Peter James Field

Should Creatives Work for Free?

2012-01-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

Writer and film director Jon Spira recently wrote a piece on his blog about a spat he had on Twitter with Guardian columnist Emma Kennedy. He disagreed with her statement that young writers should not, under any circumstances, do unpaid work for clients who could afford to pay. An escalating row ensued. His post (linked here) focuses mainly on the manner in which the argument played out, and though that side of it doesn't interest me, I am interested in the underlying ethical dilemma.

In my experience there are few illustrators who weren’t asked, early in their career, to work for free by major publishers. My story is probably very common. I graduated to find myself in a blind panic at the sea of talent I was now forced to compete with, and ethics were furthest from my mind in the early days of my career.

I was particularly enamoured of a certain international fashion magazine (I’ll call them ‘Mag A’) - who went straight to the top of my hit list. I dearly wanted my work to grace their pages, I needed their name on my CV. I bombarded them with lovely handmade books and finally the art director called me.

“Hey, we love your stuff! It’s absolutely great! And guess what, we’ve got a full page for you to illustrate.”

Brilliant news. I waited for him to mention the inevitable massive fee I expected from a magazine of this stature.

“One little thing, we’re actually a bit overspent on this issue – you know how it is, we’re all up to the wire so we were hoping to come to an arrangement. Maybe if we give you a really big credit line, including your website address, you’d do this one pro bono? We’ll definitely pay you next time, and it’ll stand you in good stead for future issues.”

Green and recently graduated though I was, I knew this to be unpasteurized bullshit – yet after thinking about it for a while I still took the job. There are no excuses. It didn’t feel right, but I was desparate enough to go for it.

Soon afterwards a fellow illustrator pointed out that by taking that job I had breached an ethical code, and that I had actually helped make things worse in an already tough industry. By giving non-payment my tacit seal of approval, I had ensured that future generations of young graduates would be asked the same question. And, worse, when other magazines learnt that this publication didn’t pay for illustration, this reprehensible practice would spread through the industry like cancer. By taking the job I’d not only devalued myself – I’d shat on other illustrators too.

This is the logic Emma Kennedy quite reasonably espouses in her argument with Jon Spira: creatives must stand united with a zero tolerance attitude towards people with access to budgets who still ask for unpaid work. The only way to uphold this view is to allow no exceptions. She explained to Spira that if he, as an educator, told his students otherwise then he was doing them a disservice.

…Except, of course, to anyone who’s ever tried to get a break in the creative industry this thinking doesn’t exactly describe the real terrain. The world does not, and will not ever, work in this rather wonderful utopian way. There will never be a magic moment when creatives all unite to renounce unpaid work. There’ll always be someone who’s willing to nip in there and take the free job. I take the point about ethics on board and feel guilty about what I did – but still there’s a lingering voice in my head which says, someone was always going to do that job for nowt, why shouldn’t it have been me….?

Shortly after this, I had another, more instructive, insight into the world of professional ethics. It doesn’t involve unpaid work, but it’s an example of what can happen when you are brave enough to take an ethical stand...

It was a year or so later and, ashamed by my previous acceptance of unpaid work, I was determined to make matters right by exercising a more responsible stance. I joined the Association of Illustrators and took delivery of their glossy magazine, featuring a 6 page illustrated feature on a senior member (I’ll call him Illustrator A) whose work was a constant source of delight and influence.

The back pages of the same magazine, focussing on ethics, counselled that a certain national magazine (I’ll call them Mag B) had recently introduced a new and punitive clause in their commissioning document. For no extra money, illustrators who had previously granted a ‘one use, UK only’ licence for their images, would now be forced to surrender entire copyright for no extra money.

Wow. This was a big one. The AOI understandably urged all illustrators to stand shoulder to shoulder and resolutely refuse to work for Mag B under these terms.

I, having completed paying jobs for Mag B six times already, knew a difficult choice lay ahead. I was struggling to buy food and cover the rent, so I was secretly hoping they’d get in touch. But I didn’t want the potential nastiness a confrontation would bring to my door.

Two weeks later, sure enough, Mag B commissioned me. I explained to their picture editor that their new contract was not to my taste – and appealed to their better judgement. Surely a regular contributor like me could be permitted to waive certain clauses? I explained that I’d been advised by the AOI to not sign their new contract, but begged them to negotiate.

“Yes, I can see your point of view” they said kindly, “Let me just talk to the art director and we’ll call you back within the hour.”

Four hours went by and finally I e-mailed to ask their progress.

“We’re sorry you didn’t like our contract” came the response, “but we did find another illustrator who was willing to sign it.”

So I’d lost the job. I could easily picture a recent graduate, someone more desparate even than myself, being prevailed upon to sign this punitive contract which would grant them copyright and allow them to alter and sell the original artwork without consent in image libraries for the ensuing decades. The following week I waited to see Mag B hit the shelves and find out who had taken my job.

It was Illustrator A. The well-known illustrator, a generation above me, swathed in accolades and lucrative ad agency commissions whose work had headlined the same issue of the magazine that had entreated us to ignore the new contracts from that magazine. And I couldn’t afford to buy food that month. Did I do the right thing in turning that job down? I certainly took an ethical stance, but you can’t eat your principles. It sucks.

The moral of my tale is not “Illustrator A is a c***” – far from it. (I can't say that nowadays I wouldn't do the same thing myself). At a certain point, we wake up and realize that we really are sole traders. That’s it.

Returning to the Spira/Kennedy argument… Do I think it’s bad for a teacher to tell students that working for free is actually an option? Actually I think it's a bit irresponsible to do the opposite and paint a picture of a rose-tinted world where creatives all unite in the same instant and everyone triumphs over The Man. Paths into the industry are many and varied - and anyone giving you absolute rules to live by is probably foisting their own biography onto you. Free work for big companies isn’t ethical and I would never ever do it nowadays, but I certainly can’t get on my high horse about it.

Let me once again emphasize here; I don’t actively advocate working for free, and I have nothing but contempt for organizations who don’t value what we do. I would never encourage students I lecture to work for free. But like Jon Spira I would never propagate the ‘if you work for free you’re a disgrace’ line either, that’s all I’m saying.

I do consider that the free job I took early on (which looked great in print and definitely, with no shadow of a doubt, lead to other paid work) helped me on the road to the eventual point where I was able to make a living from illustration. Obviously this is a vile, unpleasant fact I can never feel proud of - and I have even found it tough to publicly admit on this blog. Luckily I am (for now) in the situation where I can tell people who do have budgets, but who still ask me to work for nothing, to go and fuck themselves.

Or, as my friend Mr. Bingo phrases it on his website (under a button labelled ‘Does Mr. Bingo work for free?’):

New York Times

2012-01-01T06:06:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year! I've ushered in 2012 by making my debut in the New York Times, with a diddy portrait of 'Major League' and 'LA Law' star Corbin Bernsen.

The Year of the Portrait

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-08:00

As 2011 has been so busy and happily productive, I couldn't resist rounding off the year by adding up just how many portraits I've produced since January.

I just calculated that I completed a total of 220 commissioned likenesses (that's more than four per week). If you add on the 400 miniatures I drew for my 'Saliva Tree' project, that would bring the total to in excess of 600. If I were to add in roughs and re-draws it would put me safely into the 1000 plus category.

I think I've earned myself a day off...

Christmas Greetings

2011-12-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

Hope you’re feeling festive already! I’m not, I confess - but that’s only due to my resolutely un-tinselled flat and Scrooge-like disposition. I guess I'll flip into genial Christmas mode tomorrow evening, somewhere between my third and fourth glass of sherry. Here's hoping.

I’d like to wish you all a good one, whatever you have planned!

2012 CD Swap is Here

2011-12-14T06:15:00.000-08:00

I’m pleased to announce the seventh annual PJF CD swap. After a bit of a break from it, I’m raring to start swapping compilation CDs in the New Year.

In case you haven’t participated before, here’s the lowdown; you make a compilation CD of your favourite music – any number of tracks. Burn 10 copies and send them to me. A few weeks later you will receive a selection package containing 10 randomly chosen compilations by the other players. All swappers are welcome, whether you know me personally or not – but you must let me know if you’re playing ASAP by e-mailing peterfield13@hotmail.com. I’ll respond with a fuller list of instructions.

The deadline for sending me your CDs is not til the end of February 2012 – which gives you the entire festive period, and beyond, to start dreaming up your playlists...

Saliva Tree - Festive Discount

2011-11-29T06:56:00.000-08:00

What says ‘Christmas’ better than the saliva of a perma-tanned fame limpet, hanging on for dear life to the rusting wreck of a singing career? Look no further than the Peter Andre Saliva Tree.

In the run up to Christmas I’m happy to offer a 30% discount on all copies of the book – simply click on this link and then enter the discount code ‘SALIVA25’ at the checkout. The book, usually priced £7, will now cost £4.90 per copy over this period. Please feel free to share this with friends who are looking for a unique, conversation-piece Christmas present for that special somebody.

N.B. This discount code also works for orders of my ‘Numbers’ book – now less than ten copies remaining!

Independent Oxford

2011-11-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

My work features in the Arts section of today's Independent newspaper, illustrating an article about ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, Jon Spira’s documentary on the music scene in Oxford.

The illustration lays the principal bands (Radiohead, Foals, Ride, Supergrass and The Candyskins) across a simplified road map of the area - alongside local landmarks.

Having been a teenager in the 90s it was nice to have the chance to sketch some of these bands – notably Ride whose music I worshipped and whose faces also adorned my GCSE sketchbook. This is as good a chance as any, I guess, to post one of their songs....

Hemispheres Magazine

2011-11-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

For the past eighteen months I have been (and continue to be) a regular portrait artist for the ‘Three Perfect Days’ feature in United Airlines Hemispheres magazine. United were the first carrier to ever launch an inflight publication (back in 1947) and their revamped publication finds its way into the hands of an estimated seven million travellers each month...

November Update

2011-11-08T06:43:00.000-08:00

November already and, as Britain pauses on verge of the apocalyptic winter freeze the newspapers have been depressingly predicting for weeks, I’ve been taking advantage of this precious time before I turn into a block of ice, in studio and home environments both bereft of central heating. I’ve put a few new folio images on the main gallery pages of my website, with more to come next month. My visual diary continues to receive its monthly updates. Among other recent work assignments, I’ve painted thirty dignitaries (including Barack Obama) for a Columbia University prospectus, as well as sketching Tony Blair for a publication to accompany the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix this weekend.

Los Angeles Magazine

2011-10-24T03:10:00.001-07:00

My work features in the latest edition of Los Angeles Magazine, illustrating their special feature on markets and market produce. Firstly I sketched six unusual items of produce...

Top row: fava beans / heirloom tomatoes.

Second row: cavolo nero / crosnes.

Bottom row: finger limes / chioggia beets

I also illustrated the typical market goer, along with the trendy accessories she might wear for an afternoon at the market. Being asked to accommodate a bum-bag (aka fanny pack) plus a plaid poncho into the same illustration was quite a technical challenge...

New Portrait Project: Faces Needed

2011-10-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

After the flurry of last week’s portrait themed blog-posts, I thought it would be as good a time as any to talk about my next project.

In brief; I’m looking for subjects for my own new forays into portraiture. In the past I’ve submitted entries to both the BP Portrait Award and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, however it’s now been over five years since I gave this a serious bash.

In the intervening period a lot has changed, not least that portraiture has become my bread and butter - for editorial clients like TIME, the FT and Wallpaper. I really enjoy it, but I rarely if ever have the pleasure of meeting my portrait subjects in person, or of having much say over how the reference images I receive are photographed. They’re usually reproduced very small, too, and have to be executed at some speed.

Whilst producing my recent large-scale ‘Peter Andre Saliva Tree’ personal work I again found myself doing mini-faces at a rate of knots from found photo reference! The irony wasn’t lost on me, and I resolved that the next big personal project would have to be a different sort of portrait challenge.

I’ll be honest, I don’t have the space at home or in the studio to carry out sittings from life – so the good news is that I’m not in search of people to donate hundreds of hours to sit in person. I’d love to sketch some faces from life, if anyone’s up for that - but for the moment the most realistic scenario for my painting is that I’m looking for people who are willing to have their faces photographed.

What sort of sitters am I looking for? In the first instance I’m just putting the word out there, and will start building up a photo archive of a diverse set of people without imposing any limits on the sorts of people I need. Can you help or do you know anyone who might be willing to help? I envisage it would only take up half an hour of your time max, and I’d be willing (within reason) to come to you. In return I’ll happily supply photos/scans of any artwork that results. I’m looking for a diversity of all sorts of faces, especially in this research stage. Content-wise I wouldn’t be posing sitters in any strange or surreal scenarios, the purpose for now is just a pure focus on the face – so in all respects the sittings would be extremely simple. The plan is to be highly naturalistic, so although I can’t allow for any special requests (‘draw me without wrinkles’ etc) I can certainly reassure you that there’ll be no Picassification.

If you’re interested you can e-mail me direct at peterfield13@hotmail.com, or tweet me @peterjamesfield.

Portraits 6/6: Minton and David Tindle

2011-10-13T05:51:00.001-07:00

My last portrait choice is entirely personal, a picture of a sitter about whom I know relatively little. It’s a small scale oil portrait from the 1950s by John Minton, depicting a young man called David Tindle – and it hangs in the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

My feelings towards the picture can’t exactly be summed up in words; for me it conveys an awkward sense of tenderness and fragile beauty and I’m not ashamed to say that, the first time I saw it in the flesh, I literally welled up with tears – like it was the ghost of a past encounter, or an unexpected reminder of an old friend I somehow knew and understood.

It seems to have been painted with real love – and perhaps longing. The sitter looks a little stiff and isolated in his own world - his shoulders tense and his hands awkwardly clasped in front of him. Perhaps the studio is unheated - he hasn’t removed or unbuttoned his coat.

Minton belonged to a postwar generation of figurative painters who sometimes socialized together – their number included, famously, Bacon and Freud. He was independently wealthy, but chose to divide his time between fine art and commercial art, a practice which had yet to be named ‘illustration.’

He is now perhaps best remembered for his illustrations on various book jackets, including the first editions of the famously pioneering Elizabeth David cookbooks. Such commercial sell-outs were teased by his fellow ‘serious’ artists like Bacon.

You’re unlikely these days to see Minton canvases on display in the major London art galleries (he was collected by the Tate but their holdings of his work now rest in the warehouses, far from public view). You might be more lucky in regional galleries like Chichester – or indeed in my home town Bournemouth, whose gallery possess a portrait of a chap called Norman Bowler.

This portrait of Bowler, at a larger scale and more thinly painted, seems rather less enigmatic somehow – but still of interest to me on account of the identity of the sitter. I love it when the world of high art car-crashes with the world of light entertainment, and this is an example.

Norman Bowler was a body-builder in the 1950s, famously good-looking. Minton clearly took a shine to him, for he featured in several artworks. He married Minton’s best friend Henrietta Moraes - one of the most notorious figures in Soho society of that period. She was a muse to Francis Bacon, a wildly promiscuous good-time girl who descended into alcoholism.

Her marriage to Bowler was shortlived and he later went into acting – eventually being cast as patriarch Frank Tate on Emmerdale in the early 90s. You couldn’t make it up.

I’ve looked up the sitter David Tindle and, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I have a suspicion that he is still alive. There is a Royal Academician, now in his 80s, who bears the same name. The dates fit, he would have been 20 at the time of this portrait. I hope it’s the same chap, I’d be glad to know that his story had a happy ending.

Minton, it seems, wasn’t quite so fortunate. There’s no information to tell me the nature of his link with Tindle, but there is plenty of stuff out there to suggest that Minton (a gay man at a time, let us not forget, when it was still illegal) often suffered the pain of unrequited love. He was apt to give his heart away to unsuitable, or heterosexual, men and spend large sums of money on people he liked, only for them to disppoint him.

I didn’t know any of this when I first saw the portrait. My own emotional response was natural and uninformed by Minton’s biography – yet it seems to fit. The sitter seems detached, somehow; admired and (with those big eyes) even idealized by Minton - yet utterly lost to him.

In his book on Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson writes of the final heartbreak in the artists life. In 1957 Minton’s best friend Henrietta Moraes won the heart of a man he was in love with - she who had also been married to the aforementioned Norman Bowler. In the words of Julian Maclaren Ross he was emotionally ‘torn to pieces by tiny marmosets’ and, perhaps in a cry for help gone wrong, took an overdose of sleeping pills and died.

