy. Growing up in North East London, he describes his parent’s separation when he was 11 with a long acrimonious divorce, as a troubled young boy, which included self harm, night-time escapes from home, he found his place in the world of graffiti. “I wasn’t an easy person to deal with,” he tells me, “I was getting arrested a lot, I grew up with people who got into things” he explains, and he thinks his father was worried about his son getting on into the world. It was around the age of 14, he ran away again, and he recalls falling asleep in a shed. And he came across a spray can, that was used to make marks on a football pitch, his instinct was to make tags, scribble and draw, and this is when he got into graffiti. “Graph had a bad reputation, it was considered delinquent behaviour” Ben emphasises. He was constantly getting into trouble at school, “There were not many ways to teach a child, it was either sports or you had to be academic” he explains. The teachers didn’t have time for him, and he realises there were no tools available to help children like him. He had promise he had potential, but he was always getting suspended. He even got kicked out of art GCSE.
He had so much energy he was bouncing off the walls. It became an instinct to draw on a wall, on places you were not supposed to, in the mid to late 90’s. “I wasn’t even aware of art as a subject” Graffiti taught him to explore life and embrace those differences, although very anti-movement with police, anti education and anti art, compared to today’s world.” He explains how graffiti was activism, it was people struggling in life, all troublemakers. They would arrest them and put them in detention for a day. Ben loved putting paint on a train, he would think of people traveling to work, hoping they would think it was a nice bit of colour. At 15, Ben’s mother decided he should spend time living with his father, Ben believes that the fear he felt for his father, helped him. He did eventually discover sports, mainly football and running, and he wasn’t getting into trouble. After eventually passing his GCSE, Ben attained a place at Southgate College and pursued art and design as subjects, describing it as the best time of his life. Although Southgate College was a melting pot of possibilities, “I ran away from hurt, a lot of people telling you are worthless and wrong, takes a lot from you.”
That is when he realised painting. However, he became insecure at the notion that art was such a high society topic and the rejection letters he received from the Royal Academy. He felt it was too hard to be part of that club “Witnessing liberal people from noble families being accepted. Ethics wasn’t immovable to me” Ben explains “Art used to be for the wealthy, and art had to be more accessible. I can enjoy that more for what that is” he explains. When I ask Ben what specifically drew him to art, he talks about how out of all the chaos that was happening, there was an intuitive response towards survival. “What was I doing?” at first he didn’t consider art at all, “I was still getting into trouble in art college”. People in his life were still encouraging him to get involved in certain behaviours, and he was at risk of ruining what felt like his final chance. It was his mum’s voice, the only voice he wasn’t hearing, when he had an epiphany, “By fluke I somehow found my way out of bad options, and I stumbled through the door of fine art”. “I was doing my graph, and the doctor said, everything I was drawing are self portraits, some of them were violent and aggressive” he tells me. We talk about finding his distinctive style. Ben tells me about moving to Birmingham when he finished college. He attended an art course, in visual communication, describing it as the best three years of his life, everything was an explosion, of educated people and the world started opening up, they were liberal and positive and had an exciting view of the world.
But difficult years followed, after his course finished he lived in a council estate in Birmingham, “I was smoking a lot of weed” working in a nightclub bar. He became unwell, weighing only 47.6 kilos, and collapsing at work, he was hiding self harm and ended up getting sectioned. With this incarceration, having his freedom taken away, he felt he was becoming more unwell. On release two years later he managed to get his job back at the nightclub, as well as working as a community patient, cutting everyone out of his life. Then one winter’s evening, in late December, heading home from work, he was robbed at gunpoint, getting into a scuffle, a shot was fired and Ben was beaten unconscious. In the hospital the police interviewed him, it was serious because a firearm was involved. Refusing to disclose who the offenders were because they were his neighbours. He was discharged and released on custody, to attend court. But his dad turned up out of the blue, “I hadn’t seen him in a while, dragging me into the car, and driving me back to his mother in London”. By the 2 of January, he was on a plane to his Aunt in France. He couldn’t speak French, and relatives were unable to speak a word of English. He describes the next year of his healing process of good food, slow long walks, feeling safe, and taking his sketchbook, as he started drawing and writing, and when he was ready, returning to London, at 24. He moved to Hackney, renting himself a large warehouse, for £200.00 a month, he found himself a job, and he would paint as much as he could. That became his baseline for where he is now, the foundation for his art organisation.
