Abdo is a Visual artist, based in Cairo, Egypt. Specialized in digital visual arts, digital collages, and mixed media, Abdo hassan’s collages images with artistic vision following no rules, making artworks with wild colors and surreal concepts. This expression has no boundaries, and this is the freedom he finds in the surreal and collage arts.
What makes him a messenger of his vision is seeing people facing wars and poverty—these overthinking and depressing feelings turn these feelings into art and powerful visual creation.
He’s participated in Graphic Matters festival, Speak up in the Netherlands, showing the suffering of children in Aleppo wars. He raised money for hurricane victims and got published to show the struggles of the Arab women and teens, with marriage problems and in other publications around the world. Ive joined international exhibitions and got featured in various books and magazines.
Instagram: @3abdo.h
Q: Could you tell us a little about yourself and your journey so far as an artist?
A: I am a natural trier. As a kid, I used to crop pictures from magazines and comic books and put them together to create a canvas. I found this the easiest way to speak my mind out. I can say that I am a visual artist. Images and visuals are the tools to express my deep feelings.
Q: Can you describe to us your busy working day?
A: My day is really simple, I do my working hours as an Art Director in a digital advertising company in Egypt, usually my day starts at 8:00am with a coffee and some relaxing, of course there were some time out after work with friends and family but for now and at current situations of Covid-19 most of my day is at home doing art, listening to music, reading books and watching documentaries.
"For me, every artist is a prophet that has a message to deliver and causes to fight for."
Q: Not only does your work consist of image based work, but you also create video art. Can you tell us about the two - like what your work is about, and how the differ from each other in terms of strengths.
A: I believe that you can show and visualize your feeling and your thoughts in any medium, drawing, dancing, writing, etc. and videos are one of these mediums. As I said I’m a natural trier I like to try new mediums, like video making and other mediums. I also believe that videos have a really big impact to people and easy for them to understand an idea from a video than any other medium.
Q: With everything that is happening this year especially during this pandemic, how has that affected your art? What are the kind of challenges you are facing and how do you continue to find inspiration and motivation?
A: The pandemic really affected my work, I had canceled art exhibits, canceled artworks.
But I really believe that the more limitation you have the more creative you go, I’m the kind of guy that really gets creative under pressure, and I love challenges, I can’t sit like this doing nothing, so I started a personal project visualizing every days feelings, thoughts, ups and downs through this new weird situation we all facing specially in Egypt and the events happens in Egypt during the pandemic.
Q: What was a defining moment in your art career?
A: Every artist have some phases in his art career, he starts with trials, having doubts about if he gonna make it or not, if he is an artist or not, if he is getting enough exposure of his art or not, a lot of ifs and overthinking, and then comes a moment when you realize that you are making art because you love to, just your passion and your love to art. When I realized this at some moment, my art career started to flourish and things started to pay off.
Q: If there was an artist who you could collaborate with, who might that be?
A: For me my favorite artist is rapper Kendrick Lamar, I really dream of collaborating with him either in a cover album or a video, also I love some creative photographers like Rob Woodcox, and of course the great Beeple and Banksy
Q: What kind of projects are you currently working on? And what do you hope to achieve by the end of next year?
A: Currently i'm working on two personal projects:
1 - Every day feelings through the pandemic (still working until an unknown date) as I mentioned earlier. 2 - Polaroids of mind, a personal project visualizing my deep feelings and my deep deep thoughts, I do meditations and a lot of thinking with myself for hours before I start in any piece of it, the main concept is creating digital art pieces looks like a fast instant photo taken while you are in a dark place, many environments and many elements depends of what I was thinking that day and my deep thoughts was wandering about.
Q: What advice would you have for aspiring artists? What factors do you think have contributed to your success?
A: My advice is a thing I discovered lately, that don’t look for appreciation, don’t imagine yourself winning a trophy, or being great in any kind of field, just follow your passion and do it with love and humanity, Once you follow your passion, life awards you. Also never think that you know everything, always learn and learn more, open your mind to every aspect, and learn again.
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