Portraits 5/6: Goya and Manuel de Godoy

2011-10-12T06:35:00.001-07:00

I couldn’t possibly write about my favourite portraits without finding a spot for Goya, my favourite artist.

Goya paints Manuel de Godoy, arguably the most powerful man in Spain – and certainly one of the most hated. He leans back in a victory pose intended to echo the triumphal portraits of antiquity. It’s a bit awkward, though, and falls far short, surely, of convincing us that this sitter possesses genuine heroism. I could be projecting, but it looks to me like Goya just can’t bring himself to believe in the myth of his sitter’s brilliance. He looks like a hard drinking, over-eating, slightly distracted posh boy, who’s just collapsed in a rather ungraceful heap.

But that’s just it, so many of Goya’s images present us with these curious riddles regarding his true intention. We doubt his sincerity then end up chasing our own shadows. Debates have raged for centuries about his portrait of the family of King Charles IV, once described by Theophile Gautier as ‘the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.’ At first glance it does seem that in its faithful transcription of royal ugliness it shows not realism but open, treasonable contempt. Yet many critics sensibly challenge the view that Goya here practised distortion of his royal subjects’ faces. ‘The idea that Goya set out to satirize the patrons he depended on’ writes Robert Hughes, ‘is of course the merest nonsense’. Though we’d love Goya to be a sort of 18^th century art terrorist, smashing the system from within, Hughes argues that it doesn’t seem likely he’d have got away with it and kept his job. Simply put; these people were just bloody ugly, and he painted them, as requested, to the life.

Still, despite this caveat I find myself stubbornly doubting Goya’s sincerity. OK, I grant you – he carried out no distortions or direct caricatures on his portrait subjects, but surely the fact that generations of onlookers have been compelled to ask these questions time and again tells its own story? I can’t overcome the sense that something weird and intangible is happening in these portraits.

I don’t think anyone has ever questioned whether Van Dyck secretly hated Charles I, or whether Velazquez’ Las Meninas was a veiled attack on the Spanish royals?

Yet beside these clean examples of royal portraiture, what are we to make of an image like Goya’s large group portrait depicting the Junta of the Philippines, presided over by Charles’ son Ferdinand – so sparse as to be reminiscent of Rothko. The colour scheme shrieks boredom/alienation and some of the delegates appear to be sleeping!

Goya was a republican. Whilst we have no written evidence of his disdain for the excesses of the Spanish monarchy, we know that many of his friends were radical Enlightenment figures critical of the conservatism of church and Crown in Spain. He produced artworks in favour of the Constitution proclaimed at Cadiz in 1812, and criticized the war and the subsequent Restoration of the monarchy in his Disasters of War prints.

Goya’s life story seems relevant too. In a Spain where male middle class life expectancy was 40, he lived to 82. If he’d died during that normal life range, he’d have been an unmemorable artist who produced fluffy genre scenes for the royal court. In his 40s, though. he suffered from a serious illness which temporarily derailed his career and left him stone deaf. Only then did his genius properly emerge, in a series of paintings and graphic works which are at times perplexing and at other times satirical of every aspect of the age he lived in.

Late in life he executed the Black Paintings (including ‘Saturn eating his children’) on the walls of his own house. Was he locked in an insane world of nightmares and paranoia? Or, as the Disasters of War etchings might suggest, was he merely reacting to the insanity of the cruel age he dwelt in?

Imagine being completely deaf and living in a war-zone, seeing mutilated bodies hanging from the trees, and then being asked to paint pompous overblown generals like Manuel de Godoy. Your deafness would prevent you from hearing their self-justifications or the squirming machinations of their enormous egos. A horrendous gory mime show enacted before your eyes. You’d see past all the trappings, as Goya did – and you wouldn’t even need to caricature it in order for your contempt to somehow be revealed on the canvas.

The sitter of our portrait, Godoy, was a charismatic member of the royal guard who inveigled himself into the affections of King Charles IV and his wife Maria Luisa. In the space of a few years he had become Prime Minister of Spain and, thanks to his Royal influence, the de facto dictator of the country. He was rumoured to be the Queen’s lover, and for a time forced his wife to live in the same house as his mistresses. King Charles showered him in gifts and bestowed a ludicrous list of meaningless official titles on him – foremost among them ‘Prince of the Peace’, which probably sounded ironic to the Spanish populace, as Godoy dragged Spain into several bloody wars with France, Portugal and England.

The portrait shows him at the age of 34, during his second spell as Prime Minister, just after he invaded Portugal. He is handed the note of surrender and sits down on a chair at the edge of the battlefield. Does this portrait flatter its subject? Despite the awkwardness of the pose and the unconvincing notion of Godoy as military hero, it probably still does, through gritted teeth, offer flattery of a sort. There is a terrible, dark, dick-swinging bravado to the masculine indolence of this man’s posture – crudely emphasized by the stick positioned between his legs.

Godoy never got his comeuppance, though he came very close to being lynched in the 1808 Mutiny, when the Spanish people finally had enough and marched on his residence. The King and Queen remained under his spell to the last, and abdicated their throne to spare his life. The three of them were forced into lifelong exile. Forty years later this man, once among the most powerful and feared men in Europe, finished his life as a dotty man in his eighties, living alone in a small flat in Paris.

Portraits 4/6: Gericault and Anon

2011-10-11T03:00:00.000-07:00

Gericault gives us one of the first masterpieces of anonymous portraiture.

It’s not that we’ve forgotten this sitter’s name somewhere in the annals of time – no, we never knew it. This wasn’t a rich man who could afford to commission a portrait of himself for his home. He wasn’t a king, or a prince, or a pope. He was a compulsive thief in a mental institution.

The very fact that the word ‘bedlam’, meaning uproar, noise and disorder, takes its origin from Europe’s oldest mental hospital – the Bethlem Hospital in London, might give an impression of what life was like behind the walls of a pre 19^th century asylum. There was no treatment, only containment. Inmates were handled like wild animals and chained up – their illnesses subject to misunderstanding and public ridicule.

In art history, too, we find few sympathetic representations of mental illness. Painters portrayed the insane either as pathetic helpless individuals or extreme people to be feared. The perception of mental illness in art (as in society) was tied to Christian perceptions of demonic possession and divine punishment.

Only thirty years before, Blake gave us one such example with his (admittedly rather wonderful) representation of the insane Nebuchadnezzar crawling on all fours like a dog, his hair straggled and his body naked. We’re not, I think, supposed to see ourselves in Blake’s picture and identify with it. The humanity has been sucked out for dramatic effect.

Gericault’s representation communicates the changing attitude to mental illness which was ushered in by the Enlightenment – a cultural movement away from supersition and blind faith, towards empirical knowledge and reason. His work was produced at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris – now most famous as the place where Princess Diana died, but famous in the nineteenth century too as the birthplace of a new humanitarian approach to the treatment of mental disorders.

The reforms began with Philippe Pinel, who pioneered the so-called ‘moral treatment’ of insanity at the Salpetriere, ordering the removal of chains from patients. In the decades that followed, different types of mental illness were patiently observed and classified into the categories we still use today – kleptomania being one such example. Pinel’s assistant Etienne-Jean Georget commissioned Gericault to help him by experimentally recording the faces of some of his patients in these various categories.

Gericault was an artist destined not to reach middle age (tuberculosis claimed him at the age of 32) – though he’d already achieved major fame in his 20s with a monumental painting called Raft of the Medusa.

The Medusa was a frigate, wrecked in 1816 with great loss of life. Amid horrendous stories of starvation and cannibalism a handful of people managed to survive on an improvised raft. His representation of this event is positively a manifesto of Romanticism, a sensational headline-grabbing dramatization of man versus the terror of nature.

Here’s an interesting thought, though - only three years later his portraits for the Saltpetriere stop some way short of his dramatic imagining of the Medusa. Romanticism was an art movement opposed, in some senses, to the pure reason of Enlightenment. Romantic art existed in the realm of felt experience, prizing drama and tension above simply objective realism. Whereas Blake and Goya (both associated with the Romantic movement) chose to dramatize their representations of insanity to the point of caricature, Gericault, when given the chance, took two steps back. Why?

In another portrait from the same sequence, the woman with obsessive envy, we can see nothing specific to her condition. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her clothing dishevelled but it’s a completely objective, unsensational view.

The kleptomanic looks slightly haunted and distracted, and his collar is dirty – but Gericault seems to be saying that he can still see the person within, clear as day. He is, whether consciously or not, defying Georget who commissioned him to record these phases as ‘types’ according to manias. Georget was pioneering for his time but Gericault, if I’m not mistaken, is a step ahead even of this. He tells us that this man isn’t just a definition of symptoms, a sub-division on some empirical, rational diagnostic chart. As such, you could say it still fits the definition of Romanticism as being a felt response, emotional and aesthetic. It’s more mature and subtler than the Medusa – perhaps because the earlier picture had been based on an imagined reality, whereas here Gericault is actually forced to sit opposite the people he is representing.

The portraits are given additional weight with the knowledge that the artist himself suffered from depression, and is even rumoured to have made a failed attempt at suicide. He is surely working under the awareness that there isn’t a great deal separating him from these institutionalized souls. As such the pictures are true one-offs, wordless documents of understanding and fellow-feeling between humans.

Portraits 3/6: Hogarth and Francis Matthew Schutz

2011-10-10T05:00:00.001-07:00

Hogarth shows Francis Matthew Schutz as he himself might not, perhaps, like to be seen by the world – spewing his guts into a sickbowl.

Portraits exist for all sorts of reasons – yet surely most commissioned likenesses seek to express the vigour and virility of a sitter, attributes which will, on canvas, outlast their physical lifetime. Is this really the way Schutz wanted to live in posterity? How many of us would choose to be remembered blowing chunks after a night on the Stella?

Hogarth is, of course, known for his moralizing pictures – among them Marriage a la Mode and Gin Lane. In these images he became the father of the modern comic strip, the first British artist to really straddle the realms of commercial mass produced art and gallery art – plus, arguably the first Brit to acknowledge that real art could also be funny. Satire was just taking off, and mass production of engravings was allowing independent publishers to sell affordable editions of prints which had a political and social as well as an artistic point to make.

The fact that multi-panel storytelling pictures enter British art at this moment can be no coincidence, either – for Hogarth’s work can be seen in a wider context where moralizing narrative became important in British literature – it was the age when the novel was born. From the pioneering efforts of Fielding and Richardson would be born a multi-million pound industry which continues to the present day.

Like Richardson’s early novel ‘Clarissa’, this was not mere entertainment, either. In ‘Gin Lane’ Hogarth depicts a woman dropping her baby onto the street in recognition of a famous contemporary case, in which a mother, Judith Dufour, reportedly murdered her infant and sold it’s clothes to feed her gin addiction.

Meanwhile, in ‘A Rake’s Progress’, Hogarth depicts Tom, the eponymous anti-hero, being sent to the horrendous Fleet debtor’s prison, where the artist’s own father was imprisoned for five years. The pictures were intended to amuse but never lose sight of a clear warning of moral danger.

The portrait of Schutz can be seen in this context - for it, too, gives a warning message, albeit on a gentler more domestic scale. The sitter was a powerful and wealthy man, closely related to King George. Amusingly, the panel was a pictorial form of finger-wagging, commissioned by his wife Susan. She hung it in his bedchamber to remind him of the inevitable results of his nightly partying. An ambiguous Latin wall inscription from Horace (Vixi puellis nuper idoneus ‘Until recently the girls loved me’) might suggest he’s been suffering with a bit of brewer’s droop into the bargain, and that this is her unsubtle way of reminding him not to ignore his spousal obligations. This backstory of marital strife adds a delightful (if slightly sad) soap opera element to the story, making the portrait completely idiosyncratic and unique in the history of all those boring overly flattering portraits which line the walls of stately homes up and down England. It’s also a classic example of Hogarth blurring the boundaries between the worlds of satire (where scatalogical humour was acceptable, even encouraged) and the world of fine art canvas painting, where such expressions might garner at best a double take, at worst a gasp of shock.

The story continues to be rather amusing, too, as we follow the provenance of the picture as an heirloom down the the Schutz family generations. At a certain point the social embarrassment of prim upper class descendants gains the upper hand and the stream of vomit disappears, to be replaced by a newspaper! Vandalizing a family portrait to avoid blushes might seem a crazy and outrageous thing to do – but doubly so when you imagine some dull Victorian hack being paid to mess about with an original Hogarth portrait. Happily for us, though, the portrait has recently been restored to its puky glory.

Portraits 2/6: Holbein and Thomas Wyatt

2011-10-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

Hans Holbein sketches one of the most notoriously handsome men of the Tudor court, the Brad Pitt of his day, physically strong and more than six foot tall – Thomas Wyatt.

Wyatt’s father was a war hero who’d sided against Richard III in the Wars of the Roses, and had faced torture in the Tower of London. When Henry VII won the Battle of Bosworth field, though, it was all change for the Wyatts. The freed Sir Henry was suddenly an honoured man, permanently in favour at the newly crowned house of Tudor.

This portrait dates from a turning point in British art, the moment when facial likenesses change from generic mask-like sameness to believable humanity. It began precisely as the medieval period concluded – the moment Henry VII saw off Richard III at Bosworth, bringing to a close the Wars of the Roses. I’ve always liked the idea that the medieval period in England had such a defined end – a literal date, 22^nd August 1485.

Compare the portrait of Richard III (left) with that of Henry VII (right), and you can see that there has been a tangible change from medieval stiffness to a more photographic verisimilitude. The Tudor court employed artists from Europe who had learned the skills of the newly flowered Renaissance. The Tudors, whose claim to the throne of England was tenuous at best, (they connected to the royal line via illegitimate female descent) may have understood the need for impressive regal images of themselves and their loyal subjects, to sprinkle an urgent air of imperiousness upon the shaky foundations of their dynasty.

Holbein, a German artist – and probably the greatest court painter England ever had – was a true gift to the Tudors, for he managed to create beauty that transcended generations. His life-like portraits enable us to see, empathize with and really imagine the human beings at the centre of the whirling cyclone of tortures and executions that characterized Henry VIII’s reign. In drawings like the portrait of Wyatt, we see Holbein’s work at its simplest and best. No lavish decorative conceits or symbolic settings here – just a human face sketched with complete confidence yet striking economy. A connection to the likeness of a man long dead, together with a suggestion of his inner life. Wyatt doesn’t meet our gaze yet nor does he really look elsewhere – he seems to be thinking. We can only wonder what’s on his mind.

Whenever I look at Tudor portraits in the National Portrait Gallery I can hardly bear to read the accompanying captions. Most of them seem to have fallen from favour at some time or another, being tortured and/or executed. If they didn’t offend Henry VIII then most would go on to offend his daughter, Bloody Mary. You couldn’t really win. Some of Holbein’s greatest portraits were literally snapshots from the core of this insanity, often not merely depicting the dramatis personae of the times but directly influencing events.

The most famous example is Holbein’s portrait of Ann of Cleves, which the artist was dispatched to paint when Henry was seeking wife number four. Holbein was presumably in a bit of a pickle with this one – she was, after all, a member of European royalty. Should he flatter her, make her look beautiful? We can only judge his portrait by the events which unfolded; Henry loved the painting and agreed to a marriage, but when he finally met Anne he famously denounced her as a ‘mare’.

Henry’s Lord Chamberlain Thomas Cromwell, subject of another striking portrait by Holbein, was executed for his role in this sorry affair. Anne escaped with an annulment and Holbein, too, lived to fight another day.

Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Wyatt also depicts a man who had a front row seat on events which shaped England. The dashing man’s reputation lives on even to this day in English literature, for he was a gifted poet whose poems remain highly regarded, even pioneering – he popularized the sonnet.

Wyatt here is the young handsome man at court but potential disaster was only just around the corner, for he had enjoyed a flirtatious dalliance with Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn. This was not an adulterous liaison. At the time Anne was an unmarried young lady-in-waiting, with as yet no reason to believe she would be marrying the King of England. It also remains completely unknown whether the romance had even progressed as far as a kiss. What’s more, Wyatt had sensibly confessed his former infatuation to the King.

Wyatt’s life was placed in danger, however, when Henry began to tire of Anne. His ministers searched furiously for excuses to chop her head off – any scrap of evidence would do. The merest whisperings were enough for this purge - a young musician at court, Mark Smeaton, was arrested after being overheard talking to the Queen. He confessed under torture to being her lover, and faced the axe. Anne was charged with incest, her brother was executed and it was furthermore suggested that she had practiced witchcraft to ensnare the King. The moles on her body were described as ‘devil’s teats’.

