found one!

Ayman Yossri is my favourite artist from yesterday. And the day before. Though originally Palestinian (with a Jordanian passport), he's lived in Jeddah most of his life - Jeddah being cosmopolitan compared to other Saudi Arabian cities. Ever since pilgrims began to gravitate towards nearby Mecca there's been a greater racial, cultural and ethnic mix in Jeddah and thereabouts, which is some kind of a backdrop to Ayman's life and status as someone, in his words, who lacks identity.

Ayman is pronounced 'A-man'.

His studio was a concrete-walled sauna. Jammed into a rough-hewn hole above his bed was an air conditioning unit the size of an oven, and about as useful when it came to cooling us down. I went to visit him towards the end of the day - he usually sleeps till four or five in the afternoon and spends most of his waking hours watching old films and crying; sometimes he prints miniature versions of the posters from these films onto tissue boxes. He also collects IKEA gnomes and arranges them on boards.

More than any other artist I've met in Saudi he has a following. At times it feels cultish. Young film-makers and artists look up to him and see him as a mystic, genius, man-child, joker, or just inspired baby with extraordinary ideas and a balding pate. He has has a more situationist take on making art than other Saudi artists in the sense that he doesn't believe so much in the creation of finished artistic products that can last beyond him and be photographed, packaged and sent to London for an exhibition. He'll do all that. I guess. If you force him. But it's unlikely he'll send exactly what you've agreed. At the beginning of our evening he announced that he would recreate his studio in the London gallery and man it throughout the show, shopkeeping an 'Identity Shop'. He wants to buy identities, you see, and offer some of his in exchange. By the end of the evening he had decided to send 3-metre wide blow-ups of film stills with subtitles in Arabic frozen onto the screen. Dialogue or voice-over which when translated would read as: 'I know who did it'; or 'Then there was silence'; 'Later he died', and others.

Is he an eccentric artist?

Am I not allowed into Mecca.

That doesn't quite work, sorry.

Yes is the answer.

Here's a slightly less eccentric Saudi artist I also met yesterday: