“You know what still amazes me after living here nearly nine years? It’s the life- style expats from all over the world are living here,” says Clare Napper over a kiwi smoothie in Dubai Marina’s Café Martinez. “It’s almost a lifestyle usually reserved for the rich and famous, which in their own countries they would not be able to lead. And it was that I wanted to share with everyone. How ridicu- lously we live out here. But in a tongue-in-cheek, laugh-at-ourselves kind of way.”
This is the second time the graphic designer-turned-artist and I have met. Just two weeks earlier it was over red wine and canapés at the Tribeca bar where she unveiled the second in her naughty High Life Dubai Series – a gentle satire of expats’ extravagant exploits depicted through a number of 1930s-style travel posters. And given the condiments accompanying our encounters, it seems we’re not doing a lot to debunk stereotypes.
“I love the idea of telling modern-day stories in this old vintage way,” she says. “And I realised quite quickly that the old vintage style of the old travel times were these very idealised places. If you had money, you could travel. So it allows me to take everyday Dubai situations and reframe them in a very foreign, idealised way. When you reframe it in this kind exotic way it makes you realise just how crazy it all is.” Many of the images will undoubtedly feel familiar to a lot of expats – most awkwardly of all perhaps, the one depicting an infamous Dubai brunch in all its glory. “I had some fun designing them,” Napper cheerfully admits.
While many artists face the endless struggle of trying to monetise their work, Napper has achieved the rare feat of being able to live off being a full-time artist – something helped by her background in advertising. Having trained in graphics and subsequently cut her teeth at a number of British design agencies, she made the move over to Dubai in 2007 to join Saatchi & Saatchi, where she was even- tually promoted to head of design. It was there, while undertaking a project to launch Dubai’s Metro, that Napper fell in love with the Roger Broders-style posters showing travel during its golden age in the 1930s and 40s. Though the Road and Transport Authority rejected the idea, the inspiration remained and would become integral to Napper’s art.
However, the high-pressured strains of the advertising industry eventually took its toll. She quit, taking her strong work ethic with her into a career as a freelance designer and now an artist. “I’m very disciplined,” she says. “I have been in design and advertising so long that I am kind of used to ‘the project’ and timelines and deadlines, so I will book my exhibition in at the end of the year and then create each piece within the timeframe that I give myself. And it’s kind of like a daily discipline I guess. I work on each picture and I don’t over- run on each so I know I’m on track to create this body of work by the time the exhibition comes.” She adds: “I wish I could be more like a real artist. Where I just pick up the paint brush and be like ‘Oh I feel like doing this today’, but I’m not like that I guess. I work more like you would tackle an agency project. It’s very useful though – it’s a great discipline to have.”
Napper finds support in her local artistic peers. Among them is Madeleine Butcher, who similarly made the transition from advertising into Dubai’s fledgling art scene. In fact, Napper and her friends even held an exhibition called No U-turn because of the pressure they felt leaving the business.
Nearly two years later, the High Life Dubai series remains in-demand, with the second, two-month-long exhibition closing last week. Given the success it’s had, does Napper plan on doing a Peter Jackson and turning it into a trilogy?
“I was thinking this will be the last time I do this exhibition but then I’ve already got a list again for another exhibition and there are already lots of places that I haven’t done and a lot of requests I get from people. So DIFC I haven’t done, there’s the clichéd ‘Jumeirah Janes’ which I haven’t done. I’m constantly getting requests for that and places around Al Barsha and Jumeirah Village Circle. These residential areas I’m getting a lot of requests for and Abu Dhabi actually. I don’t want people to get bored of it. We’ll see what happens. Maybe it will be a hat-trick and then it’s done.”