Poor Thomas must have been horrified to find himself arrested for treason and placed in the Tower of London. From his prison cell, it is believed that he could actually see Tower Green, and was therefore able to witness Anne Boleyn’s head being chopped off with a sword. He can have been in little doubt that his own execution would soon follow.

Luckily for Sir Thomas, then, this saga had an unusually happy ending – he was a rare survivor of the Boleyn accused. It’s believed his father’s influence at court secured his release and he lived on to the ripe old age of... er... 39.

Portraits 1/6: Toulouse-Lautrec and La Goulue

2011-10-05T08:58:00.001-07:00

Here is the first of an occasional series of six short pieces about portraits I love.

Toulouse Lautrec depicts a haughty woman entering at the door of the Moulin Rouge arm in arm with a pair of lady friends. Her face is not pretty in any classical sense, and her dress is, for the era, pretty provocative. This portrait might be the earliest glimmering of the as yet undreamt of celebrity culture that was to blossom in the 20^th century.

Toulouse-Lautrec was born to an aristocratic family, who gave their name to the French city of Toulouse. He was the heir to a fabulous fortune, the latest in line from a family not without its share of troubles.

Inter-breeding, in this case the marriage of family members to first cousins, is thought to have been the root cause of a series of birth defects which were decimating the family by the late 19^th century. Toulouse Lautrec himself was a dwarf, and suffered constant pain in his legs. His family expected him to live a life of leisure and seclusion on the family estate but, fortunately for us, Lautrec wanted more. He spent his confined indoor hours painting, and eventually left for Paris to be an artist, much against his fathers wishes. This was no silver spoon situation. When his father learned that he was signing his pictures with the family name, Lautrec was partially disinherited, and his uncle angrily cast his early works on an open bonfire. After a childhood cosseted in material wealth, Lautrec now joined the poverty stricken painters of late 19^th century Montmarte.

Lautrec was known to be a physically unattractive man who found it very difficult to attract a partner, hence a fascination with prostitutes which grew to an obsession (and ended in syphilis). His paintings of prostitutes never seemed idealized or judgemental. In many cases they became his friends.

A large percentage of his output documents the vibrant club scene in Paris, delighting openly in the hedonism of it all, whilst never losing the bittersweet edge which suggests he understood its transience, and felt removed from it all somehow. A case in point is found by comparing Renoir’s fluffy, insipid painting of the Moulin de la Galette dancehall with Lautrec’s later version – executed from almost the exact spot.

Renoir’s picture shimmers with light, the figures all glancing towards the artist in a moment of shared, respectable bonhomie.

In Lautrec’s picture, the figures are more isolated and the club seems seedier and more claustrophobic. The green glow is slightly sickly and redolent of the dubious pleasures contained in a glass of absinthe – pleasures the artist himself would be destroyed by.

The sitter in our portrait is a habitué of seedy Paris night-spots - Louise Weber, known as La Goulue, ‘The Glutton’. It’s not certain how she got her nickname – some believe it was from her buxom figure, others have cited her greedy propensity to drain the beer glasses of unsuspecting Moulin Rouge punters. Either way, few would disagree that she was nursing a growing alcohol addiction.

La Goulue was an early innovator in Parisian dance – a Moulin Rouge regular who popularized a dance that would go on to be known as the can-can. At first she was not even a paid employee of the club. She and her dance partner Valentin le Desosse (Valentine ‘the boneless’ - after his dance style) began as amateurs who quickly gained notoriety. La Goulue had a distinctive look – a contemporary described her as having ‘a vampire’s face, the profile of a bird of prey, a tortured mouth and metallic eyes.’ She quickly became a celebrity in Paris and far beyond, thanks in no small part to Lautrec, who was fascinated by her, and used her distinctive shape in early posters for the Moulin Rouge.

His advertisments for the club are among the first truly memorable mass produced lithographic posters and, in a pre TV and cinema age, brought the club’s stars to a wider audience than any entertainment act had previously known.

Interestingly, the haughty Goulue (despite enjoying her new found success) failed to appreciate the influence Toulouse-Lautrec had wielded over her career – she repeatedly turned down requests to sit from life. The only way the besotted Lautrec could force his muse to pose for this picture was to convince the Moulin Rouge staff (who did indeed appreciate his power) to place it in her contract.

Our portrait puts the spectator in a kind of fan role, perhaps waiting to catch a glimpse of their idol outside the doors of the club as she strolls in. Not for Lautrec the traditional portrait pose, where the sitter meets us eye to eye in a studio setting. She doesn’t even ‘sit’, she is captured, paparazzi style, as she glides past. The picture shows a fascinating character whose face simultaneously displays arrogance and vulnerable sadness. Apparently she hated it, and it’s easy to see why. She’s not idealized or beautified. And isn’t that a double chin?

Some critics have suggested that the picture was a kind of premonition of the future – showing her not as she looked in 1892 but as she would come to look a decade or two later.

Her story has a sad ending – she self-funded a vainglorious attempt to break free from the Moulin Rouge and set up a travelling dance show, which flopped to leave her an alcoholic destitute. Lautrec’s alcoholism killed him in 1901 but La Goulue lived on until 1928 as an anonymous Parisian street dweller, selling matches outside the club where she once danced.

Diary Extras

2011-10-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

So October is underway in sunny fashion - and I thought I'd post up a couple of visual diary pages from the summer that didn't fit on my main website displays. Shame to let 'em go to waste...

Weltwoche 2

2011-09-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

Wow it's been a busy September - forty-five portraits commissioned thus far! My head is in a (happy) spin. I just wanted to reassure you that I'm still alive and well here in Brighton, planning loads of blogging for next month so watch this space.

Meanwhile here's a recent portrait I did for Swiss mag Weltwoche Stil...

You've Got Talent

2011-09-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

My line drawings feature in ‘You’ve got Talent’, a new book about the entertainment industry aimed at teenagers, published by DK. The book is packed with facts about ‘the business’, including basic dance steps, stage make-up techniques and entertainment terminology.

I contributed fifty drawings in total for three graphic novel style double page spreads which introduce the three main chapters of the book; music, dance and drama. Each of these introductory spreads gives a potted history of each respective discipline – from its earliest recorded form, to its current incarnations in chart hits, movies and reality TV talent shows.

I’m really pleased with the finished spreads, which feature an eye-catching mix of line-work, colours, captions and photographic backgrounds. It’s also a refreshing change to see my work in a book aimed at young people!

Claremont Group Show

2011-09-02T01:29:00.000-07:00

A selection of PJF prints and originals will go on display from Sunday at The Claremont, a swish boutique hotel on Second Avenue in Hove. This splendid group show of hand-picked local artists will be launched with a drinks reception between 3 and 5pm. Friends of mine are most welcome to pop along!

September

2011-09-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

September is here and, after struggling through the last couple of weeks with a nasty cold and a general post-saliva tree slump, I am really looking forward to getting creative again with some new projects.

Coming soon is an announcement about my next big personal project for late 2011. Watch this space!

Old News: Failed Pop Stars

2011-08-26T09:48:00.001-07:00

I’ve been randomly posting some old work on twitter each day, and rediscovered my ‘Old News’ project which straddled that odd, nervous period in 2005 between my exam project, graduation and the early beginnings of life as an illustrator.

Part one of the project consisted of collecting CDs from charity shops by manufactured pop bands who, despite major label backing and slick promo campaigns, fell by the wayside. From this I fashioned a one off book called ‘Old News’ which housed the CD collection along with portraits of the groups and silly factoids.

Back then my favourite default TV channel was called ‘The Box’ – it only played music videos. Frequently the ad breaks were taken up with lengthy promos for the latest girl or boy band, in which they’d give giggling frothy interviews and make nice for the camera. Desperation was frequently all too palpable. I remember one ad for a particularly dowdy girl group (the name escapes me) which featured them boasting that they were already ‘the biggest British band in Syria.’ I found it genuinely quite melancholy how small the success ratio was among these ‘next big things.’

Looking back I don’t think I’m being too lofty to suggest the project actually captured a moment in time - a desparate time in the music business. Record sales were falling and reality TV looked like it might supply the answer. Pop Idol had really blown the field open a year or two before, and there was a sudden feeding frenzy to find another Gareth Gates or Will Young. You didn’t have to win a talent show to get signed. Admittedly that is still true with the X Factor (think Jedward) – but back then you even got candidates who didn’t make the second round of auditions getting signed up. Yes, Cheeky Girls, I am talking about you. On series one of Popstars, Liberty X had proven that, in some cases, the losers could have more success – and so after series two (Popstars: the Rivals) you ended up getting, if you include the aforementioned Cheeky Girls, no less than five new major label groups and one soloist. Can you name them all? No wikipedia cheating!

Part two of my ‘Old News’ project was a limited edition hand finished book featuring failed solo artists of the same period. Most were, again, the flotsam and jetsam of various reality shows. Examples include the cheesy James Fox from the BBC’s flagship flop Fame Academy, or Welsh song-murderer Rosie Ribbons from Pop Idol (who, not content with flopping once, did so again on Australian Idol).

Interesting to look back and notice (as my friend Sean from Artmagic pointed out on Twitter yesterday) that amidst this cesspool of blandness, a few of my featured floppers were actually great singers who slipped through the net. They might still be remembered one day, and definitely deserved a better crack of the whip – perhaps more so than the ones who got success.

One example for me would be Mania, a duo girl band launched by Xenomania, the production house responsible for Cher’s ‘Believe’, Pet Shop Boys ‘Yes’ album and many Sugababes and Girls Aloud songs. Singers Niara Scarlett and Giselle Somerville were no pre-packaged pop product, in fact Scarlett had been an integral part of the Xenomania writing team for years – she helped pen ‘Sound of the Underground’ for Girls Aloud. Their debut single ‘Looking for a Place’ felt slightly cooler and weirder than anything else around, with a hellishly catchy whistled obligato. They too had their own promo ad on ‘The Box’ channel... but the single flopped and their completed album ‘Do you know your Daughter’s on the Roof?’ was canned. It remains one of my favourite songs. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en5pyDErAws)

Equally, the solo career of Siobhan Donaghy can only be described as a ‘failure’ in the bald commercial sense. I hesitated to include her in my ‘Old News’ book because as one third of the original Sugababes, she had had her taste of fame. But in her own right, commercial success totally eluded her. She quit the Sugababes after suffering a reported depression following the alleged bullying of band-mates, and her record label chose to back her, not them. They dropped the other Sugababes and funded her first solo outing ‘Revolution in Me’, recorded with some-time Massive Attack collaborator Cameron McVey. The album was was a critical hit, but went down like a knackered lift on the high street. Poor Siobhan, it must have really hurt to see the Sugababes achieve massive success with ‘Freak Like Me’ just as her CD hit the bargain bins. But listen to it – it’s a gorgeous, catchy pop masterpiece – too cool, too skewed and at times too crushingly melancholic to set the dancefloor or the charts alight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBLMSX09ZME)

Amazingly (after I completed my ‘Old News’ book) Siobhan got a second crack of the whip – this time signed to Parlophone who released another critically lauded but commercially ignored record called ‘Ghosts’. There are rumours on wikipedia that she’s working on a third album...

Website Updates

2011-08-22T05:57:00.000-07:00

I've just updated the main gallery section of my website with some recent commercial work. The diary is still going strong, containing as it does seven years worth of monthly updates - well worth a look. Also, don't forget that the Peter Andre Saliva Tree is available to buy as a hand finished limited edition book, alongside a host of other PJF delights on my website shop here.

www.peterjamesfield.co.uk

Jade: A Modern Crucifixion

2011-08-09T05:35:00.001-07:00

My group exhibition with KUTAC, ‘See’, finished yesterday at the Brighton Fishing Museum. My 2007 portrait of Jade Goody, ‘Jades Mistake’ was quite an attention grabber, with plenty of people laughing aloud at its ludicrous caption (a real quote from the News on The World interview the day after her shameful ejection from Celebrity Big Brother).

One visitor to the show, who stopped by as I happened to be invigilating, had quite a different, hostile response to the piece - and demanded to know why I had wasted my time painting ‘a moron’. Slightly intimidated to be alone in the gallery with such an angry looking chap, I couldn’t really offer an explanation much beyond the fact I’d found Jade ‘intriguing.’ This cut little ice with my interrogator, who insisted on knowing how ignorance and bigotry could ever possibly be intriguing. I shrugged my shoulders and somewhat pathetically conceded that maybe the whole reason I painted it was because I couldn’t really put it all into words.

The picture (done years before her untimely death) came about largely because I was attracted to the hideousness of that News of the World press shot. If anything, it was a record of the cruelty of the media, which had feted Jade (rightly or wrongly) for years as an icon of rags to riches success, yet now wanted to ruin her completely, and (as the quote suggested) mock her ignorance and lack of linguistic subtlety.

In the interview, the hapless Jade was shown a video of her bullying outburst then photographed at close quarters as she wailed and gnashed her teeth for the outraged self-righteous nation. As her face glistened with tears and incomprehension, her blotchy skin matching exactly the scarlet tones of her unflattering top, her hands rising up in a near crucifix pose, the photographer pressed his shutter and preserved it for the readers.

I was intrigued by Jade - I stand by that sentiment. For a start, her story had a small but interesting local significance for me. Jade’s father died of a heroin overdose in the toilets at a branch of KFC near where I lived in Bournemouth. It made the whole thing a little less removed for me - I could imagine the scene better, for all that I’d known the location. Years later, when Celeb Big Bro introduced us to her mother, the damaged, mood-swinging and downright scary Jackiey Budden, it made me wonder how all Jade’s harshest critics might have fared if they’d had the same start in life she had?

Like many people, before the Celebrity Big Brother racism scandal, I quite liked the idea of Jade – the way she’d found an identity in the public eye and seemed to have mellowed into a mildly comic and quirky yet kindly character since her earlier (and none too attractive) discovery on BB3. The media, as we all know, loves a narrative – and the public seemed able to identify with her because she wasn’t a Hollywood celebrity who’d materialized from nowhere, tall and silver spoon-fed with flawless skin and a skinny waist.

In 2007 all that did change, of course. A few days into CBB (which I avidly watched) I began to notice a potential racial undertone to the way some of the girls were picking on Shilpa Shetty. Jade didn’t seem to be the worst offender, of course. Jo and Danielle tugged the strings. Jade had a problem with her temper and I suspected, whether from cruelty or boredom, J & D were egging her on to an inevitable explosion.

The famous ‘Oxo cube row’, when it came, took me entirely by surprise. Jade’s rage was completely disgusting and harrowing, her eyes popping out of her head with pure fury – words of filth leaving her mouth. Shilpa’s graceful calm and silent disbelief only cast a troubling spotlight on Jade’s clear inability to handle her anger and boiling rage. I was shocked and disappointed in her, but couldn’t quite get on board with the loathing the newspapers were suddenly so eager to drum up. Danielle (a far nastier, more insidious offender in my humble opinion) got off relatively scot free because she was young and gorgeous – yet the demented and twisted face of the less classically good-looking Jade in mid-Oxo rant made her, for a while, an easy poster girl for bigotry. The moral outrage quickly got out of hand. Initially cynical, it didn’t take me long to believe very sincerely that Jade was properly sorry. Her genuine tears, for me at least, cut through the galloping charge of media high-horses. She was horrified that people now hated her and thought of her as a racist. To quote Russell Brand in his marvellous summation of Jade “She was a tough girl but utterly lacking in the malice on which true prejudice depends”. Worse still she was, it seemed to me in some of those early post CBB interviews (cf ‘The Wright Stuff’ on C5) actually lacking the very language to describe and intellectualize her own outburst, coming as it did from such a dark, hidden and bruised place within her.

Putting aside this opinion (it’s just an opinion, I never met the lady) – I still think it’s remarkable that so few people are neutral in their opinions towards her. She was human marmite. Several years after her death, in our little KUTAC exhibition, some guy was angered by her very presence on the walls. Surely that alone makes her intriguing? Well doesn’t it?

Saliva Tree Launch

2011-08-08T06:45:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone who came to my Saliva Tree private view last Thursday at KK Outlet – I can safely say that a lovely night was had by all.

(Photograph by KK Outlet)

The evening held for me a real sense of occasion, coupled with an excuse to meet up with some dear friends and also celebrate the happy ending of the saliva tree project – basking in its success for a moment before I move on to projects new.

