Damon Kowarsky has managed to relive the sense of mystique while detailing the structural exactitude of architecture through his prints. That intrinsic quality cajoled out of printmaking in order to make it truly expressive is what sets his work apart.

Born in 1973 in Australia, he studied printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts and at Glasgow School of Art, followed by Advanced Figure Drawing with Godwin Bradbeer at RMIT in Melbourne. Travelling has always been his prime passion, taking him from New South Wales to Damascus, finding him assisting on a dig for the Dakhleh Oasis Project in Egypt in 2002, learning and teaching drawing and miniature painting in Lahore in 2007, or undertaking a collaborative residency with Kyoku Imazu at Art Vault Mildura in 2013. In 2014, he’s been the artist-in-residence at Guanlan Original Printmaking Base in China.

While working in collaboration with Atif Khan towards ‘Hybrid II’ in Lahore, he took time out from making art in which individual voices beckon viewers into their realms while the outward surfaces remain pleasantly conventional and technically innovative. Excerpts follow:

The News on Sunday: How do you strike a balance between commercial constraints and your creative expression?

DK: A number of years ago a colleague of mine pointed out that there are many different art markets out there. We often think of people who are collecting at the highest end of the art market because they are celebrities buying ‘celebrity art’. But there are also a number of well-educated people who are interested in other things, who may be people of a slightly more modest means in comparison but have a strong interest in art. They, too, go to art galleries. Looking at my work, she suggested that that’s where I should pitch.

So, I am not going for the oligarchs of the art world. I am, instead, looking at the doctors and the lawyers or people who have disposable incomes and sufficient interest to appreciate my work, and the world that I found was fairly big. There are lots of different art markets and I’ve been lucky enough to find one that supports what I am interested in making, primarily pictures that I want to see and make to the best of my ability.

TNS: You quoted David Hockney as a potential example. What about him?

DK: Hockney is a great example: He’s had enormous success right from the beginning which is indisputable but he’s never wavered from his commitment to drawing and to image-making. He experimented in the 1980s with fax machines and colour photocopiers. He did i-pod drawings but it was always technology that he savoured.

At the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London, 600,000 people came, and yet Hockney is not regarded, not at least sales wise, as the biggest living artist in the world. That exhibition toured other venues with a similar response. I understand that the people in England would be interested in the English landscape but the show garnered same response even in the rest of Europe.

TNS: How did you stumble upon printmaking, to begin with?

DK: When I first went to the arts college, the foundation year offered ceramics, sculpture, painting, drawing, etc., and printmaking simply felt right. Temperamentally, it was the right mix of the creative and the technical. It was a physical medium. I was actually at it, working with my hands -- what I have pursued ever since. It was back in the year 1992 when I started out.

In contrast, photography also meant a lot in terms of darkroom techniques. These days with the advent in digital technology, there’s an assumption that photography is not a technical craft, which is incorrect. Taking a good digital photograph requires a lot of skill and time, and using the photoshop is like a digital darkroom. Photography is not just about point/click/print. However, there’s something that drawing has that photography does not! We live in a world that is dictated by the lens; everything is visual seen through the camera but whenever I see something that’s hand drawn, I respond to it immediately. It’s a physical, visceral act and not just a camera blocking print.

After twenty odd years of work and study and learning, I can draw in a style that distinguishes me from other art makers. If you are a musician, and have spent twenty years learning violin, then you play only violin and not harmonica because you have invested your time in pursuit of an ideal.

I don’t use any photographic references: for instance, if I need a tree for a particular picture, I have to draw that tree or take one out of the archival drawings of trees I have done over the years. When you draw something, you have to first look at the object and understand it before you make the first translation from the 3-D world to the 2-D page. That’s the hardest part -- turning it into an ‘abstract representation’. Hockney said the same that the initial bit is the toughest thing; after that, itmuch easier to transform, to change the tones or to resize.

Likewise, I’ve never done photogravure. In ‘Hybrid II’, Atif Khan did the photoetching: he transposed images on to the plates using photo emulsion. Once that was done, I would come in and put a hard ground and draw my ‘stuff’ on them. In case of a photograph, you are constrained by the resolution of the image. In digital photography, the end point is a pixel which is a square when the world is not square. On the contrary, when you draw something the end point is molecular. It’s beyond what our eye can register whereas in case of a digital photograph, I can walk up to it and see the pixels or find errors in the file. I can see the artifice of how it’s compressed and formatted.

TNS: What exactly made you come to Pakistan?

DK: I first came here in 1997 when I as still a university student in Australia. It was a summer break and I wanted to travel to India, Pakistan and Iran. I was more interested in visiting the Persian empire but at that point in time, there was no Middle Eastern airlines and no good way to get to Iran from Australia directly. So, without looking at the map, I bought the ticket to Karachi, and since I was an art student, I visited the NCA, Lahore where I met Nusra Latif Qureshi.

Around 2004-5, I became interested in Japanese woodblock printing and South Asian miniature painting because my art school curriculum was missing in on what I saw as the rigour in technique and skill that these traditions entailed. Meanwhile, I met Sabine Raja, a printmaker from Pakistan, who was on residency in Melbourne, and expressed my interest in learning miniature painting. She recommended me to Ms Salima Hashmi who welcomed me to study miniature art at the BNU, Lahore, upon the condition that I would have to teach drawing to the Foundation Year for six months. Subsequently, I came back in 2010 to teach at the IVSAA, in 2012 to collaborate with Atif Khan on ‘Hybrid I’, and now for the fifth time, to collaborate again on ‘Hybrid II’ with him.

TNS: What makes Damon Kowarsky a proverbial globetrotter?

DK: Let me admit that I do have wanderlust. My middle name is Lawrence after Lawrence of Arabia. Australia is a small country: its entire population is the same as Karachi’s. It’s huge but sparsely populated. Human endeavour requires large and concentrated population, and there’s been a long tradition of people going to centres of culture and learning to push their ‘game’. There’s a famous Australian expatriate, Clive James, who moved to London in the 1960s. He used to say: the reason why one lives in London or New York is because one is ‘small’ there. James was global quality -- he’ll put in an article in the New Yorker and might get rejected because there are hundreds of people his quality. He would say the only two cities that have a global literature are New York and London because they can afford to reject people. If you stay in a smaller place, then you are a big fish in a small pond.

When I go to India, there are things I’ve never seen before or could never hope to see if I stayed back in Australia. The things that I discovered in Pakistan will never march down to where I live. Rohtas Fort will never move up and come to Melbourne.