I'm interviewed in the latest issue of Computer Arts Magazine (Issue 133) for a regular feature 'My Career So Far', choosing eight pieces of work from the last ten years and discussing them. In the shops now.
Here's the pieces I chose and why.
2001 - 'Deface the Face-Madonna'. Client: The Face/HHCL/Tango.
I was working in record shop at the time of this piece. I was asked to be a judge for a competition run by the Face magazine to re-interpret a Face cover, and created this as an example of what you could do. It's a very early example of me using my first Mac with hand sprayed scanned material, just working out what you could and couldn't do by accident. It has lots of fake drop shadows and photoshop lens flares…oh yeah!
2002 - Notorious B.I.G. Client: The Source
My first commission when I signed with Art Department in the US was this portrait of Biggie Smalls. I'm bit of a hip hop fan, so this was an honour. I painted on the canvas digitally, scanning artwork separately so I had full control over every part. The process has improved, but continues to this day.
2004 - 'Access'. Client: Wire Design
While making really bright portraits of hip hop stars, I also created this illustration for a book by a design company. They weren't paying so you could do what you liked. It was my first photo collage, and influenced lots of other similar projects. I was working with McFaul and others on Black Convoy at the time.
2005 'BBC 1Xtra Hip Hop Weekend'. Client: Blue Source
This ran on posters on the Tube promoting the radio station in 2005. The height of my mental photoshop documents stage, it had hundreds of layers and represents a progression from what I had started with the Biggie portrait three years earlier.
2007 - 'Kylie Minogue', Client: The Observer Music Monthly
This is from the run I did for the Observer Music Magazine a few years ago which included portraits of lots of people including the Arctic Monkeys, Prince and Rihanna. This Kylie image is my favourite and the pinnacle of this style of work. I realised shortly after that I couldn't do much else with it and developed a new style.
2007 - 'Isolation', Client: Sound In Print
I created this piece in 2007 for a book that to my knowledge didn't ever actually come out, which is shame. I made it by carving up photos of UK shopping centres and playing around with perspective, before finally making use of some of the cubism lectures I endured years of at college.
2008 - 'ASOS', Client: The Telegraph
A lot of the work I made when I started out commercially was spraypaint-based: this came out of not being allowed to silkscreen print at college because I wasn't from the fine art department. But I was definetely starting to move away from the urban spraypaint thing by 2008. This project ran full-page in the Telegraph and was one of the first versions of the two colour collages thatI've been doing a lot of recently. It's nice to be given a bunch of photos, and make work relatively quickly.
2009 - 'Arctic', Personal Work.
A personal project, this one was created to go alongside a number of other collages for a Peepshow exhibition that we held back in the summer of 2009. It was the first piece of work that I'd made in ten years completely unaided by a computer.
2009 - 'Billion Dollar Bubble', Client: The Financial Times.
It's interesting how the style of work determines the clients you work for. Three years ago with all the ink and spraypaint it was music related briefs and clients; now with this new collage work it's mainly business magazines. This project ran on the Financial Times cover last year and is a development of the photo collage style I've been working on for the last few years with a very limited palette.
