Hi there, my name is Tinie Tempah, and right now, I’m at the Tate Gallery viewing the Chris Ofili exhibition. If you are under 26, you can get a ticket for £5 and come and view this amazing, amazing exhibition. It’s well worth it.
I’m a musician, I’m an MC. Some of my contemporaries and people that have come before me are the likes of [inaudible 00:00:46] Chipmunk and I’ve just signed a record deal with Parlophone, been asked to do a 32 bar about how I’m inspired by Chis Ofili’s work, so yeah, his stuff is incredible. So I’m just working on it bit by bit every day just to make sure that it matches. I’ve been doing a lot of reading up, where he grew up, where he studied, and stuff like that. I think all of that is important for, you know, you just start writing about somebody’s work, it’s always good to kind of do your research about where they’ve come from and what may have led to some of the paintings that they’ve done.
The title of this painting here is No Woman, No Cry. It’s based around what happened to Steven Lawrence. I was very young at the time that happened, but I later kind of moved around the area where it happened, and so yeah, it’s become more personal than many things, considering he’s captured it so well and so beautifully, it just says everything that it needs to say. You know, that’s the reason why I’ve chosen it.
The thing that appeals to me about Chris Ofili’s work is his background, the way he’s come from. And some of the inspiration behind these paintings, sometimes you have to look at them more than once, more than twice, even, more than three times, until you can grasp a little bit of the concept. Also the Elephant’s Dung is kind of like… that would make anybody get it, like, what, really?!
I really like this. I really, really, really like that. I seem to be always staring at the ones with women in them, right? I’m bad like that!
Oh, wow! This is grand, this is like… That’s really nice over there. I just sometimes wonder what the process would have been to do something like this. I think it’s kind of like, the process of this sort of reminds me of, like, making a song, as well, that is stage by stage, layer by layer. Obviously you’ve got undercoats and stuff like that, where I’d record a main line and then I’d do, like, backing vocals which make it thicker, and then I’d do ad-libs on top of that, and then it would get mixed and mastered like this. It’s kind of weird. That’s just screaming at me, like I just [inaudible 00:03:13] that.
Yeah. This is amazing. These are like the earliest sketches, right? Funny, one of my friends’ walls is like this. When you walk into his house, on the right, his wall is exactly like this, just portraits of, like, women in his family. That looks like the mummy! Oh, that’s crazy. It kind of feels like you’re there, and trying to squint to get… you’re looking from some bushes, or something.
In my opinion, personally, like, art is cool to me, but I think a lot of young people and a lot of people round my age and my demographic kind of, like, overlook it. But I’ve always appreciated art, and when I’ve seen this it’s like I appreciate it on a whole next level now, like I can so connect with this.
A lot of art is like, it’s subjective, like, you may get something from it that nobody else does, and I think that’s what’s so special about art. I don’t think everybody is going to look at this painting and go away with the same thing.
