Brushes with strangers

There are probably better ways to welcome tourists to your country than with the words, ‘Go home England. Bastards.’ To their credit, Henry Hemming and his travelling companion Al, both suspected by the Slovak border guards of being Islamic extremists and denied entry, do not go home. With a retaliatory cry of, ‘Go home Slovakia. Bastards,’ they drive away in their beloved truck Yasmine and the journey continues.

And it is quite a journey. Fresh from university, the two fledgling artists travel through Turkey, Iran, Oman, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. Their mission: ‘an artistic expedition to the heart of the Islamic world in order to alter Western stereotypes of the region.’ Like many such lofty ambitions, the objective soon succumbs to reality along the way and the journey becomes instead a more introspective story of self-discovery.

Penniless, as all young artists should be, the pair must put on exhibitions wherever they can. In Tehran, where they are told theirs is only the third foreign exhibition in Iran since the 1979 revolution, they don’t sell as many pictures as they would like, which is also just as it should be. Some Spectator readers may wince a little at the terminology the artists use. For instance, they only ever seem to ‘make art’, rather than paint. Al spends a good deal of time immersed in what he calls his ‘paint-feelings’. These are later superseded by ‘nature-cultures’.

One mean-spirited reviewer of this book dismissed what she called its dubious ‘studenty solipsism’. A more generous verdict would call it youthful exuberance, smile indulgently at some of the more pretentious observations and admire Hemming’s chutzpah. The pair get into more than their fair share of scrapes, in part because of the author’s unkempt appearance and slightly foreign features.