Reach Out to Asia – Doha, Qatar

Having completed the Arctic Monkeys house artwork in the cold mid winter just hours before, we find ourselves throwing us and our luggage onto a train headed for London. The three of us were to hook up with Neil and Barny at Heathrow exactly one year from our last Qatar mission. Five of us this time and a decent enough wage to  keep this de5ign4 lifestyle locomotive going for the next few days and nights, but there was far less leisure time than the last. It made the previous visit seem like a picnic. This was down to the scale of the walls. The first–120′ x 11′ and the second–80′ x 10′. The first giant was the outer wall of ROTA headquarters and a very simple brief once more. 6′ high lettering spanning most of the wall reading REACH OUT TO ASIA, a photorealistic child’s face either side of the text and the ROTA logo as background. No oil company logo on this one!

On arrival we discovered our rooms at the Movenpick Hotel weren’t going to be ready for another 24 hours. This place was still being built! This was also a dry hotel and the nearest and virtually only other drinking establishments were across the city at the Sheridon Hotel or at some ropey old club for workers and their families from the west, on the outskirts. It’s hard to find a pastime in this country unless you’re a keen sheesha smoker or have enough serious dollar to buy a kestrel that you could train to fly 10 foot above your Hummer as you make your way through town for the 100th time that day blending in with all the others. No one seemed to be struggling in this country. The majority of the economy was based on oil and had placed itself on the map for it’s history of pearls, originally. Petrol was cheaper than water here! No kidding.

We spent the first  two days mapping out the biggie and block filling some of the colour then we all had to drop tools on the headquarters job and pick up at the next. We were really up against the clock for the Wheels & Heels festival, which this year was being hosted at the site for the Asia Games Sports Village, Qatar. More extravagant spending on a very modern design just complete, weeks before the event. A beautiful site of weird constructs surrounding our temporary white wall and overshadowed by a conical hotel that lost its top in the clouds. A swimming pool protruded from its outer rim over 100′ above. F*ck that! We only had one day to paint this wall for the festival so a few short cuts had to be made involving stencils. We had both the sponsor logo and the ROTA logo cut by a local sign firm, applied the cut outs to the canvas, spray painting them and then peeled off to reveal a clean, accurate finish.

This years Wheels & Heels festival went out live to the homes of the Qatar population. A spokesman from de5ign4 was requested so we ushered Jae in their direction to suck up the limelight, as usual. Poor bastard. He held it together for the first few seconds but he soon fell apart when someone shouted the name TONY!!!! at the top of their lungs inches from the man’s ear but accidentally just about out of camera view. Strange that. When you take yourself a little too serious something always seems to happen to pull you back to reality. We all painted into the night but were rewarded with a drink at the club house into the early hours.

Two further days with the sun on our necks at headquarters and we were done. Mission accomplished and sadly perched back on a plane to Old Blighty to suffer a few more months of the cold.

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