Draw For The Pen.
You think you’ve seen it all on the dancefloor until you haven’t. Hungover laying on the sofa I actually found something that piqued my interest. Scrolling through insta stories lead me to the keep hush mid-week slice of business. A rocket-fuelled school night sensation that’s kicking Boiler Room in the shins and saying all the right things. One clips got a poised fella clutching a sketchpad, signature green lights bouncing off textured paper and some quick-fire line work in the mix. The story’s tag @caibellisart leads me on to the artist in situ. And there we have it, our next feature.
Cai Arfon Bellis is an artist focussing on the inner-city motions of nightlife in London. He takes in-the-moment visual notes through pen and pad to ignite energetic momentum into his pieces. Cai’s focus is on the energy at play in these darkened surroundings and the characters we find ourselves brushing sweaty shoulders with through the brief encounters of the rave. The unmatched live performances of Grime shows have had a massively inspiring contribution to his creative journey; “I’ve always compared it to jazz in the sense of collaboration, the djs working off the mc and the mc’s working off the dj and they’re both working off the crowd. They’re all just trying to one up each other. That’s what drove me to start this stuff in the first place.” This triple threat along with the alluring surreal environments can make for something larger than a camera can record. Cai portrays the elements at play and the synergies of these spaces in effect.
A recurring theme to our conversation was the necessity of community within a scene. Close knit, small communities in the music scene allow for an accessibility of people and their identities coming together. Cai’s using his art form as a springboard for his creative process. Going against the common practices of art’s seemingly stagnant rules about its own purposes on a subject matter. Cai’s work is there to celebrate the life of the culture’s that surround him. Especially in the forms of a “community-led trip, essentially…”, representing the sensory overload that shows an immersion of individuals all in unison.