I have always stated that I rate the artist before the artpiece. That the personality behind the work has huge influence on my eventual judgement of the final product. However all of this went out the window with The Cloud Commission. For some time now I have admired his work from a distance and known only the artpiece. The bold workings of a person I know absolutely nothing about. Therefore I take great pleasure in sharing the outcome of a long overdue meet last week. I’m glad to say that meeting the person behind the piece has reinforced my connection with his work. My first Clouds piece is at the framers and its sure to be the first of many. Full Interview after the jump…
Firstly, how would you describe your artform? I had a go: clever-creative-clean-cut-sureal-original-pasteup-wallwork-ism! what do you think…
I’ll take with ‘clever’ for starters! Ultimately it’s drawing on walls, plain and simple. The cannon of ‘street art’ is massive these days, people getting up in many new and innovative ways… keeping graf alive and well, stenciling, graphics, stickers, building sheds on the vertical sides of cliff. Its all swell, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think in these new fan-dangled terms. I draw… would feel a bit shan keeping it to myself in sketchbooks. I don’t aspire to work the gallery circuit. I don’t want to create greetings cards and don’t get me started on the advertising industry. The only acceptable thing for it is to end up on walls… either pasting up large to share with as many as possible or drawing at parties to avoid talking to people.
Who did you gather the most influence from in your developing early days? Who did you roll with as a young street artist?
In the early early days, I guess it was less of ‘who’ and more of ‘what’. I grew up in an archetypal british seaside resort that had seen better days. Hand-painted signs and wooden roller-coasters dominated my visual environment, it was completely all encompassing and I was completely unaware of its impact on me. As part of that picture, my grandfather had an old ice cream and donut shop on the seafront which hadn’t been decorated since 1955 or something daft and I was surrounded by American soda pop graphics and ‘Nice cold, ice cold milk’ campaign posters all summer long. The graphics were mind-blowing and it all etched itself pretty deep into my psyche and I’m still trying to sift through it.
As for the street art thing… I went to study in Hull and was pretty much working in a bubble for a couple of years, building and altering signs and advertising billboards… pretty much doing the whole ‘art activist’ schtick. It wasn’t called ‘Street Art’ back then and was generally more of a political movement as opposed to creative. The big shift was the graf writer ‘Dher’ who linked me into the scene in Hull 2001 and I started painting graf. He pretty much hooked me up with all the paint I could use and took me under his wing. At the time, I was a timid kid and it was the only way I was going to be part of something social. It was a big turning point for me as I was being switched onto ‘Graphotism’ friendly illustrators like Will Barras, China Mike, Mr Jago, Matt Sewell and painting at festivals with the likes of INSA, Astek, Mr Zee, Pryme and Pinky.
I love the way that every one of your pieces tells a story, and that it is up to the beholder to determine the outcome of that story, and therefore your work reaches people on different levels in different ways! Was this always your intention?
I guess so. Its about layering up the narrative in simple visual details. For example, a starting point could be ‘I’ll draw a character that looks like he could/would be a twitcher’. This may be embodied by a David Bellamy type with big beardy and sandals, pair of ‘nocks and maybe a rucksack for the packed lunch. Its all going to plan so i’ll throw in a few tattoo’s or an anarchy symbol carved into the forehead and it creates its own story. It becomes something different and begins to create a suggestion of its own history. People like to decipher the back story.
I love stumbling across your paste ups – are they screen print ? Original drawings and paint or combination’s?
Me too!!… am often surprised to them still up! They’re all pretty much hand drawn. I’ve tried to do reproduction stuff for the streets before, printed stickers, photocopied paste ups… it just doesn’t sit well with me, I don’t believe in them. I can’t use the same sketch twice either, its a bloody curse as it takes me an age to perfect a sketch.
The paste ups you’re likely to see or have seen will all be hand drawn pen and ink only, even the 10ft’ers! Its a beautiful process and I can find joy in every part of it, be it discovering a new brand of pen, a special waterproof ink that doesn’t burn through paper, finding a load of dead-stock plotter paper or hunting spots!.. I’m all about the knowledge
Do you have a wall piece you are exceptionally pleased with? Why?
I do, but not for the obvious reasons. Anyone who gets up to this kind of work will appreciate that it is often not the piece that sticks in the mind, but the adventure to get it done. There’s a piece in the Ouseburn Valley, Newcastle for example thats been up for an age now (in paste terms) and that was a loooong evening! The short version is pasting at midnight with about 5 others in tow, getting spotted by the law and it all becoming a bit ‘cat and mouse’ for the next 4 hours. Didn’t get caught of course and still without an arrest to my name. Exceptionally pleased about that! Been close mind.
What does your rucksack contain on writing/paste up missions? Favourite tool of the trade?
All sorts! I’m like a travelling salesman when I’m out and about. Extending poles, adjustable angle brushes, extending ladders, tupperware cereal boxes filled with homebrew paste, spare paste in 2 litre pop bottles. I get all inspector gadget when the mood takes!
The number one tool is your camera folks. Always. So much of my early stuff I didn’t photograph or left to friends to shoot, never to see the resulting flicks. I used to be knocking out 5/6 original character stickers a day and I’m lucky if I’ve got 5/6 flicks of them, total! Again, camera for spot hunting. How many sweet spots I see when I’m rushing to pay bills and promptly forget about or a ripe scaffold I see go up that I can never recall when I needed to. Its all about the camera.
How far has your creative style progressed since the early Cloud days? Can you envisage the next step?
Its come so far and stayed the same all at once. I still start a character by drawing a circle for the head… every time! It all started when someone asked me to do a comic. At the time, I was doing the sign altering and/or big blockbuster letters that were frankly awful… I couldn’t do characters at all! I was pretty gutted at having to knock back an opportunity, so I set myself a project to design 50 characters and get them up. By the time I hit the 30′s I was gaining some notoriety and I never got the chance to stop. (Note: The question has prompted me to dig out the flicks of this project… and the USB stick they were all housed on has gone awol! Add decent size external hard drive to that favorite tools of the trade!).
Where next? Thankfully, there’s always something on the go, things have gotten to the point where people come to me before I need to find something else to do. At the moment, I’m learning how to use a laser cutter for the Newcastle’s forthcoming ‘Design Event 2009′ having been asked to collaborate on some jewellery designs with local design hero, Dan Civico. Beyond that, who knows! At the moment, I’m getting excited about commissioned/colab projects that coax you into learning a new process, drawing something you wouldn’t usually draw… doing anything that you wouldn’t do if left to your own devises. Its the fastest way to grow.
Hows the new studio – creativity flowing?
Getting a studio is the way forward. I was doing the whole home studio thing for a while and there’s only so much focus and flow you can get when the dishes start piling up, the washing wants doing, the bills blah blah blah. Now, instead of 6ft walls, moving sofas and shelving every time I want to work the pens… I’ve now got a scaffold rig, no distracting chores and a 10ft sq white wall left purposefully blank in order to coax me to work on it every spare moment I have.
Absolute pleasure man!