In terms of the public reaction to the piece… well, the fact that the entire two hour duration of the private view people were clamouring to look closely at the tree, follow the connections and, in some cases, take souvenir snaps on mobile phones, made it all worthwhile.

In the run up to the show, I joined twitter and carried out an experimental tweeting campaign to make some of the celebrities on the #salivatree aware of their immortalization in a PJF artwork. I haven’t yet entirely given up on trying to get some sort of response out of Mr. Andre himself – but thus far, randomly, I’ve only got re-tweets from Inglorious Basterds actress Diane Kruger, and X-Factor’s Sinitta. Watch this space…

The show runs another three weeks – closing on August 27^th – so pop by if you missed the preview. Details here.

Don’t forget the Saliva Tree souvenir book – also available at my online shop now.

Peter Andre Saliva Tree

2011-07-28T06:39:00.000-07:00

I’m pleased to announce the completion of an updated version of my Peter Andre Saliva Tree print, which will go on display from next week at KK Outlet in Hoxton.

The show runs August 5^th-27^th (9am-6pm Monday – Friday, 12-5pm Saturday) with a private view on Thursday August 4^th 7pm-9pm.

The print connects Peter Andre, via marriages, divorces, affairs and offspring, to a staggering four hundred famous people, including a former US president, the King of Pop, and a host of stars from the golden era of Hollywood. At three metres long, it’s far and away the largest and most challenging illustration I’ve ever attempted. It was my intention to make something that was redolent of obsession bordering on mental illness – hopefully I succeeded.

The first version of this print was made for a display at Nolia’s Gallery back in 2007 – and was headed up by Loose Women’s Carol McGiffin, linked to 100 other famous people in an interlocking tree of marriages and affairs.

That print was featured on Loose Women (click here to view) - you can read a longer account of its genesis here.

It had always been my intention to make a larger, wall-sized tree of connections and I’d been gathering notes in an exercise book over the course of the intervening four years.

Earlier this year I was offered the chance to participate in ‘Telling Tales’. a group show at the arts centre in East Grinstead – which gave me the opportunity (and more importantly the sheer expanse of wall space) to contemplate a new, no-holds barred saliva tree.

First things first, then, why Peter Andre? For a start I figured the tree would have real impact only if I could succeed in connecting a UK celeb to the golden greats like Bogart and Sinatra. I chose Andre because he fitted this bill, and was also a local resident (he’s got a place near East Grinstead, I believe). As with Carol McGiffin, the choice of celeb isn't ironic, I thought I might as well head the piece up with someone who does genuinely seem like a nice bloke.

After the East Grinstead exhibition, I was honoured to be approached by KK Outlet in Hoxton, who offered me the chance to display the tree in a shared exhibition with artist Craig Oldham (whose excellent Hand-written Letters project goes on show the same night). I took this opportunity to update the tree once more, adding another hundred faces to the previous work.

The KK show is also accompanied by a limited edition, hand-finished concertina book – which contains an abridged, 250 person strong fold-out tree. The souvenir book presented its own unique challenges. Originally I’d intended to make a poster set, but it was difficult to resolve. The obvious solution was to make a long, fold out, shrunk down version of the tree. This didn’t turn out to be easy by any means. Printing it on a single sheet of paper (well over a metre long) would have been prohibitively expensive.

At this stage I approached The Entente, aka Brighton designers Anthony Sheret and Edd Harrington, who’d printed my ‘Numbers’ book in 2009 in-house on their risograph machine. They suggested once again that we print the pages at their studio, and get them folded and stuck by professional book-finishers.

A few price quotes later, we realized this was also a prohibitively expensive undertaking. The only solution was to take on the job of assembling the books ourselves.

Anthony and Edd devised a system of three tabs per book, each of which needed to be scored, folded and have double-side tape applied. Only then could the books be assembled (with infinite care, mind you, to ensure the saliva lines matched up across the folds). It was quite a daunting task, not least because double-sided tape obviously can’t be re-positioned when stuck. Still, this was home-grown publishing at its most exciting – the whole edition being admittedly rather an experiment. How many would we mess up? How long would it take us to join over a thousand glue points? It was thrilling but I also lost quite a bit of sleep over it.

I can’t praise Anthony and Edd highly enough for their determination and attention to detail through the whole process – I also have to doff my cap to some friends of mine who volunteered their evenings, and put many hours into the production of the final book; Keeley Smith, Steph Burnley and Hannah Forward. It eventually took five people working flat out about ten hours to complete the edition (or so I thought).

The final hiccup took place the following week when we realized the books, with their unusual glue system, could not be trimmed in a large industrial trimmer. Again, my eternal thanks are due to Anthony and Edd for their diligent patience in doing a small test on 10 books – otherwise the whole edition might have been ruined even at this late stage. It did mean, though, that I was forced to trim each copy of the book top and bottom with a stanley knife – and at last, another seven or eight hours later, the edition was complete. My hands are blistered and my shoulders ache, but we got there in the end.

The book will be officially launched next week at the KK Outlet private view – but it’s already up and ready to order on my website shop here.

'See' Exhibition - Brighton

2011-07-26T00:47:00.000-07:00

Exhibitions are like buses… you wait ages for them and then suddenly two roll up at once! This week I’m pleased to announce my participation in two exhibitions in London and Brighton.

Today let me begin by proudly announcing the second group exhibition by art collective KUTAC, of which I am a member. Our summer show ‘SEE’ opens this Thursday at the Fishing Quarter Gallery, situated in one of the picturesque arches on Brighton’s promenade, close to the Palace Pier.

Opening times and dates; Thursday 28th July - Monday 8th August, 11-5 daily. Private view Friday 29th July 6-9pm. 201 Kings Road Arches, Brighton BN1 1NB

Here’s the lowdown on KUTAC. The group was formed back in 2009 as a forum for creatives from differing disciplines to get together every once in a while, have a cuppa and workshop any ideas/creative problems. Originally this was characterized as being a helping hand for those whose project needed a bit of a shot in the arm/kick up the arse from like-minded souls. The joky initial nickname ‘kick up the arse collective’ stuck, eventually being shortened to the KUTAC acronym.

I felt the benefit of the group right from the word go – I was several months into the development of my ‘Numbers’ book, and just reaching that awkward self-questioning stage where I had started to ask myself ‘will anyone else get this but me?’ The positive vibes and practical advice I received at the meetings gave me the stone cold determination to see the project through.

Last year we organized our first group exhibition, at Brighton Media Centre, as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. Later in the year we also took part in the New England House Open studios. Earlier this year, a few of our members participated in the group exhibition Telling Tales at East Grinstead Arts Centre. This latter show has played a key part in the development of my forthcoming London show (to be announced later this week).

The Fishing Quarter Gallery show will feature the work of Hannah Buckley (fine art), Patrick Fitzsimons (photography), Cloe Gillies (painting/illustration), Ellen Stewart (painting), Kate Stewart (painting) and Wendy Ward (fashion/textiles). This year we are sponsored by Barefoot Wine, so consider yourself invited down to the gallery on Friday evening to raise a glass with us!

South Today, 1994

2011-07-21T04:53:00.001-07:00

In response to my May blog article on Suede, it has been pointed out to me that, thanks to the glorious and slightly terrifying phenomenon of the internet, the 1994 local TV news interview I alluded briefly to in that piece is already up on youtube!

Apparently it kicked around for years on a bootleg Suede VHS compilation called ‘Unscene’ until some kind soul uploaded it. It’s embarrassing, but enough time has passed that I also find it weird and funny too. You can view it here, although my bit doesn’t start til 4mins 45 seconds in.

My memories of it are thus. Thursday was, for sixth formers, sports afternoon. Those school barrel-scrapings like me who were too pathetic or unmotivated to be members of a main sports team were binned to the sports centre in Poole town centre to play badminton, aka ‘mucking about for two hours’.

On this particular Thursday, mid muck-about, a tannoy announcement requested Peter Field to reception. Sensing danger, I ignored this several times. Eventually a class-mate called Simon came on court to inform me that, as one of Richard Oakes’ friends, I was needed back at school to give a brief reaction interview on South Today – or else.

“I’m bloody well not!” came my reaction.

There ensued a full-on row on court, as Simon cajoled and finally bodily dragged me to the changing rooms, assuring me that the head of year (parked just outside) would make my life hell if I didn’t haul my sorry carcass back to school.

A miserable car journey later, myself, Simon and another friend of Richard’s called Russell were lined up, firing squad style, against the wall outside the main entrance of the school.

A BBC South Today cameraman was waiting, and a crowd was gathering behind him. Two dozen fellow sixth formers (many of whom had made my life a misery in the preceding years) were assembling for the gladiatorial fun of watching a classmate endure a completely public, rewindable humiliation on camera.

The smiling cameraman assured me, as I was at great pains to ask, that the taping would consist of a rehearsal take, followed by a ‘real’ interview. This rehearsal thingy would help them get their sound levels right, and help us just get over our nerves and relax into the whole thing. For the rehearsal take, the deputy head demanded silence from the spectating crowd – they acquiesced but descended into a glorious mime show that would have made Marcel Marceau weep. Pointing to their asses, pretending to vomit, miming fellatio - you name it, anything to put us off our stride. I giggled through all my answers and said nothing in particular.

Next thing I knew, the South Today bloke was rolling up his flex and packing up!

“Thanks” he said to us with a grin.

“But what about the proper main take?” we pleaded. “That was a complete piss-take, please let us go again!”

“It’s fine” he beamed, devoid of compassion “we’ve got more than enough!”

I was gobsmacked. And that was that. To this day I think it’s a miracle that they were able to find a usable sentence of reaction amid all my weird nervous teen giggling.

TIME 100 Updates

2011-07-12T01:18:00.000-07:00

For the next few months, I will be contributing regularly to TIME Magazine - offering portraits to update the progress of people featured in their 'TIME 100' souvenir issue.

This is Jeff Kinney, author of 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid'.... More to follow in the coming months.

Financial Times Magazine

2011-07-08T15:09:00.000-07:00

My colour pencil portrait of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange features in today's FT Weekend magazine. The article focuses on Assange's idyllic upbringing on Queensland's Magnetic Island. I was briefed to, in the absence of any reference material, imagine the controversial whistleblower as he might have looked as a youngster...

Underground and About

2011-06-29T05:50:00.001-07:00

When I was little, like most other youngsters I was fascinated with the idea of secret passages, hidden escape routes and the like. There weren’t many subterranean hidey-holes in Dorset, though admittedly a few local whisperings caught my imagination. A smugglers tunnel beneath the floor of the Antelope Inn, it was rumoured, ran down to the quay. A more recent (and surely less truthful) urban myth held that my secondary school, built at the height of Cold War paranoia in the late 60s, contained within its foundations a large nuclear fallout shelter.

Forget Poole though, London is obviously the place for truly fascinating underground tales. As a kid I looked delightedly at the vast tube map and wondered ‘where did they start?’ I mean, literally, where were the first few miles of track laid? Later I learned that the first underground railway in the world was begun on the stretch of Metropolitan line between Farringdon and Paddington. It’s difficult to imagine the endeavour (and urban disruption) this would have caused – back in the 1850s there were no deep-level drills, so ‘cut and cover’ was employed. The whole street would have been cut open, the tunnels dug within and then the surface replaced. You wouldn’t get away with that under Boris Johnson.

When I learned that there were hidden, inaccessible bits of the Underground network, my imagination really started whirring. It’s fascinating to think of long disused railway platforms, caught in stasis underneath the feet of an ever-changing metropolis. Upwards of forty stations have been closed over the years, but several do still exist – for example Down Street on the Piccadilly Line which closed in 1932, still very recognizable from street level, and apparently containing many of its original track level fixtures and fittings below.

Another former station, Aldwych, can be seen frequently in film and music videos - like the Prodigy ‘Firestarter’ video where Keith Flint leaps around inside a tunnel. That’s down in Aldwych, apparently.

Until fairly recently the tube wasn’t the only deep-level railway in London. Til 2003 there was the Post Office railway, which carried diddy narrow gauge trains packed with parcels. It originally had eight stations between Paddington and Whitechapel – and ran for almost 80 years, completely unseen by the average Londoner.

In terms of weird and wonderful stuff below the City, though, that’s only the thin end of the wedge. In the 1930s there was a plan for a New York-style express version of the Northern and Central lines – running below and parallel to the existing lines.

I first noticed evidence of this myself when I was living in Clapham. I was intrigued by a round, concrete building next to the station. This, I soon discovered, was the sealed entrance to a deep level air raid shelter, built during World War II. The government had authorized the digging of tunnels for initial use as air raid shelters. In peacetime the plan was to connect them up to form an express tube. The shelters were only used a few times, and the scheme was quickly dropped – but the tunnels all remain.

One of these tunnels, at Chancery Lane, became part of the Kingsway telephone exchange, a large subterranean reinforced telecommunications centre - designed to withstand a nuclear blast. This employed many staff and, at one stage, was known to house Britain’s deepest licensed bar (at 200 feet). My ex-landlord had a book called ‘War Plan UK’ which showed intriguing photos of the entrance to this deep level stronghold – a completely anonymous door off Kingsway next to a launderette. Very Harry Potter.

Talking about wartime contingencies, the Cabinet War Rooms under Whitehall are obviously an unmissable tourist destination – but only small a section is viewable by the public. Who knows what is contained in the other secret corridors? Apparently they link up to the basement of Selfridges.

Speculation is also rife about what exact form the government’s current nuclear contingencies have taken. The possibility of some pretty lurid urban myths is illustrated by a piece I read many years ago in The Times. As I recall, the article referred to a secret underground shelter in the Wiltshire countryside designed for use by government officials – and hinted that the tunnels even had their own pub called The Rose and Crown. The site, Burlington bunker in Corsham, is now decommissioned – it’s huge and amazing, but I’ve yet to see any photographic evidence of this fabled pub.

As a result, one must perhaps take descriptions of the MOD’s newest emergency command centre with a pinch of salt. We do know that in the 1980s the British government spent untold millions building a large deep-level government facility underneath Whitehall. It’s called PINDAR – and contains accommodation, conference rooms and a television studio. It’s not known whether it connects directly with Downing Street, and ministers have hotly denied that it links directly to the tube or rail network.

The place is intriguing precisely because we don’t know what’s down there. Photographer David Moore was fortunate enough to be granted access in the mid-noughties – but his resulting snaps, heavily censored both in pre and post production by the MOD, are an exercise in rather beautiful, knowing obfuscation. They are really quite mundane and don’t look like they were taken deep, deep underground. Still, they may just be the backdrops we’ll see flickering on our screens when the apocalypse comes.

Pop Perfection

2011-06-14T01:23:00.000-07:00

Two of my pop music themed illustrations feature in the new Spindle magazine. The first accompanies ‘Pop Perfection’, a diatribe against manufactured pop music.

The stars of this piece are; Jedward in the middle / clockwise from the top, The X Factor judges, Peter Andre, Britney, Katy Perry, Ga Ga, Ashlee Simpson, H from Steps, Kerry Katona and Busted.

The article itself showers undiluted contempt on these talent-free floor scrapings although, as friends of mine will know, my attitude towards bubblegum pop can more fairly be described as a gentler form of ‘love/hate’. I like to think a little fondness comes through in my picture. Manufactured pop ain’t necessarily all bad. (Journalist Taylor Parkes, in an article for Jarvis Cockers blog -click here- makes this point more eloquently than I ever could.)

Here is an appropriate moment, perhaps, to shamefacedly confess that I always quite liked Busted.

My second illustration for Spindle, thematically linked of course, sits alongside an interview with current pop clothes-horses ‘The Wanted’.

As well as putting some screaming fans in the illustration, for balance I felt duty bound to add some more sarky details – like a recycling symbol, and an hourglass running out. However I recently heard on Radcliffe and Maconie that fans of The Wanted have been known to issue death threats to those who slag off their beloved idols... oops.

Weltwoche

2011-06-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

Here is my portrait of landscape gardener Enzo Enea, recently published in Swiss news magazine 'Weltwoche'. Nice to have an excuse to get the coloured pencils out again....

Author Portraits

2011-06-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

I recently completed my third job for Time magazine – portraits of three particularly elusive writers. Pictured here is science fiction writer George R. R. Martin, aka 'The American Tolkien’.

