Exhibition: Welcome Strangers at The Old Sweet Shop

1:23pm Thursday 11th October 2007

There are few things more irritating than somebody interrupting you for a chat when you are trying to work.

Which is exactly what I do to artist Joe Schreider in Southfields' The Old Sweet Shop gallery. His project, Welcome Strangers, is a collection of portraits he draws of people he bumps into around Southfields.

"I am drawing as we speak," says Joe, "he is called Eddie, he has on dark sunglasses, sleeveless jacket and cords, and brown boots. He just happened to be walking past the gallery when I was coming out to start my day's drawing.

"I am doing about 15 A4 drawings every day and every morning I put up the ones I did the day before. There have been a few times when I have had a queue of people waiting to be drawn, it's quite funny."

The project is part of Wandsworth Arts Festival and Joe says Welcome Strangers is as much about openness and uniting people as it is about strangers being all around you. Its purpose, he continues, is to build a portrait of an area through the faces of its people - ie, it is more about the community than the individuals. Despite this, he has clearly been relishing meeting the people of Southfields.

He says: "There is the guy who runs the news-stand who has been there for 27 years, the librarian from Spain, the butcher whose family were raised here, the retired lady who has been here for more than 40 years.

"The first thing people say to me is, Have you met Mad John?,' He is a local celebrity, really, there are a lot of myths about him and people say he was in the Falklands. He walks about the streets a lot and he is very important to Southfields in a strange way. I did draw him and he said some lovely things - he takes you by the hand and says, have a nice day' a few times."

A similar project was completed by Joe in Streatham and Brixton and he is off soon to Slovakia to continue. Joe's main patches in Southfields have been the library, the Grid pub and Sikelia, the Sardinian café in Replingham Road, and the people of Southfields seem to give the area a good bill of health, one chap citing Wimbledon tennis championships as a reason for this, because "it gets painted once a year".

In conjunction with Welcome Strangers is Joe's workshops at Sheringdale Primary School.

Joe explains: "I'm taking take pupils out to Southfields centre to draw people, it is for them to appreciate a familiar local area but look at it properly, scrutinise it."

Welcome Strangers; The Old Sweet Shop, 11 Brookwood Road; to Oct 18, Mon to Sat, 9.30am-5.30pm, call 020 88712272 or visit theoldsweetshopweb.com

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