The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees, I want money… that’s what I want
I decided to take a break from my on going studio practice, the reason for this derives from a conversation I overheard in the sculpture studio a couple of weeks ago, a level five student was talking to a tutor about how he felt his work needed a more commercial look if he was going to make it appealing for public selling. The tutor’s reaction was to tell the student that for this to happen he would have to change his whole approach to his work and basically only produce work that sells, therefore turning himself into a cheap representation of an artist whose art could quite happily sit amongst the shelves of The Range or Dunhelm Mill, waiting for the next uncultured swine to come along and purchase an item to fill their magnolia painted walls.
So for the next two weeks over the Easter break the student spent his time in the workshop making frames for all his work, often spending more times on creating these frames than what the actual art work took to create.
(I realise at this point that I am yet to go in to real depth about my work, but look at these blog entries as a Magical Mystery Tour if you will, or a Forrest Gump box of chocolates, you just have no idea what you’re gonna get, what I have been working on will follow).
I have always been a great lover of street art, whatever your views on it you have to admit it has no constraints or limits, only the limit of the artists imagination, a particular favourite of mine is D*face. Based in London at the Stolen Space Gallery, he has become a world renowned street artist and his work has become very collectable, reaching very high sums of money. I remember reading about how D*face had made these huge spray paint can sections out of concrete and gone around London late at night with a friend in flat bed lorry with a crane on the back, dropping these cans onto pavements and placing broken concrete around them giving the effect that these cans were breaking through from the underground and were taking over. As it happens D*face did not restrict these sculptures to London, they have appeared all over the country, as well as South Africa, Australia and America. The iconic image of the spray can is what most represents the subject of street art, so with this in mind I set out to create visually appealing concrete sculptures with the subject of the spray can.
I had reached a point with my own work where I was struggling to justify making any more CCTV Camera trophies as I now had over twenty and that was the amount that I was aiming for. With the conversation in mind I was very keen to completely step away from my studio practice and do something completely different, something that I felt would appeal to the masses, that was very visually pleasing, something that really just cleared my mind and opened it up to new ideas for moving on with my studio work.