Spencer Murphy / Trashscapes

2011-05-23T09:57:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I popped to the National Portrait Gallery for my customary nose round – and was surprised and delighted to see they’ve bought some photographic portraits by my friend Spencer Murphy. Indeed, I was so incredibly excited to see a friend’s work there that I interrupted an elderly couple who were mumbling lovely things about his portrait of Benedict Cumberbatch (above).

“It’s great isn’t it!” I gushed breathlessly, probably looking like a bit of a nutter, “And guess what, my friend did it...!”

It just so happens I’ve been looking for an excuse to re-post an article I wrote about Spencer a few years back for the Association of Photographers journal - this does seem like the ideal occasion.

First, allow me to set the scene a little. It was 2006, and Spencer had been awarded the AOP bursary to pursue his interest in waste sites. He’d become very interested in making ravishing, moody photos depicting dumping grounds of various descriptions - and the bursary gave him the chance to cast his net a little wider. He knew that (as my visual diary will attest) I’ve got my own fascination with finding beauty in unlikely places. He also knew that his first destination, Scotland’s so-called ‘Anthrax Island’ had long been on my list of places-I’d-love-to-visit. He came up with the suggestion that I could come along and provide a bit of company, plus help with some low level assisting (which generally speaking amounted to holding an umbrella or carrying an occasional bag). When we got back, I wrote this little piece about what we got up to...

The Multimap printouts bundled in the glove compartment of Spencer’s car promised a tour of Britain’s most beautiful scenery. Yet the schedule notes scribbled in their margins told a different and parallel story; an often embarrassing catalogue of waste disposal sites and nuclear dumping grounds set at the most conveniently sequestered corners of the UK.

Take our first destination, Gruinard. This tiny yet sheltered island near the coast of Westeross, north Scotland, had been selected by the MOD in 1942 as the site for a number of top secret germ warfare tests. TNT bombs, detonated on the crest of the island, spread anthrax spores over a flock of unfortunate sheep restrained nearby in wooden crates. Scientists carefully observed the symptoms and efficacy of various concentrations of poison on these animals, as they perfected their embryonic biological weapons. The flocks of infected sheep, now a midden of corpses, were burnt to ashes then sealed up in a cave.

The MOD had finished with the island - but Gruinard could not be returned to the people. It was contaminated with invisible and deadly pathogens, destined to lie dormant in the soil for hundreds of years. The island’s fate became the focus of local and national debate. What on earth could be done with it? It remained ring-fenced in miserable barbed wire and forbidding red MOD warning signs, before an eventual clean-up operation of mind-boggling expense was deemed the only solution. Every inch of the island’s topsoil was burnt, then soaked in formaldehyde and bleach.

Although declared safe, the locals still clearly felt a measure of mistrust. When Spencer and I booked into our B&B, the face of our pleasant host turned thunderous at the very name. Gruinard was a blot on the local landscape that clearly embarrassed and pained him in equal measure.

“You’re not actually going out there?” he asked incredulously. Spencer told him we’d chartered a boat for the following day and briefly explained the nature of his project - though it seemed to cut little ice.

“Be sure you take your boots off before you step back across my land”, he said threateningly.

The next morning, we waited in the B&B. The atmosphere was tense and troubling. Spencer was silently worrying through the practical details of today. Undeniably it was a risk. He’d driven the entire length of the UK, to charter a boat at great cost from someone he’d never met before, carrying his irreplaceable equipment out to an island no-one visited – an island until only recently contaminated by an aggressive, fatal disease. We sat in silence watching a replay of the previous night’s Big Brother.

At three PM we parked the car in Dundonnell to meet our ferryman. He was a cheerful red-head in a thick black jumper with a firm handshake, who explained that he was also the local builder, the proprietor of the village coffee shop, owner of the nearest B&B and – should we have call for one during our brief stay – the undertaker.

It was a lovely calm, sunny day as we clambered into the boat. A fresh wind roared through our ears as we powered off. The route from Dundonnell was circuitous, taking us the entire length of Loch Broom before moving into open waters. Finally the engine cut out a short way from the shore of Gruinard, which loomed large and dreadful before us. So there it was. A dark brown island with two long tapering shores and a hill at its centre.

The water was getting rough as we jumped down into a small motorised dingy. We sped to Gruinard’s rocky, forbidding beach, then turned off the engine. Our guide explained it was best to wait for the choppy water to throw the boat naturally onto the shingle.

The waves, to my horror, were big and seemed to be growing. I can’t swim, and feel scared of water deeper than the bath. Out here with no-one to see us, I felt sure that if our boat went over we’d quickly drown. Spencer clutched his camera bag, meanwhile, in a different kind of horror, praying that a wave wouldn’t soak it and ruin his treasured kit. We came close to the beach for a second, as the front of the dingy momentarily dashed the stones… but in a second the tide threw us back even further. After a moment it threw us in again - nearly there, then back out with a woosh, like some aquatic fairground ride. Finally our guide took a chance and vaulted over the front of the boat. He was knee deep but standing safe by some miracle on the shingle of Gruinard with the rope in his hand, tugging with all his might. Spencer leaped over the front of the boat and lent me a hand as I finally emerged somewhat more pathetically, my confidence dented and my trousers soaked.

Here we were, then. Spencer and I watched with some measure of trepidation as the speedboat, complete with our ferryman, disappeared from view. We had five hours completely alone on this island. For a few moments, we enjoyed the sheer thrill and novelty of this situation and stood there cackling like naughty schoolchildren.

After calming down, I took some time to wander off alone and examine the ruins of crofting cottages on the shore, before starting a slow ascent of the island’s steep central hill. The carpet of brown scrub looked deceptively flat and smooth, but underneath it’s surface lay jagged rocks, interspersed with deep sodden bog. Every step threatened a sprained ankle. I finally made it onto the brow of the hill, to be joined moments later by an exhausted Spencer, who emerged from the other side faltering under the weight of his heavy camera apparatus. I greeted him with a smile and we sat down on the rocky ground to eat sandwiches and drink our flask of coffee.

Spencer explained he’d done a circuit of the whole island. Aside from looking careworn and barren, the MOD had been careful to leave no trace of their encroachment upon the history of this place. There were no leftover warning signs, no obvious bomb craters, no sheep graveyards. I toyed with a rabbit skull at my feet, noticing that there were rabbit bones everywhere.

“We’ve probably got anthrax on our hands by now…” I said jokily as I took a hearty mouthful of my sandwich. This was a strangely modern wasteland, unique in Spencer’s itinerary. It was a place that kept its threats well hidden, its horrors locked in the soil amidst beguiling Highland splendour. It was rather easy in any given moment to forget that we were sat on the site of the very first deployment of a biological weapon. This humble rock had therefore played a role in the history of modern warfare, effecting a paradigm shift from firebombs and smoking craters to the subtle microscopic viruses capable of wiping out generations with black necrotic skin ulcers, vascular leakage, and respiratory collapse. I brushed the breadcrumbs off my coat and screwed the cap back on the flask.

Spencer set up, while I sat absently watching him. To his tripod he fixed an old fashioned plate camera complete with a bright red hood to keep out the daylight. He quickly snapped a Polaroid to check the light.

“Far too bright” he said, “and I don’t like that sky.”

I’d already seen Spencer’s techniques at work the previous autumn. We’d been sent together on a magazine assignment to Western Ireland – illustrator and photographer paired up by an eager editor. Despite my initial cynicism, it soon became clear that Spence was, like me, introspective and self-questioning in the face of the complexity of the world and how to represent it. Till I met him, I must say I’d thought a lot about how to represent landscape in my own work and never come up with a good answer. Landscape photography, too, had never done anything for me. Mentally I’d long since dismissed the idea that the enormity of landscape could ever be summed up in a photo. The power of a moment’s experience, involving every sensory organ, could in it’s photographic version surely only be seen by the viewer as a mere slug trace of the original?

One morning on that Ireland trip, however, we’d driven out to the seashore before 5am, in total darkness. I sat drawing a picture of the car dashboard while Spencer hurriedly set up his tripod precariously atop a slipway down to churning, threatening ocean. It was so dark I couldn’t see a single thing outside. Spencer set off long photographic exposures lit only by the tiny first rays of dawn, a daylight so spare we could barely even make it out. That’s when the truth hit me. He wasn’t capturing his firsthand knowledge of the landscape via his camera, he wasn’t validating the experience of his eye by replicating it on a negative.

The camera was experiencing a completely parallel version of the moment with him. The final prints were real/surreal images, their lapping waves reduced to smoky spectres, the scene revealed gradually in a form the eye alone couldn’t realize; lit across long stretches of time by tiny morsels of light. His photographs held their own unique discoveries and delights, and like all the best artworks, heaped an extra layer of feeling onto raw experience.

Spencer tried another Polaroid.

“Not quite there yet” he said, sitting down beside me to wait some more. The old cliché seems to dictate that photographers work best fast and snappy, thriving on bright light, but for Spence the opposite seems true. A single Spencer Murphy photo will often be the end result of hours spent waiting for the brief periods of semi-darkness at either end of the day, often at the most inclement times of year and in the most exposed places.

Thus it was that in this fine tradition we stood stock still on the crest of that island for the remainder of our stay, beginning to feel the bite of the wind turn icy, and watching the unwanted sun gradually descend below the brow of the hill. These were strange, in-between hours. Occasionally Spencer took a light reading or a Polaroid or – even more rarely – an exposure. As the day became silvery and our shadows disappeared we finally heard the sound of a speedboat powering back down Loch Broom, coming to fetch us.

Seascale was a town without motion, a bedridden pensioner. Our hotel was clean and cosy but its chintzy carpets and loud wallpaper belonged to a different era. The clock had stopped here decades before.

“Well… we bought this place in 1980”, the manager explained as we signed the register, “and it was still fairly bustling then, I have to say. People even used to come here on holidays. But of course that all changed in 1983.”

That year, he explained, there’d been a discharge of radioactive material from nearby Sellafield, onto Seascale beach. A Greenpeace investigator had died, and soon there inevitably followed a swathe of tabloid features about “The Village of Death”. Seascale’s already ailing life as a family resort was killed stone dead in that moment.

Sellafield was founded in the 1940s. It was Britain’s first weapons grade plutonium production facility, built in an era when progress was valued far higher than safety. Its early actions were born of the same Cold War thirst for weaponry that had quite happily showered Gruinard island in anthrax. In 1957, a fire in the reactor had spread radioactivity across the surrounding countryside, necessitating a massive cull of livestock at local farms. Worse and more unbelievable – for nearly twenty years the nuclear waste produced by the plant was simply diluted and discharged quietly, day after day, through a pipeline into the Irish Sea.

“You won’t get anywhere near the place” warned the manager when we told him we’d come to take photographs. “They’re on amber alert after the London bombings. You won’t stand a chance.”

Spencer dropped me at the Sellafield visitors centre and drove off to have a look at the nearby nuclear dump at Drigg. We arranged to meet a few hours later.

I wandered into a huge warehouse building, greeted by a friendly lady offering me a range of leaflets. This, she explained, was the only part of the Sellafield complex open to the public. Through the double doors I could learn all about the delights of nuclear energy. I wandered round a lurid interactive display, aimed at demystifying Sellafield for children and parents alike. It was a bizarre maze of audio soundtracks and strange buttons that lit odd displays in vain attempts to deconstruct terrifying terms like “vitrification” – a well-meaning, yet over-zealous and rather intimidating museum. I quickly gave up on it.

In the shop on the second level I bought Spencer a stick of Sellafield rock as a joky souvenir, then paused at the head of the stairs. An enormous window offered a delicious panorama of the entire power station, the first time I’d seen it. It looked like the crazed imagining of some 18^th century paranoiac visionary, a city’s worth of weirdly shaped buildings dominated by vast towers. It was incredible – both beautiful and terrifying. I grabbed my sketchbook and dashed out the front door of the centre, determined to get closer.

Outside there was a car park and a road leading back to Seascale. There was no obvious path in the other direction. I forced my way through a few hedges and came to another road. I followed it for a while and reached a huge, imposing gate. Vehicles and personnel were being searched as they came and went through generously manned barriers. I decided to make a few sketches from the safety of the public footpath outside.

A chap in a suit strolled past and gave me a shifty glance. I knew it had to be a significant look. It was the sort where you don’t even turn your head, you just flick your eyeballs. As he surveyed me, his eyebrows raised a little. I saw his pace quicken and he produced a mobile phone. I sensed threat. My mouth went a little dry, and for a second I considered retreating through the hedge. Almost instantaneously, I heard the scream of sirens. The barrier flipped up and a van marked “Police Dogs” tore up to me, halting almost at my feet. I nearly laughed out loud at this excessive reaction to little old me – a bloke in a rather silly jacket, armed with a clicky pencil.

A bespectacled policeman sidled up to me.

“Good afternoon sir. Can I ask you what you’re doing please?”

Minutes later, I sat in the van, glumly trying to explain about Spencer’s Wasteland series.

“Well… err… I’m with this bloke. He’s not with me right now actually…”

The policeman produced a stop and search form, and asked if I would co-operate by supplying my name and address. It was all over very quickly. He gave me a copy and suggested I head straight back to the Visitor’s Centre.

“You didn’t break the law,” he assured me kindly, “but it’s our job to watch people.”

Spencer picked me up at three. We both agreed that the story of my encounter with the police was a hilarious and exciting new development. Eagerly, we parked back in the town and resolved to approach Sellafield from the other side this time, down Seascale beach. I’ve visited my fair share of dank off-season resorts but Seascale takes the award for most forlorn and godforsaken. Litter decorates the grey shoreline like a shameful carpet. The sand is gritty, punctuated by tufts of scraggy black weed. A single lonely railway line runs parallel to the shore. In the distance rises a vast and ominous citadel of exhaust funnels, industrial buildings and cooling towers.

Spencer and I sat down to eat on the garbage strewn beach. The wind began to howl, blowing sand onto our food as we passed a cold, uncomfortable mealtime. Half-way through, Spence cast his sandwiches aside to start photographing an oil soaked bird corpse.

Continuing along the outer perimeter of Sellafield, we met enormous fences decorated with yellow signs, promising that guard dogs would deal swiftly with interlopers. The railway line split. One track proceeded up the coast, while another went ominously inside the gates. The complex has its own freight station to dispatch waste along the passenger rail network to disposal sites across Great Britain. The Greenpeace website offers a “nuclear rail timetable” to demonstrate the scary frequency and predictability with which this deadly radiation crosses our countryside, unguarded. If breached by terrorists, the freight containers, many of which pass through London only metres away from domestic buildings, would spread radiation for miles and cause mayhem. Spencer and I were about to discover that this most silent section of the Sellafield perimeter was, precisely for this reason, the most jealously guarded.

I wandered off to the far end of the fence. In front of the security gates I found a passenger railway station for employees. I sat down and started to sketch it, in a world of my own. Moments later I heard the sound of a vehicle on the tarmac. I turned my head, in mild annoyance, to see another van marked “Police Dogs”. A young WPC strolled over to me. I closed my notebook.

“Are you a trainspotter, love? What brings you all this way down here?”

I smiled and gave her a quick lowdown on myself and Spencer. I was getting used to this. I showed her my previous “stop and search” form and she examined it closely.

She couldn’t seem to get her head around the idea that someone might want to come and photograph this place for aesthetic reasons alone. Presumably previous trespassers had been journalists or activists with an agenda to push. To her it seemed ridiculous, funny even, that anyone would come to Sellafield without some seditious intent. She smiled and wandered off, but I was left to continue thinking this one through in my own mind. Why was Spencer here? I don’t think that even he could answer that one himself, at least not with a neat soundbite. Obviously there’s an environmental aspect to his Wastelands project. It’s a relevant topic in these times of enhanced sensitivity about our impact on the planet. Yet I think it would be an insult to say that environmental comment alone is what the project “is” – for that would reduce it merely to a collection of documentary evidence. If Spencer had conceived his series with a pre-existing “green” agenda, then the scenes of waste would be presented in a more detached, perfunctory manner surely – not luxuriated in, nor treated so well by his lens. The care and delight with which the pictures are lit and photographed provide their own manifesto, for although they may be places of confusion and uncertainty, to Spencer they are also places of beauty which first and foremost excite his enthusiasm, regardless of their strange and sordid origins.

I began to make my way back down the perimeter. Rounding the corner, I noticed Spencer’s distant figure talking to a man in uniform. To my left, through the grille of the metal fences, I noticed that the WPC in the van was driving alongside and keeping eye contact. Every so often she spoke into her radio. It was reassuring in a way to think we’d raised such concern. Tonight I could rest safe in the knowledge that Sellafield was seriously well guarded.

