Across The Tracks and Through The Looking Glass

I was born in 1970 and am currently based in Shoreditch, East London. I have drawn and painted with passion all my life and am entirely self taught, so my styles were unwittingly wrought in the forge of consecutive countercultures that have revolutionised our cultural identity during the last four decades.These ideas, attitudes and energy proliferated and mutated throughout society enabling evolution of thought and expression.

My experiences within these cultures and resulting inner journey resonates into my work enabling ongoing conditions for leaps of intuitive insight.

Certain things was involved in or influenced by were illegal- disclaimer.

My earliest memory is of rubbing my eyes to see the coloured patterns I could generate, Bosch and Breughel prints adorned my walls and  books on the arts were within easy reach. I loved history, comic books, and Alan Aldridge books and lived in a home where Dylan was the soundtrack, lentils cooked and joss sticks burned.

I was fascinated by microscopes and kaleidoscopes and gazed intently at the ‘invisible’ worlds they showed me. When daydreaming I could project similar landscapes which would animate before my eyes, these persisted until I was five or six.

At the anarchic and medieval folk festival Barsham Fayre in the mid seventies I first saw the possibility of alternative lifestyles which instantly felt ‘right’ to me. By the late seventies the first wave of punk rock filtered down to me and my schoolmates in news bulletins, tabloid screamers and rumours from older kids. It was as if aliens had landed and while the music was essentially banned from radio and TV this just added to the excitement. Their very presence in society offered an alternative philosophy and role model that we instantly understood.

I bought my first record in around 1979, soon my bedroom wall became a collage  of press cuttings and record covers mixed with my own drawings often using ripped and torn  imagery and ransom note letters. My favourite artists were Jamie Reid and by 1980 Gee Vaucher who made the artwork for Crass. Her work drew me toward their message of self governance which appealed to my youthful optimism and reinforced my objection to authority.

Thus inspired I began tentatively painting my first wonky slogans, dripping logos and home-made Crass stencils onto the streets in around 1982.

I saw Style Wars in 1984, it was the first film to document the New York Subway graffiti art movement. My aims and aspirations transformed overnight and after a while practising on local walls I progressed to the London Underground in late 1986 when UK hip-hop culture was in its heyday.

Much of this time was spent in and around the Underground network and streets in our constant hunt for paint and recognition. Our movement took a unique London twist on the New York phenomenon and made it our own rolling gallery on the oldest underground railway in the world. I played a small part compared to the members of  Intercrime, Kold Krush Dukes, We Roc Hard, World Domination and Yardies who were the ‘King’ crews of the London  Underground and wider city and held in awe by us younger and less experienced writers, but I was there and ‘up’ on the trains the only place it really mattered.

These early days of  primitive train pieces were I know now the start of a lifelong career path  that has led me in many directions

The acid house music and party scene arrived in London in 1988 and opened infinite possibilities for new direction, painting party banners had pretty much replaced trains by mid 1989, my graffiti now mutating into something different, a backdrop to an ancient hallucinogenic rite so powerful it felt like it was rewriting our very DNA.

I felt I was accessing an ancestral storehouse of shapes, images and symbols that held deep and powerful meaning and these began to creep into my work.

Curious to see elements of my ‘new style’  in very old books I began to study the symbolism, primitive and sacred art of many cultures also art movements particularly Surrealism, and Cubism  discovered that I was often exploring similar themes.

I was astonished that the same species of biomorphic and geometric forms kept appearing through my life. I noticed them in the coloured patterns  I saw as an infant, in microscopes,  kaleidoscopes, on hippy caravans and event posters, in ‘sacred’ architecture, in nature viewed close up or from afar. Also in graffiti art lettering, laser show effects, surrealist and cubist painting, in descriptions of visions in sacred texts,and in primitive art and computer generated fractals.

This seemed too significant to be meaningless and was I felt, a manifestation of some higher order. I decided to teach myself to paint classically with brushes so I could attempt to give life to my new ideas.

I read books on the lives, techniques and works of great masters throughout history, visiting galleries to study works in the flesh. I read every book I could get my hands on about art materials, theory and technique and began testing out everything I could find the materials and space for. This ongoing experimentation continues to this day, the fluid dynamics of graffiti and its’ transcendental mutations remains a consistent  underpinning.

Throughout the nineties and into the new millennium I joined with the protest movement and London’s sound system community on parties and demos working on logos, banners and visuals and lighting for organisations and squatter sound rigs including Access All Areas, Family Groove, Hydrophonix and Malfaiteurs to name but a few…

I held my first exhibition at Brick Lane Gallery in November 2008 and I find myself entering a new phase in my output, of which this blog will be one element.

While writing here freely I will avoid making statements about my painting that tell the viewer what to make of it, because there is little, if any, discovery or insight there. I claim no unique understanding of any meaning in much of my work except regarding its’ creation and method. I often gain insight regarding any meaning only through the observations of others.

I hope to enable some insight into my creative process to anyone who is interested, including myself, also to shine a little light into my sources of inspiration. This space will undoubtedly take on it’s own character as events unravel, allegiances are made and ideas come to fruition so I wont say too much more, only that I hope you find any time here well spent.

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