Alex ARTE Artist of the Month

• Tell us a bit about yourself (name, location, affiliations, and personal stuff).
  My name is Alex, I'm from the UK and live in the Marina with Daisy, close to the beach.
  I'm the one you see at the Art Souqs, dripping in sweat carrying meter square canvases
  around of images such as Arabic stop signs or desert roads.

• What inspires you? Where do your ideas come from?
  Anything, everything - some people fail to see the beauty in life, but it's all around us,
  from the dusty building sites to the beach sunsets.

• Greatest claim to fame (with respect to your craft)
  I dont know if I have any claim to fame at all. 

• Where were you born?
  In the beautiful city of Harrogate, UK.

• How long have you been doing your craft?
  I've been a graphic designer for the last 15 years, but only started to get serious
  about photography in the past year.

• Favourite film of all time? 
  Hmmmm... There are many, the Deerhunter would be in the top ten.

• How long have you been in the UAE? 
  It'll be three years in May, last week I packed in my day job, Daisy and I opened a
  bottle of champagne and sat down and decided that i'd set up on my own and fingers
  crossed it's going to work out.  

• Do you belong to any other groups? 
  Only ARTE and the artist emailing list.

• What are your favourite materials?
  Adobe Photoshop, my lightpad and pen and my Apple Mac.

• What is your favourite colour? 
  I have many, but if you look at my wardrobe, I do seem to have a lot of blue.

• What are you reading right now?  
  Eckhart Tolle - the power of now.

• Apart from creating things, what else do you do?  
  In the last 6 months I've finally passed their rigorous screening program and
  have started shooting stock photography, see my portfolio at 
  www.istockphoto.com/clearandtransparent Istock is the biggest stock library in
  the world and is owned by Getty images and their quality standards for images are
  very high, I've had to learn about chromatic aberration, artefacting and a whole host
  of problems that can make the difference in a good image, I've also recently started
  working with Darrin James www.djphotography.net one of Dubais best wedding
  photographers, who is soon to move into a new office on the Palm and I'm doing some
  work with Motivate Publishing, helping them with some of their images. I am also speaking
  to Mohamed Somji owner of Gulf Photo Plus www.gulfphotoplus.com they are soon going
  to be offering as well as photography classes - Adobe Photoshop classes, because as we all
  know, these days half of taking a good picture is the post production side of things and editing
  your pictures to get that perfect image is a must, back in the UK I taught Photoshop at
  Manchester College of Arts and Technology, so I'm very much looking forward to doing that
  again, apart from that I'll be taking on projects for people anything from brochure designs
  to websites, today I'm meeting with somebody that wants an Arabic calligraphy logo doing
  for his daughter, similar style to the Emirates Airline one, it's very exciting, not knowing what
  the next day will bring.
  
  
• How can ARTE be improved?
  Perhaps a website redesign, other than that Arte I think is great, the people you meet
  at the souqs, the friends you make, I'm very pleased to be in the gang and Miriam is just
  ne of the loveliest people I've met here in Dubai.

See my website if you want to get in touch www.clearandtransparent.com