When I reached Spencer, he was alone again and cheerfully waving his own “stop and search” form. We began to wander back. Before we crossed the railway tracks we allowed ourselves one last look back to the power station. The strange vista of Sellafield overlooked a golfing green, in a ludicrous juxtaposition of recreational space and forbidding industrial architecture. The clouds, no longer fluffy and floating, had formed into solid objects with their own threatening weight and shadow. The natural light was starting to dwindle, the skies were promising rain and here we stood in lone appreciation of the twisted beauty of Sellafield. I smiled inwardly and imagined telling my hairdresser what I’d done on my holidays…

All photos by Spencer Murphy. www.spencermurphy.co.uk

Rock Family Trees... and other stories

2011-05-20T01:48:00.000-07:00

After yesterday’s post, with my mind full of Suede recollections, I thought it was high time I looked out Pete Frame’s Suede-themed ‘Rock Family Tree’. I’m a massive fan of his band line-up trees – appealing as they do to the diagram-geek in me, and no doubt a subconscious influence on my own ‘Saliva Tree’ diagrams. All things considered, then, it’s probably one of my life’s big achievements to actually be featured on one (albeit only riding on the coat tails of a friend with genuine musical talent!). Nothing can detract from the fact that I was once the lead singer of a band only four degrees of separation away from Morrissey...

On Wednesday I blogged about Artmagic, yesterday I blogged about Suede – so today I thought I’d complete the circle in unashamedly self-indulgent and reverse chronological fashion by mentioning my old band TED, aka The Electric Daffodils.

As Richard Oakes’ wikipedia page correctly points out, we in fact started life (embarrassingly for me) as ‘PIPATED’ aka Plug-in Peter and The Electric Daffodils. The origin of this is lost in the sands of time, it was all a big joke. At this stage, aged 13, the entire purpose of the band was to meet round each other’s houses and make stupid noises into microphones. In the year that followed we recorded classics like ‘Uncle Doug’ (screaming into microphones), ’30 Seconds of Noise’ (screaming into microphones), ‘PC Thirty One (a truncated Beatles cover that ended up with us screaming into microphones) and... well, you get the picture.

By 92, we’d dropped the ‘Plug-in Peter’ and decided to get a bit more serious. Richard and I had become obsessed with PiL and The Cure, and started to flex our songwriting muscles. He wrote tunes, I wrote words – so I became the singer by default.

We lived in a strange little world, gently exploring the private fantasy of being in a ‘proper band’ – in my case ignoring the fact that I genuinely possessed not one iota of musical or singing talent. We met round our friend Colin’s house to record what we thought of as our ‘debut album’ – 30 original songs. Lyrically I didn’t confine myself to the usual teen fodder... ‘Pretentious’ could possibly just about cover it. ‘Jupiter and Thetis’ was inspired by an Ingres painting. ‘Last Days’ was about the death of Picasso. One song, ‘The Empty Upper Victorian Modernism’ had lyrics which I improvised on the spot (with the net result that they were shit). All the songs were strictly one-take wonders, usually with Rich being note perfect and me off key and off tempo like a first-round X Factor reject.

To give us our due, though, looking back these bedroom based rehearsals were just sheer fun – a completely safe environment to mess about. It speaks volumes that I was happy to sit in a room and sing my most embarrassing teen poetry to Richard and he never ever laughed. I like to think I also gave him a bit of space to try out some songwriting ideas.

When our ‘debut album’ (entitled ‘Sod It!’) was ‘released’ we recorded several copies and gave them to classmates to listen to. Most people were mildly impressed with Richard’s guitar playing, but less enamoured of my opaque lyrical mumblings. This was best summed up by a class-mate who re-christened our band ‘BOB’ – aka ‘Bunch of Bollocks’

Undeterred, we started work on our difficult second album. I wanted this to be even more serious and introverted – a statement of drab teeny angst called ‘Outside’ with twelve tracks thematically linked. We moved out of Colin’s bedroom and started to rehearse in various church halls in Poole.

Our attempts to rehearse with live drums and bass proved difficult – several school colleagues came and quickly went, but eventually we found a regular drummer – a 13 year old friend of a friend called Phil. I took on the bassist role for want of any alternative.

Around this time we played our first and only gig at the ‘Alf a Crown Bar’ in Poole. Amazingly we still have the entire thing, including the soundcheck, on cassette tape. Our rehearsal of the song ‘Tondo’ is memorably stopped mid flow by an angry man with a strong Dorset accent who storms in to complain about the noise.

The gig was a family party, a context for which our music was crashingly inappropriate. This is best demonstrated by the cover versions we foisted on grannies and kids that evening – ‘Pornography’ by The Cure, and ‘Four Enclosed Walls’ by PiL. The latter garnered nothing, not a single solitary smile or handclap. Needless to say we never got to do our encore.

Undeterred once again, we booked into a local studio to launch our assault on the mainstream record industry – with a taster demo of our ‘Outside’ album.

‘Sally’s Studio’ was a makeshift recording facility run by a young guy called Jason from a house in Poole. Richard, Phil and I rolled up on the big day somewhat unprepared. He wanted to lay down the TED rhythm section first and overdub vocals and guitar later – not realizing that Richard’s guitar was the only trace of glue that held our performances together. We had to hurriedly crouch on the floor and write out song structures – yet still, several takes later, Jason announced there was “little he could do” about my lack of rhythm.

Richard stepped up and delivered four beautiful, first-take guitar overdubs whilst Phil and I turned green with envy.

“Wow, that was really, really good!”, enthused Jason. He was clearly finding the disparity in our abilities difficult to fathom, a feeling no doubt exacerbated when I came to put my wispy, frail, weedy vocal overdubs on the four tracks, ‘Outside’, ‘Parsifal Song’, ‘Doomed Man’s Smile’ and ‘Secant’.

The demo tape was (as you might expect) rejected by all the labels we sent it to – including Suede’s parent label Nude. A year later however, Richard sent the band a copy of the tape as evidence of his own songwriting. I gather they thought it was quite good – although as Suede manager Charlie later said to me “the singing was shit”.

Richard did come close on several occasions to re-using Sod It and Outside era TED bits for Suede songs – although admittedly the only time a TED fragment actually made it to disc was when the melody for ‘Outside’ became the bridge section of the Suede b-side ‘Together’.

One day we’ll unleash our third album. The world had better watch out…

Suede in Brixton... and other stories

2011-05-19T02:15:00.000-07:00

As the new Artmagic EP, featuring my cover design, launches this week, I’ve been rifling through the cuttings archive – and have found the very first mention (inauspicious though it is) of my artwork in the national press.

The date was 1999 and Suede were interviewed in Select magazine. Guitarist Richard, my best friend from school, mentioned in response to a question about art that he liked my stuff. Fairly innocent, right? The following month Q Magazine picked up on the story and used the quote about him ‘only liking pictures by his mate Pete’ as the punch-line for a snidey story.

On the subject of Suede, Richard is having a busy week. Last night (as mentioned in yesterday’s post) he launched Artmagic’s debut EP at the Brixton Windmill. Then tonight, Friday and Saturday he and Suede will be celebrating the imminent release of deluxe editions of their albums by playing a three night residency at Brixton Academy.

Looking at the above 1993 flyer I can see that Saturday's gig will mark exactly 18 years to the day since Richard and I went, purely as adoring fans, to see Suede Mk I play a gig at the Poole Arts Centre on their first UK tour. The first stirrings of what would eventually become depressingly known as ‘Britpop’ were reaching the provinces. Bands rarely came to Poole, so this was our chance to get a firsthand glimpse – our first live gig and we loved it. Metal Mickey became my favourite song, and Richard devoted himself to learning all their guitar licks. Typical teenage fans.

A year later we were saddened to learn that Bernard Butler had quit the group. None of my classmates could see how Suede would possibly keep going. “Not”, my friend Mike memorably quipped, “unless Richard replaced him!” Oh, how we laughed. A few weeks before, Rich had entertained us all during a free period by demonstrating his guitar skills. He was note perfect on every Suede track.

I clearly remember (the odd events of that summer 94 being etched on my memory) that Richard told me he was thinking of sending a demo tape to the Suede fanclub. They’d put out an open call for replacement guitarists and Rich didn’t see why he shouldn’t have a crack.

“You might as well!” was my advice – and I thought little more of it.

During the summer hols, Richard called to announce that he’d received a letter from the Suede fanclub requesting some original material. He popped a copy of our band TED’s demo tape in the post. Next thing I knew he was going up to London for an initial audition.

This alone was weird for me. Think about it. My best friend, latterly my songwriting partner and bandmate, was just nipping up to London to audition for a Mercury prize winning chart-topping band I loved. No-one else knew this but me and his family. I was fit to explode with the news.

Richard was typically nonchalant after audition number one – he came back with a copy of the new unreleased Suede album and told me he’d been asked to learn all the songs. His parents were on holiday in France, he’d stayed back for the audition. He didn’t seem fussed though, he just wanted to drink tea, hang out and watch Magazine videos – I couldn’t fathom his nonchalance.

The following Wednesday he went up to London one more time, and returned with the weirdest news. He’d been offered the job.

I vividly remember a week or so later, sitting on my own on the school bus en route to the first day of the upper sixth form.

“Where’s Rich?” people enquired, knowing that we were rarely seen apart.

“Ermm… Well, he’s quit school to be the lead guitarist of Suede, actually!” I giggled.

“Fucking shut up Pete, stop talking fucking crap!”

I got the ‘fucking crap’ response for about a fortnight, until the news was officially announced by a somewhat non-plussed headmaster in our school assembly. The following day, news crews descended on the school and I was forced to endure the humiliation of being interviewed on BBC South Today. Later that same night Richard made his debut on Top of the Pops, miming to ‘We are the Pigs’.

I got my own chance to meet the band a few weeks later when I went to stay with Richard. During a day-long NME cover shoot, I sloped off for fish and chips with Brett and Matt. I was super-awkward in their presence, but they made pleasant attempts to chat with me.

“We’ve got a launch party next week for the new album”, ventured Brett, “are you coming?”

“Gosh no I couldn’t possibly”, I said, visibly outraged at the prospect, “It’s a school night!”

I turned out to be an occasional, mostly very awkward, spectator on some of the odd goings on that went on in Suede-world over the years. The most memorable scene took place on a different occasion, again when I was in town staying with Richard. Brett summoned him via a repetitive drugged out answering machine message to come over to his flat straight away. We wandered by to find Brett and his mate Alan bouncing off the walls after an all-nighter on various substances. The place was a tip, the curtains were drawn and my eyes watered in clouds of cheap incense smoke. Brett made us sit down and watch a rehearsal video of ‘Beautiful Ones’ (then entitled ‘Dead Leg’). When the tape ended he commanded me to rewind it so we could watch it again.... And again.... And again.

After a good hour or two of this, Brett decided we should retire to his ‘writing room’ (a cupboard, basically) and make a new version of this video. Brett (by now shaking and glistening with sweat) pushed us into the cupboard and foisted a video camera on Alan.

“You’re the director” he barked, “Pete, you’re the lighting guy.” Richard grabbed a guitar and started playing. I stood there trying to look nonchalant. After running through ‘Beautiful Ones’ another dozen or so times, Brett turned on me in genuine rage.

“Fucking hell Pete! You’re a fucking shit lighting guy!”

A year or so later, in summer 96, Suede’s first album with Richard, ‘Coming Up’ was finally released (and, no longer a schoolboy, I finally got to attend an album launch). Most of the tracks were co-written by him, and it went on to be the biggest seller of their career, yielding five top ten hits. It’s easy to forget, I think, what a big risk the other band members took in signing an unknown seventeen year old. So many other great indie bands (The Stone Roses and The Smiths being two obvious examples) could not survive the departure of their guitarist let alone better their previous successes the way Suede did. I’m just saying...

Artmagic - Debut EP Sleeve Design

2011-05-18T02:33:00.001-07:00

I’m absolutely over the moon to announce that my sleeve art and design for ‘I Keep on Walking’, the debut EP by Artmagic, will be launched tonight (May 18th) at a special gig at Brixton Windmill.

Artmagic is a collaboration between Suede lead guitarist Richard Oakes and Sean McGhee, a prolific engineer, producer and writer who has worked with, amongst others, Britney Spears, Alanis Morrissette and Imogen Heap. This pairing of pop and indie might sound unusual, but it’s undoubtedly a match made in heaven. Richard was responsible for co-writing some of the most insanely catchy top ten hooks of the 90s (‘Beautiful Ones’, ‘Trash’ and others) while Sean has long hankered after a more personal outlet for his songwriting themes. The meeting place between their different career backgrounds turns out to be a set of four thematically linked, melancholy yet melodic tunes – offering a taster of the delights promised by their debut album, coming later this year.

The EP is sold in a very limited edition – available on general release from next Monday but ready to pre-order as a physical copy from the Artmagic website here.

Four Great 20th Century British Realist Painters

2011-05-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

Just by way of a bit of fun, I’ve put together a list of four under-rated British realist painters from the last century. They aren’t ranked in any particular order – and, whilst none of them could fairly be described as ‘unknown’, where possible I have gone for less famous options – hence the absence of perennial favourites like Lucian Freud, Stanley Spencer and LS Lowry.

1. Henry Tonks

Tonks was an unusual painter – trained as a surgeon and for some time a practising doctor at the Royal Free in London. He gained a reputation as a painter of rather twee, chocolate-box scenes influenced by Impressionism. As Professor of Fine Art at the Slade he taught and inspired a future generation of great British artists.

His place on my list, though, is based on a remarkable body of drawings he produced during the First World War. During that period he worked for the pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies, recording the facial injuries of soldiers. His pastel sketches document the horrendous results of modern warfare – whilst retaining a lightness of touch and a sense of compassion.

Here’s a clip of Andrew Graham-Dixon introducing the drawings on The Culture Show.

Are they beautiful, and can they be fairly described as art? Yes to both, in my opinion. Though Tonks himself balked at the idea that any spectator would be morbid enough to view these sketches from an aesthetic viewpoint, it’s tough to avoid doing so. Pastel, a soft sketching medium forever associated with polite 18^th century society portraits, and the elegantly posed ballet dancers of Degas, seems a significant choice of tool – almost ironic. The rich pigments in his hands easily lend themselves to rendering the glimmers of light on recent scar tissue, his reds and pinks allowing us to really feel the angry absences of destroyed sections of face. The beauty of his handling of the colours and forms can only serve to make us feel more sickened by what we’re witnessing.

In the 1940s Francis Bacon imagined faces twisting, melting and blowing apart in a nightmare of violence – but twenty years previously Tonks had actually seen it. It was no mere dream to him, he’d stared it in the face.

2. Alan Lowndes

A gear shift from Tonks, no sign of violence in the gentle domestic work of Alan Lowndes – often unfairly dismissed as a ‘naïve artist’. Lowndes was an untrained painter whose career had two distinct phases – an early period from the late 40s through to the 60s observing the comings and goings in his native Stockport (a period of relative success, when he was collected by the Tate Gallery and other major public collections). Then a complete change, when he joined the artistic community at St. Ives in Cornwall.

His work seems at its best to mix painterly expressionism, more akin to European painters like Munch, with a quaint and eccentric viewpoint that is wholly English. Melancholy tolls like a bell through the pictures.

I discovered Lowndes’ work by chance as a young teenager – during a trip to see my great aunt in Bedford we wandered into the local art gallery and got chatting with an extraordinarily posh lady - who turned out to be the curator, Lady Halina Graham. Lady Graham was intrigued by the fervency of my devotion to art – and sent me away with two shopping bags full of old art catalogues she happened to have lying round in her office.

One of these was a 1975 Crane Kalman gallery catalogue for a small Lowndes retrospective. He didn’t immediately hit me as the most sophisticated (or good) painter I’d ever come across, but as time passed that catalogue became one of my favourite possessions (and still is). I found the pictures incredibly human and evocative, transporting me to the street corners of a very recent past, forever lost.

In the early days of my interest in Lowndes (pre-internet) there was absolutely no other information to be found about him, which made it all the more fascinating. What became of him, was he still alive? I travelled to London aged 16 (sad teen that I was) to seek out some answers.

I found that the Crane Kalman gallery still existed and managed to grab a quick chat with Andras Kalman, the ageing owner. He told me that Lowndes had died in 1978. Affected by a stammer that seriously affected his communication, he had succumbed to alcoholism. I wasn’t surprised. I had always sensed the sadness and awkward isolation of a man who’d devoted his life to those strange, clunky observations.