The poignancy of the story, becomes even more poignant, reminding me of the legendary film Good Will Hunting. Ben became the cleaner in a mental health community care home in North London. Then one day he ended up doodling with a patient on the wall, “The authorities were livid” he tells me. He was getting a formal dismissal. When one of the directors invited Ben back to draw with some of his patients, this snowballed him to meet a music therapist, “They saw something in me”. So an intuitive drive to work with patients, he trusted himself, and positive results came out of that. This is now part of his arts program, in art, music and child therapy. Now a full time artist, Ben is also the founder of Outsider Gallery and Hackney Wick Life Drawing, delivering expressive arts and wellbeing programmes for the NHS MHT North London Forensic Service, since 2016, as well as guest lecturer for ‘Arts in Health’ at the psychology dept at UWE and an arts program for NHS mental health secure units across north and east London. “Art has the potential to be a vehicle to explain, and that seed can grow” he explains. He now serves his community doing just that, with art therapy. Giving someone the time to be creative. “Art saved me from myself, I have the scars on my body that can back that”.
He talks about the pain of recently losing both his parents, he describes the beautiful moment when his dad accepted him, “He told me he was proud of me” and I could see he accepted me for who I was. “We saw each other for the first time” he explains and moved passed issues they had with each other. “We should consider ourselves lucky when something hard happens because it shapes us and brings character into our personality.” “I wouldn’t be able to paint if these things didn’t happen” describing how his Mum loved him unconditionally. But Ben admits he did become an artist to get to his parents.
When I ask Ben, what he considers his greatest achievement, “Going full circle from being a patient to developing and delivering an arts program, for the NHS for children and adults. “Since 2014 I have been doing this arts program, to being a delinquent nobody, to having doctors write about you.” The community work is my biggest achievement, being able to run an art therapy program is an overwhelming feeling”. Then he says, “And having my painting in the Saatchi Gallery” Then he said, “And having my painting in the Saatchi Gallery.” However, sadly his Mum couldn’t make it, she had just passed away and his Dad was in palliative care, in his final days, “Telling me I had to go” Ben explains, but everyone else was there. Additionally, he describes another professional highlight, the clinicians and doctors writing about him and his work, the delivery of his therapy sessions, they showed this to the artistic world and the paper was accepted in the Wiley library.
We talk about his biggest influences, “The French impressionists, It’s like watching a movie, I could stare at a Monet all day” Ben describes how he was stunned in silence when he gazed at his first Monet. “Alongside the Graph warriors” and how it had a huge impact, “The ideas and how they came about and why we did it, them” he explains. On the same note, I ask about his favourite artists, “There are loads” he tells me, he mentions William de Kooning and his wife Elaine de Kooning, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, and then pausing for a second, he tells me about a patient he has worked with, and that he owns one of their artworks, but he can’t tell me their name. “They wrote extensively about the ‘just seeing’ how they were highly neglected and abused intrinsically most of their lives, they were in their late 60’s in 2014, and they were not aware of how their art impacted everyone, including King Charles” Ben explains. With that we discuss if narrative is important, “It used to be, until about two weeks ago” he admits finding it hard listening to people’s comments. “Empathy has to be a bit evaluated, some people need a little bit of perspective” he explains. He tells me about listening to people’s judgements, “There is rebellion somehow, I am really into resilience.” He describes becoming frustrated with some people’s stories, “I don’t want to tell you about stories” he explains “I want to be strong for the people in my life”.
We talk about what he considers perfection, “I admire dedication, my mum’s work ethic, was second to none, she worked harder than everyone else, my mother is perfection”. When I ask Ben what are his myths “Myself, there are people still out there who still see me as a job applicant when in fact I have been self employed for over 20 years, that is the myth” he explains. “I wake to make the best of the day”. If he could have any artwork? “It would have to be a Monet any of his water lilies”. We talk about his art process, Ben describes being consumed by it, sometimes he realises he has missed a couple of meals, it’s taking the next day, he gets transported to places where it’s quite uncomfortable, and it can take a number of hours and days.
Interview: Antoinette Haselhorst
