Edek
Edek is a community artist. He runs Edek’s Doodle Chat at locations across Leeds.
His brother Roni died in 2022.
“After Roni died, someone told me to honour my grief. It wasn’t someone I knew very well; I’d only met them a couple of times.
I’d never heard that before.
It wasn’t ‘deepest sympathy’. It wasn’t ‘sorry for your loss’. This person was like have it, own it.
Retreating into the attic to draw gave me space to spend time with grief; to not try to turn it into anything else. I realise that now.
I don’t think there’s a moving on and I don’t think there should be. There’ll be times when you feel it less and times you feel it more. But it’ll always be there.
The strength of emotion is a measure of the love you had for that person. Creativity allowed me to just be there and really feel what that was.
I love memes. I love the universality of them; I love that they’re immediately accessible.
A lot of the time they look stupid, but they’re actually incredibly refined. To be able to hit a comical note that can resonate with so many people with one split second image is just amazing.
I love that dogs can’t spell in memes; that they say ‘fren’ instead of ’friend’. It’s so daft and funny.
Roni loved crows. We both did. There’s something about that intelligent, inquisitive nature. After he died, I started drawing other things - dogs with pigeon heads, mainly. I call them ‘mighty horses’.
It took me ages before I could draw a crow again. It was months before I could write ‘bye fren’ on one.
Roni wasn’t my biological brother., but his mum died when we were 15. My family kind of took him in after that.
We were all very close to his mum. When she went into the hospice, we were told she was going for a rest - so when she died, it was brutal. For both of us, that was our first real experience of grief.
We decided very early on that we were brothers. We chose to be as close as we were. There’s often less value put on those chosen relationships.
“You don’t have to make art if you don’t want to, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.
There’s no pressure.”
We met through graffiti. I did a tag on his gate and he heard it was me and wanted to fight me. But I sent the guy who grassed on me back to clean it off. I think he respected that.
Now I’m being haunted by graffiti: there’s someone who lives near me who keeps writing ‘Ronnie’ on walls.
Every time I see a crow, I think about him, too.
A friend of mine came to make a film of me. All through the filming, I was drawing.
And as I was drawing, I was able to talk about everything: my isolation, the anxiety that comes with living with chronic pain; how anxiety manifests physically; the deep sadness I was feeling.
He said, “How have you not talked about this before?” And I realised it was because I had this thing, this creativity without an aim to it - doodling, essentially - that allowed me to open up and speak.
That’s what Doodle Chat is - just having a doodle and a chat. But it’s also having a safe space, somewhere you can be yourself, meet other people, share skills and stories.
You can bring a project or you can just use what’s there. You don’t have to make art if you don’t want to, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. There’s no pressure. But when I see the impact, I understand they’re a very deeply needed thing.
I’ve never managed to find the reason that I create. All I know is that if I don’t, I start to feel quite mentally unwell.
A lot of artists talk about this idea of compulsion. When I’m in the studio, I can paint for eight hours non-stop. My partner sometimes sends me back there if I’ve been away for a few days.
When I don’t paint, I get weird.
I need to do it but I don’t know why.”