3. David Bomberg

David Bomberg was a great British pioneer whose work didn’t start off particularly figurative. He got on at the ground floor of Modernism – painting in a Cubist idiom just a few years after Picasso and Braque had minted the style. He and his fellow ‘Vorticists’ celebrated the dynamism and promise of the mechanised age – and rebelled against the old conventions of representation. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that Bomberg’s Cubist leanings got him expelled from the Slade by none other than Professor Henry Tonks, the first name on this list.

Bomberg’s famous canvas ‘The Mud Bath’ is a classic of early British Modernism – perennially on display at Tate Britain, and always a favourite in reproduction at the gift shop.

Just a few years later, though, anguished by his experiences in World War I, Bomberg turned his back on those radical machine-age Modernist leanings and retreated to Spain, where he led a rural existence and fell in love with the rocky, arid landscapes of Ronda. In his earlier works, figurative elements had been streamlined and reduced – their colours flattened and separated. Now they came back to the fore, bleeding into one another in a celebration of a far more direct experience of beauty, free from any doctrine. A raw delight and excitement pumped through them like blood.

Upon returning to the UK, Bomberg was bitter to discover that he had been somewhat disregarded as an artist – a large 1950s Tate retrospective on Vorticism displayed only one of his pictures. Unable to get teaching work at any major London art school (he made three hundred unsuccessful applications) he was forced to teach drawing classes at Borough Polytechnic – where his unorthodox approach helped to inspire a new movement of great British figurative artists, including Auerbach and Kossoff.

4. Joan Eardley

Joan Eardley was an English born painter who settled in Scotland. She spent much of her working life in and around the tenements of postwar Glasgow sketching the slum children there.

Eardley was particularly drawn to the Samson family – a haphazard collection of twelve offspring who lived with their parents in a two bedroom tenement, on a street called Rottenrow. Her paintings of the Samson kids are intensely lively (as the children themselves no doubt were) – painted with vigour, leavened with a toughness born from hard experience and never, ever stooping to sentimentality.

The children embody a sense of truth that shows the keeness of Eardley’s observation – for example in her painting of a young boy holding his little sister by the wrist, not the hand – a strong gesture of protectiveness that suggests, perhaps, that he acted as a surrogate parent. Her pastel drawings, too, are a revelation; little maelstroms of beautiful fevered lines, sketched directly onto that most unforgiving of drawing surfaces – sandpaper.

Eardley herself was a tough lady – with short hair, normally dressed in corduroy trousers and a woollen sweater. She never married or had children, and happily acknowledged that she was a difficult character - prone to depression, driven to distraction by severe neck pain, and eventually killed at 42 by a brain tumour. She once wrote that “If you want experience and understanding of beauty then envy me now – but if you want happiness then don’t envy me because these things don’t bring happiness.”

The Wealth Report

2011-05-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a large series of pencil portraits to accompany The Wealth Report 2011 - published by KnightFrank in association with CitiBank. Admittedly I'm not sure I understand the first thing about the report itself - but then again, given that it relates to 'wealth', I can rest assured that I will never have cause to. Drawing the portraits was fun, though.

Management Today

2011-05-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

I have been a monthly contributor to Management Today for an astonishing five and a half years now – which makes them my oldest and most trusted clients.

I started out as regular portrait illustrator of their ‘Start Again’ column at the end of 2004. I’d only just graduated and their offer of a regular gig was a hugely gratifying vote of confidence.

The style has been tweaked over the years – from the early loose pastel sketches to a more recent, smooth acrylic finish. A big change came last year after a redesign of the magazine – the column relaunched as ‘You Live and Learn’ – complete with much larger space for the portraits.

This month marks a triple whammy for me in Management Today. In addition to my regular portrait (this month - former Dragon’s Den investor Simon Woodroffe) I’m featured on their Contributors page, and my pencil portrait of former Pizza Express boss Luke Johnson makes the first of many appearances atop his monthly column.

Time Magazine

2011-04-28T10:40:00.001-07:00

My work has been featured once again in the world's largest news weekly magazine, Time - as principal illustrator for the magazine's prestigious annual 'Time 100' collectors issue.

The centrepiece of my contribution is a half-page 'Rogues Gallery' featuring some of the most infamous and dangerous people on the planet. Clockwise from left; Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader; Kim Jong-un, heir presumptive to North Korea; Saif Gadaffi; Anwar al Awlaki, Al-Qaeda activist and Muqtada al Sadr, Iraqi cleric.

My portraits of a further 25 influential individuals are scattered elsewhere throughout the magazine - ranging from French fascist Marine Le Pen, to film star Matt Damon, via Kate and Wills and soccer star Lionel Messi (pictured above).

Happy Easter

2011-04-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

I was just rifling through my archive - when I discovered this little illustration for NatWest, completed in (I think) late 2006. It predates the flying balloon-powered house in 'Up' by three years! Made me smile...

Despite this weather I think I'll be having a quiet Easter relaxing at home, munching chocolate and watching Doctor Who with the curtains drawn... Have a good one!

The Ugliest Building in Britain

2011-04-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

‘a mildewed lump of elephant droppings’ HRH Prince Charles

Everyone had a strong opinion on Portsmouth’s Tricorn shopping centre. In 1967 the Observer architecture critic Ian Nairn raved that it had been “given an architectural orchestration in reinforced concrete that is the equivalent of Berlioz or the 1812 Overture.” The same year it became the first shopping development to win a Civic Trust Architecture award. Yet in surveys of public opinion since the sixties, it has regularly been named “the ugliest building in Britain.”

The Tricorn scheme was first hatched in the early 60s. Portsmouth had suffered heavily from bombing and, like many other cities, began to make plans to renew and develop its beleaguered centre. In the contemporary schemes for New Towns like Stevenage, Cumbernauld, and Basildon, shops, residential and leisure facilities were designed by a single team of architects and built together around a central public space. Portsmouth opted to design a new mini-centre along these lines. Architect Owen Luder was commissioned to design one building to meet all of Portsmouth’s needs. It would contain a department store, a supermarket, smaller shops, residential flats, a multi-storey car park, restaurants, bars and the re-housed Commercial Road wholesale market.

When it opened, though, the new Tricorn centre cut an odd profile across the city. Locals didn’t know what to make of it. No-one could deny it was a dramatic, eye catching structure. Boat-shaped parking decks were stacked against the skyline. Access for cars came via a huge spiral ramp. The entire centre was open to the elements, the walls completely flat and bereft of any applied decoration. The whole piece was executed in concrete, unpainted and unrendered. The walls bore only the slight textures of the wooden shuttering into which the liquid concrete had been poured.

This style, popular with architects in the sixties, was christened “brutalism”, both in recognition of its uncompromising look, and after the French beton brut (unpainted concrete). Le Corbusier had been the first well-known architect to use concrete in this way, on his “Unite d’Habitation” of 1948-54, a huge housing block in Marseilles commissioned on a tiny postwar budget. The architect decided that instead of trying to disguise the harsh economic realities of the period, he would declare them in the structure itself, by refusing to paint, decorate, or smooth out his raw material. This new style of Brutalism enjoyed a brief but all encompassing worldwide postwar vogue, mainly because it was cheap to do. The Tricorn was no exception. It went from a model to a working building in four years and cost only £200,000. The Council needed a quick solution, and they got it cheap.

The official opening of the Tricorn in 1966 was a disaster. The rain bucketed down, gathering in lakes on the uneven surface of the first floor market, while the Lord Mayor made an apologetic speech.

“It looks horrible from the outside” he acknowledged, “but we are not here for things which look pretty, but which work.”

The centre didn’t work, though. By 1969 many shops had still not been let – and the market traders were complaining.

“You can say what you want about Commercial Road,” said Mr Chamberlain, a trader, “but we were happy there”. Amongst the grievances were inadequate drainage, the lack of shelter from the elements, dangerous approach roads and an absence of toilet facilities. The story was just as bad over in the residential blocks. Victor Hogg left the flats in the early seventies.

“It was lovely when we first moved in,” he admitted. “but in less than a year, the walls were black with mould. Come winter everything got damp.”

Portsmouth’s newer ‘Cascades’ shopping centre, opened only a street away in 1989, cost £100 million, and took the council fifteen years from conception to completion. Heralded as “one of the most complicated planning and development schemes ever undertaken in this country” it won no architectural awards, and no plaudits in the broadsheets. The council had learned it’s lesson though - it was never voted the ugliest building in Britain.

After Cascades opened, there were a few half-hearted attempts to resurrect the failing Tricorn. In 1993 some of the walls were painted white. Soon after, there was a pathetic attempt to “rebrand” the Tricorn with the Cascades logo. Yet in 1995 Rod Vorm, the longest serving trader, admitted defeat and closed his shop. The place was now completely empty, and its fate appeared to be sealed. A demolition date was set.

Perversely, in a sudden and unexpected twist, some local residents chose this moment to stick up for the centre and demand its preservation. The Portsmouth Society, dedicated to protecting the heritage of the area, applied to English Heritage for a grade II listing, forcing the Council to halt all future plans pending the decision. Portsmouth Society secretary Roger James wrote that the Tricorn was a piece of “sculptural architecture” worthy of preservation.

The Society’s move came at a time when English Heritage was in the throes of a deep re-appraisal of postwar architecture. People began to appreciate the need to protect hitherto maligned structures, lest they lose forever these snapshots of a different era. The early 90s saw Denys Lasdun’s brutalist National Theatre, along with a host of other brutal classics from the Barbican centre to the earliest motorway flyovers, receive a Grade I listing. The Tricorn, however, was not to be so lucky. After some months of deliberation, English Heritage decided that the building was “unsuccessful.”

Various further demolition schemes came and went in the late 90s, while the structure continued to rot. The dark, narrow, piss-stinking alleyways engendered a hideous sense of foreboding even during daylight hours. Incidences of suicides in the multi-storey car park were so high that The Samaritans affixed placards on the top level. The whole place was altogether a different world from its sister centre Cascades, only a few metres away. Liberal Democrat MP Mike Hancock summed up emotions when he said “it’s as if there’s a curse on the city from the Tricorn”.

With the rise of the internet, support for the preservation of the space grew stronger, but it was changing. It no longer spoke of “beauty” or “sculptural architecture” but focussed on the Tricorn as a kind of symbol for anti-consumerism. One such group, Proles for Modernism, organized a so-called Freeart Collective Festival there “to make some human marks and noise in a city saturated with little more than commercial signage and naval heritage.” The Tricorn’s purpose in this process, according to the organization, was that it “disrupts the city, ideologically and visually. It does not woo the shopper, rather it breaks the icon that shopping has become.” So the Tricorn, according to this new wave of fans, was “completed” by its emptiness and failure.

Two anonymous Portsmouth writers launched an internet defence of the Tricorn, entitled “Our Brutal Friend”. “Essential to our support”, they wrote, “is that the Tricorn refused to exist as a mute space, a facilitator of an anodyne, seamless shopping experience.” They pointed out that Portsmouth Council had thus far only failed to demolish the hated monolith because they couldn’t stump up the cash to replace it. “The buildings continued existence owes more to the demands of ultra-capitalism than it does to its official heritage value”.

David Ferrone and Martin Fickling, two young film-makers, spent four years documenting the life of the centre. Their film was nominated for an award in Southampton’s Harbour Lights festival. Additionally, the bare walls of the centre offered a vast blank space for graffiti writers in the city. The wall next to the old wholesale market on the first floor became home to a huge multi-coloured mural, sprayed by local people. The spraycan art varied from the funny, scrappy and whimsical to the abstract and beautiful. On the ground floor there grew a separate, bitchy narrative of people and relationships, scrawled in marker pen by bored teenagers.

The story finally reached its conclusion in 2004 when the Tricorn centre was knocked down, despite some last minute fears that the demolition would unleash a horrendous plague of rats and fleas on Portsmouth. Local news played angry scenes of residents arguing with anti-demolition protesters, before applauding and cheering to see the overdue toppling of the “giant pigeon loft” that had blighted their city for nearly forty years.

Photographs by Peter James Field

Conde Nast Traveler - US

2011-04-10T05:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent illustration I completed for CondeNast Traveler's US edition - featuring portraits of three Mexican entrepeneurs (a hotelier, a restaurateur and an ice cream chef) who have all brought their expertise to the streets of New York.

Craigie Aitchison

2011-03-29T15:09:00.001-07:00

My January blog-post about religious art in a secular age got me thinking about my BA dissertation, which explored a similar subject. The tutors assured us we’d get extra brownie points if our writing included primary research, so I made it my goal to try and line up some face to face interviews with modern artists who’d explored religious themes in their work.

After a barrage of letters (probably fifty in total) to artists from Damien Hirst to Andres Serrano, a precious few dropped me a line in personal response.

I was particularly grateful to Sam Taylor-Wood who, although busy with preparations for shows here and in the US, sent me a handwritten note of apology for being unable to talk. Antony Gormley sent me a couple of curmudgeonly, though gratefully received and enlightening pages of longhand prose about the relationship (or lack thereof) between his work and religion.

The net result of my letters, then, was that only two solitary artists actually acceded to my request for a personal interview. The first encounter was a bit of a disaster (my fault entirely). Royal Academician Anthony Green contacted me via his gallery to offer a telephone interview. It was all very short notice, ‘Anthony Green will speak to you tomorrow morning, call him on this number at 10am.’ It was the holidays, and I was nowhere near the college library. I could find precious little about him online. Here was a problem. I’d pursued a carpet bombing tactic trying at all costs to secure an interview with absolutely anyone who’d ever come close to religious subject matter, but now someone had called my bluff and offered me a chat straight away with no time to prepare. And I knew sod all about him.

The extent of my knowledge was this; Green is a figurative painter who makes images using scenes from his own life. An enormous shaped canvas he produced for the millennium, entitled ‘Resurrection’ had toured English cathedrals. Surely I could bluff my way through a phone interview by just asking him to chat about this? The answer was no. Green, obviously an old hand at weeding out the bluffers from the enthusiasts, began the interview with a brief quid pro quo to gauge my cluelessness. ‘How much do you know about my work?’ he pleasantly inquired. I stumbled in my response and he invited me to call him back when I’d done more homework. I scuttled away embarrassed and painfully aware the fault was my own – I’d learnt a vital lesson, and I never called him again.

Of those fifty or so initial letters, I only got a single face to face interview – with 80 year old Royal Academician Craigie Aitchison, a man whose career stretched back to the mid 50s and who was the immediate contemporary of Freud and Bacon.

Luckily this interview was booked more than a month in advance, giving me the chance to learn from the mistakes of my phone interview disaster with Anthony Green. It’s true to say that, unlike my previous artist encounters with Gilbert and George and Carl Andre, my initial contact with Craigie wasn’t exactly fan mail. If I hadn’t known him through his religious themed art it’s safe to say he would probably never have crossed my radar. I borrowed various books and articles from the library and started to read about the man.

Craigie was what might be (perhaps unfairly) termed a ‘naive’ artist – schooled in technique but choosing to simplify his figures into schematic representations – images that critics often dismissed as childlike. Although agnostic himself, the crucifixion had been a recurring subject in his work for fifty years. I didn’t like the pictures at first glance, but as I turned the pages and accustomed myself to his way of looking, they began to move me.

His compositions felt like a tranquil middle space between figurative and abstract – with gorgeous colour combinations dominating the image to such an extent that it sometimes felt the crucifixion subjects were just a figurative (and no doubt symbolic) framework upon which to hang sensual colours hinting at transcendence of the world of the flesh. Interesting to note that, at a time when Francis Bacon’s ‘Three Studies for a Crucifixion’ hinted at the horror and violence of postwar Europe, Craigie’s treatment of similar subject matter contained no anger or violence, only solace and, at times, melancholy.

Showing Craigie’s work to my friends at college, I realized this painter was pure artistic Marmite, even more so than my beloved Lowry. A couple of people delighted in the sweetness of the pictures, whilst many more were plainly outraged by the naivety of his technique.

Reading about his life, I had to confess to being charmed by his life story. The grandson of an unconventional, thrice married Scottish minister, he was encouraged into a career in law and studied at Middle Temple in London – before failing his exams and becoming a painter. He travelled Europe in an old London taxi, where he viewed the medieval and early Renaissance masterpieces that would eventually inspire his career.

