Retro: Day Three Without a Cigarette -

 Day Three Without a Cigarette

Posted 28/8/08

This marks my third day without a cigarette, and I can already feel the wonders it's doing to my head—if not quite yet to the rest of my body. Though, to be fair, the kink in my neck and the damnable pain radiating from it might not be directly related to smoking. Still, I’m curious to see how long I can go without lighting up, and what good it might do me, inside and out.

Thanks to the PC in the sales office, I’ve been able to kill time writing, instead of just sketching on recycled paper. Two years ago, I began drawing on the back of discarded Ramadan buffet brochures after discovering the management was tossing out a pile of them. The quality and size of the paper were perfect for pen and ink, and soon I had amassed a few hundred sketches of whatever caught my eye or stirred my visual taste.

At my first solo exhibition at the ABN AMRO–USM Gallery in May 2005, I displayed 65 of these recycled-paper sketches. A Chinese doctor, after admiring the collection, asked how much I’d sell each for. I told him RM25 apiece. Then he asked, “How much for the whole set?” I did a quick calculation—about RM1,200. He offered RM1,000 for the lot, and I didn’t hesitate. Somewhere in town today, there’s a Chinese doctor who owns over 60 original Bahari sketches drawn on the backs of discarded brochures.

Now, the USM Museum is considering hosting a show of mine as well, possibly on the same theme. Who knows—they might even want to own the works. So I’m busy producing more sketches on the remaining brochures, preparing for the next show.

I often wish I could upload all these sketches to this blog to make it more visually engaging for readers—if there are any out there. Sadly, I’m still not savvy with this digital business. I remain a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to utilizing the full power of the computer.

I tried getting my works onto the blog back when I was living in Kuala Terengganu, hanging out at a cyber café in Gong Badak among a few computer whizzes. I invested time and money in the project, but somehow I’m still no closer to creating a decent web page or fully functional blog. That said, I haven’t lost faith in my friend Fazli Mubin—the man who, in my eyes, is the master of computers and programming. For three years, I hung around hoping to glean something from his expertise, to push my work to its next stage. It didn’t quite happen, but he’s still around, somewhere. And if you’re reading this, Fazli, well, you know what to do.

When I started this blog, it was with the intention that my art would balance my ramblings. The sketches, drawings, paintings, and photographs were meant to be an integral part of this space. After all, this is the life of an artist—not just a diary of daily offloaded thoughts for the digital world to read.

My primary intention has always been to share the experience of being an artist: the trials and tribulations, the creative tides, and the everyday moments that shape and inspire. As the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche might say, it’s about churning all the crap life throws at you and turning it into compost—manure for the flowering of creation.

I’ve often used the analogy of the night soil carrier—a man who turns human waste into something useful and enriching—as a guiding metaphor. It’s the ultimate recycling process: transforming shit into sustenance, poison into medicine, sorrow into song