Intriguingly, my research also threw up a coincidental connection to my own life. Craigie had links to the area of central Scotland where I was born. My Dad was able to confirm that he’d evidently been honoured in my town by having local streets named after him – my birthplace was flanked by ‘Craigie Court’ and ‘Aitchison Drive’. I felt sure this would be a good ice-breaker at our interview.

On the big day I admit I was nervous about going to his house – Craigie owned several large terriers which he adored. I tend to be quite nervous around dogs, so I hoped they’d be well behaved, and that Craigie wouldn’t be offended by my reluctance to befriend them.

I strolled down a charming secluded street in Kennington and, at the appointed hour, knocked on the door of a lovely Victorian house. The sound of rushing paws and frantic doggy barking greeted my ears, followed by the sound of an old man fiddling with the door catch and berating his pets individually by name for making so much noise.

‘Now really…. shhh Sunday! Sunday, stop your barking please!’

The door flew back to reveal an old man with a prodigious mop of unkempt white hair, wearing a friendly if somewhat guarded smile. He ushered me into his drawing room, which I half-recognised from many descriptions in articles on Craigie. The artist had purchased the Kennington house with his mother about thirty-five years before, and had made it his own private museum. The room resembled a Victorian bric-a-brac shop, with little statues and trinkets engulfing every inch of space. The curtains were shut and, as I recall it, the walls were painted a dark shade – giving the space a warming, womb-like feeling, emphasized by the low atmospheric lamp-light.

It would be wrong to describe this eccentric room as ‘disordered’ or ‘cluttered’, or to give the impression that Craigie was just a man who could no longer bear to throw stuff away. Not a bit of it. The house was well cared for – very clean and tastefully decorated. The myriad objects were consciously displayed around the room with infinite care. Everything here had its place.

Craigie introduced me to his dogs, big excitable white creatures which looked more like sheep. They were, he explained, Bedlington terriers – prized for not shedding their hair all over the place. ‘Look at their coats, it’s like wool!’ he enthused.

I warned him that I was nervous around dogs, and that I had an irrational fear of being bitten.

‘Oh dear’ he said, sitting down in an armchair, ‘that’s quite a shame’. His brow was furrowed in concern and deep empathy – by no means the defensive reaction I’d feared. ‘Would a little drink help you to relax before we chat, then?’ he inquired with a sprightly look in his eye. I assented, and he gestured towards a crystal decanter on a small table in the corner.

‘Help yourself to a whisky - a large one, mind. And pour me one while you’re there.’

Settling down with our drinks, I produced my list of questions.

The interview was a success, with Craigie offering some insights into his religious pictures. His discourse was disarmingly down to earth (which I loved) and mainly took the form of anecdotes. He didn’t know why he was so interested in religious subject matter, and didn’t feel any need to scramble around in his mind for reasons. He just painted what he liked. He ventured to suggest that his initial interest in the subject was a reaction against snobbery, namely a specific piece of criticism he received from a tutor at the Slade in the early 50s who in response to his copy of a Georges Rouault Crucifixion, had declared “This is far too serious a subject for you!” Craigie answered this rebuke by stubbornly making it his core subject matter.

We discussed the difficulty of contemporary artists making work for religious space, and chatted about the artist’s own commission for Truro catherdral. He told the story of a verger who had been strongly opposed to the scheme, but who had contacted him years later to admit that, after daily contact with the canvasses, he had grown to love them.

When the interview ended, Craigie encouraged me to stay a while longer and chat off-topic at my leisure. He refilled my whisky glass several times and we sat there talking for several hours. His housekeeper, a stout middle-aged Londoner with a 40-a-day voice joined us and shared some gossip about the neighbourhood.

Craigie was extremely interested to hear about my studies – he had a nephew at the same university, and was intrigued to hear how art and illustration were currently being taught. I fished a volume of my visual diary out of my bag, and he spent thirty or forty minutes looking carefully through it, reading the captions, laughing and asking me questions about the characters. He seemed especially interested in the life studies of my parents watching the telly.

“You must keep doing this” he said eagerly as he handed the book back, “I’ve really enjoyed looking at them.” I was delighted with this seal of approval, particularly because it seemed so utterly sincere and heartfelt.

Meanwhile, the dogs were melting my heart too. They were gently determined to get my attention. At a certain point, deep in conversation with Craigie, one of the dogs lifted her paw and literally began to tap me on the leg to distract me – just as a human being might do.

I noticed Craigie was wearing a colourful tie printed with his own painting of a dog.

“Oh that’s Wayney” he explained, “Wayney died a long time ago.” He proceeded to explain, at rather confusing length, the entire genealogy of his pets – his current dogs, as I recall it, were all descendants of Wayney.

Several refills of my glass later, and I was feeling rather drunk. I took my leave and thanked Craigie for his kindness before stumbling out into the early evening with a spinning head.

After the interview I used particularly glowing terms to describe Craigie to my friends. I had ‘fallen in love’ with him and he was the ‘nicest man I had ever met’. Years later I can still honestly say that I have rarely ever had the fortune to meet anyone else so kind or down to earth.

We did exchange a couple of letters afterwards, and I’d hoped to get the chance to pop round and say hello again but – as is so often the way with these things – it got delayed and delayed and finally forgotten. I was sad, therefore, to discover in late 2009 that Craigie had died at the age of 83. I hope those dogs found a loving home…

Website Update

2011-03-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

I’ve done a spring-clean on my website, www.peterjamesfield.co.uk. The main portfolio section has been expanded to showcase a selection of old and new work across eight galleries. I’ve also updated my friends page with loads of lovely links to the sites of other creatives. Take a look and pass it on…

Pale Fire

2011-03-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

My artwork features on the new Penguin Modern Classics edition of the Vladimir Nabokov novel Pale Fire, part of a comprehensive reissue of the author’s entire catalogue in English, designed by Pentagram and featuring the work of many leading illustrators, including David Foldvari, Michael Gillette and Marion Deuchars.

Each cover incorporates a conventional, classic unifying design – offset by illustrated elements that add a touch of playfulness and humanity.

My novel is classed as an experimental late work by Nabokov – and aside from Lolita it is probably his most celebrated book. It is indeed a very unconventional and challenging novel, containing little in the way of a traditional narrative structure. The opening section of the book is a puzzlingly opaque 999 line poem called ‘Pale Fire’. The main prose body of the book consists of the numbered footnotes which annotate the individual lines of the poem.

We learn that the poem was written by John Shade, a celebrated poet who was shot dead just before he completed this, his final work. (He never had the chance to complete the thousandth line) As we read through the annotations, a curious tale starts to emerge. The editor identifies himself as Shade’s neighbour, Charles Kinbote, who believes that he has directly influenced the poem’s content through his friendship. Kinbote, we learn, believes himself to be the deposed King Charles of Zembla, a European country whose monarchy fell in a Soviet-backed revolution.

Can this be true? The notes bear little relation to the poem and the suspicion grows that Kinbote is a fraud, and not what he claims to be.

Despite scattered clues that hint at possible explanations, Nabokov leaves no direct answers to the questions he raises in his literary puzzle.

On a rather less highbrow note, ‘Pale Fire’ is the book Ken Barlow was seen reading on Coronation Street about a year back. (Til my dying day I will rue the fact it was the old edition…)

Mad about the Boy

2011-03-17T07:54:00.000-07:00

My portrait of 80s legend Boy George features in the latest issue of Brighton’s brightest and best fashion/lifestyle/music magazine Spindle. The commission called for a pouting version of the redoubtable Mr O’Dowd to accompany the text of a phone interview which went awry only a few seconds in - George took umbrage at the questions and hung up.

View the magazine online here.

Mini News Update

2011-03-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

I’m pleased to report that my column portraits will be a fixture (for a year or so) in Pro Cycling magazine’s regular Rider Diaries.

Meanwhile my ‘Telling Tales’ group exhibition continues at East Grinstead’s Chequer Mead Arts Centre until this Tuesday. The Peter Andre Saliva Tree (with even more faces added) will be coming to a gallery space on Brighton seafront later in the summer… to be announced very soon.

New Saliva Tree

2011-03-04T02:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I finally finished work on the largest illustration I’ve ever undertaken. It’s a completely new and updated ‘Saliva Tree’ featuring three hundred small portraits spread out across three metres of miniscule detail. Tomorrow it goes on display for the first time at East Grinstead’s Chequer Mead Arts Centre, as part of the group exhibition ‘Telling Tales’.

This time round the ‘Saliva Tree’ takes as its starting point the singer and reality star Peter Andre. Beginning with his twin connections to Katie Price aka Jordan, and Mel B aka Scary Spice, you can follow the lines of saliva through various marriages, divorces and affairs – and see in diagram form how Peter connects to a former US president, to the great and the good of classic Hollywood, to French New Wave movie stars… and of course to Kathy off Emmerdale.

‘Why Peter Andre?’, I hear you ask. Well, as with Carol McGiffin – the subject of my previous Saliva Tree – I knew the piece would only have impact if I could succeed in connecting a UK star with a wealth of Hollywood greats. This time round I wanted to pick a bloke. And significantly, given the fact that Andre lives close to East Grinstead, where the work will be initially hung, I thought I could take advantage of a local connection.

The sheer time and effort involved in this piece of work is the main reason why both my text and sketch-blogs have been severely malnourished since Christmas (and why I haven’t had a weekend off or a social life of any desciption in that entire period). Allow me to explain just a little… The process of making each portrait starts by finding a reference pic for each celebrity – easier said than done. Sometimes it can be quite tough to find a photo in good light that actually looks like the subject.

In one of my many rather odd PJF superstitions, I always re-size the face to the dimensions of a quarter page reference pic of serial killer Dennis Nilsen which I keep on my desktop. This was the first portrait I produced for my ‘Numbers’ book in early 2009, and it’s a pretty perfect mugshot view of an ordinary face. I know if I keep these rough proportions all the celebrities will fall into size harmony.

I draw a large version of each face, in a combination of light-box tracing and eyeballing. Then I shrink each portrait by about 50% and retrace it on the light box. This is a kind of ‘distillation’ process that allows me to reduce the face down to its necessary line essentials. (This necessitated drawing 300 portraits twice over… that’s already a basic 600 drawings.)

Some faces were tough nuts to crack – Jason Donovan took me about six goes. Edward Norton took me four or five.

Probably more taxing than the donkey-work of portraiture were the twin challenges of research and layout. For research I couldn’t and wouldn’t just rely on the likes of wikipedia. I consulted quite a few celebrity biographies in the library and paid close attention to fan-sites. Some of the romantic connections at first seemed too outlandish to believe. Did Brad Pitt seriously date 80s pop singer (and X-Factor helper) Sinitta? Apparently so - the photographic proof is out there. Did George Clooney really spend years dating Lisa, the Capital FM breakfast DJ? There’s loads of evidence out there - it’s pretty much beyond doubt. The challenge wasn’t how to find out about enough potential connections, the real challenge was to exercise some restraint and editing skills to make sure the tree was in some sense (don’t laugh) scholarly and truthful. If I’d believed internet rumours I could easily have connected Liam Neeson to Brooke Shields to Dodi al Fayed – and from him to the British Royal Family, which could have led me to a royal line of saliva stretching all the way back to William the Conqueror.

Laying the faces out fairly evenly across the available space was another very taxing challenge. Certain celebrities form ‘hubs.’ From their faces sprout a multitude of connections. Warren Beatty is an example - this bloke makes Russell Brand look like Susan flipping Boyle. If you believe half of what the gossip pages tell you, he has managed to cross-generationally shag half of Hollywood, from Madonna to Joan Collins, via dozens besides. Finding adequate room to fit his connections on a page without the whole thing becoming an unreadable mess of criss-crossing lines was indeed a challenge.

Originally I tried to plan the tree out in analogue fashion, by sticking five A1 sheets on the wall of my flat. Every night after work I’d try to spend an hour shifting faces around, chess-match-style, on the life-size maquette. The portraits weren’t ready, so ‘stand-in’ portraits had to suffice. For these I used one sketch of the Queen Mother, printed 300 times and captioned with the relevant celeb names. It didn’t seem insane until the day the plumber called round to discover me with a lounge wall festooned with miniature Queen Mother portraits. I’m surprised the men in white coats didn’t come to take me away.

I quickly gave up on the analogue route, to explore a no-less nutty way of planning it out – a humungous digital file, with 300 lo-res portraits, each face on a separate named photoshop layer. This was time consuming to create, but necessary because each face had to be readily moveable – every time you moved a face on the chart, all the attendant connections had to move as well. Would it surprise you to learn that I shed real tears over these preparatory versions?

I finally dropped the files off to the printers yesterday, and I’m intensely relieved to have finished the task. Our show runs at Chequer Mead Arts Centre in East Grinstead until March 15th- private view on Saturday 5th March, 1.30 to 7.30.

My 1 minute 14 seconds on Loose Women

2011-03-01T02:00:00.001-08:00

On the eve of unveiling my new ‘Saliva Tree’, I thought I’d take a moment to re-post a video clip of version 1, showing it featured on ITV’s Loose Women in 2007, sandwiched between an interview with Patsy Palmer and a discussion about flatulence.

The original ‘Carol McGiffin Saliva Tree’ was created for a group exhibition at Nolias gallery in south London, featuring fellow illustrators Natsko Seki, Mr. Bingo, Emily Forgot, Ruth Bartlett and Alice Stevenson.

The show was curated by Guardian art director Gina Cross, at whose behest we decided to choose a theme around which to produce work. At a rather haphazard brainstorm meeting in Charing Cross, Alice suggested we use a Lewis Carroll quote - ‘Sometimes I’ve Believed Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast.’ Over time this got shortened to ‘The Six Exhibition’ (well, there were six of us).

It wasn’t a gigantic earth-shattering leap for me to start thinking about the old ‘six degrees of separation’ theory. Quickly I started work a series of A4 ‘six degrees’ pencil sketches.

The challenge was to see how quickly you could go from a reality TV person to an unexpectedly impressive end result. My original victims were, in no particular order, Rebecca Loos, Faria Alam, Jade Goody and Jodie Marsh. Faria Alam was my favourite. She’d appeared on Big Brother with MP George Galloway. Galloway had visited Iraq and met Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Aziz, a Catholic, had been treated to an audience with the Pope. The Pope had also met with the Dalai Lama on many occasions. The Dalai Lama is believed to be the living incarnation of Avalokitesvara, Bodhisattva of compassion. So there you go… six degrees separate a Buddhist deity from a woman whose fame rests upon nowt more than dropping her drawers for a football manager.

I also needed a larger piece for the wall, so I started work on a big ‘relationship tree’, connecting celebrities via their various marriages and dalliances. The original idea came from my friend Sarah, who’d once told me that at her school she and her mates would scribble little ‘saliva tree’ diagrams connecting themselves to one another via the boys they’d snogged. This made me smile and I decided to have a try making one.

The A1 poster-sized piece would only, I knew, have any impact if you could follow the path from a UK TV celebrity down to the golden greats of Hollywood. I decided to top the chart with Chris Evans’ ex-wife Carol McGiffin for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the very fact she was on my radar seemed to say something about my life as a freelance artist working from home. Munching Super Noodles and watching Loose Women on my lunch break seemed a statement of my own isolation at that particular moment. Only a certain demographic can ever be lucky enough (would ‘luck’ be the word?) to experience the pain and pleasure that is Loose Women.

Secondly, I wanted to top the chart off with someone I genuinely like. I wouldn’t mind sharing a pint or two with Carol, and I didn’t think she’d mind me putting her atop my artwork. There was nothing snide or ironic going on.

My fellow exhibitor Mr. Bingo suggested I send a copy of the finished tree into Loose Women. I eventually sent the image to Carol, care of the show, with a rather apologetic letter urging her not to be freaked out. (Let’s be realistic – I’d placed her at the head of a 100 person fuck-tree – the potential for offence was difficult to deny)

One morning I received a call from an ITV producer to tell me that my work was scheduled to feature on the show that day. It was an average work day, I had a magazine deadline later that afternoon. Fantasy car-crashed with reality in the most odd fashion. After spending a couple of years watching Loose Women every day, today they were going to discuss me while I ate my regulation Super Noodles.

I panicked (for me, you understand, an unsurprising response to any given scenario). Would they mock me publicly, would they cackle at my folly and tear up my artwork in front of the nation, before publicly shitting on the shreds?

The result, as you can see from the clip, is one minute of rather awkward segue between two items – spotlighting in particular Denise Welch’s lack of acumen in art criticism. 7 likes and 2 dislikes on youtube. Woohoo.