New Gold Tree - New Collab - New Pins
New ‘Tree of Life and Death IV’ Original Painting
I suddenly realised this week that I’m about to close out this year without creating a single reverse-glass piece. It wasn’t a deliberate choice to drop my signature style, it’s just where my curiosity has led me over the last few months.
Gilding and painting on timber panels rather than in the mirror world of reverse-glass back to front thinking has been a breath of fresh air. It’s demanded a totally different style of mental gymnastics and creative bravery of me in the act of making.
Just the idea that I can change my mind and paint over things, which is not possible with glass work, is something I’m still getting used to. There’s more freedom but that can also be paralysing in its own way of course.
What I’m really shedding here is the pursuit of perfection. Craft has a correct way of doing things, it has perfect. On a good day I can paint a perfect set of letters because of the years of practice I’ve put in to executing a technique that was itself refined over many more years by generations of artisans.
But now that I’m using those craft techniques and materials to explore creating artwork away from their original purpose, i.e painting letters, I need to embrace a painter’s mindset rather than the craftsmen’s. And the painter needs to be ready to respond to what they see in front of them rather than any specific predetermined ‘plan’ or ‘correct’ way of executing the idea.
Each tree in the series has built on the last, on the questions posed and answered by the ones that came before it. This fourth in the series offers a more celebratory tone with a kind of May Day Danse Macabre going on around the trunk. As the series has gone on the skeletons have gone from lying, to sitting to dancing - an energetic shift which I think reflects my growing confidence in this format. My Trees of Life and Death are now ‘a thing’, a category of my work in themselves, one that I’m excited to continue exploring.
Kay Gasei x Archie Proudfoot Collaboration
One of the goals I had on my list for this year was to collaborate with a fellow artist. And given what I was just saying about loosening up and becoming more expressive I don’t think I could have collaborated with anyone better than Kay Gasei.
I’ve known Kay for a long time. Years ago he used to work in A.S Handover, the specialist sign painting art shop in Stoke Newington, which was just around the corner from my first studio in Hackney Downs. We struck up a friendship and I’ve watched over the years with awe as his work has grown in its ambition and complexity.
When he proposed the idea of collaborating on a few works it was an easy yes. Figuring out how a collaboration between two painters should work isn’t obvious. The possibilities are endless, which is both good and bad. So we decided to keep it simple for this first time: I painted a base layer of a design onto a series of A1 sheets of paper and then handed them over to Kay to respond as he saw fit.
The result are four stunning original paintings. Original not just in a sense of there being only one of each, but original in their newness, this series is a cross pollination of two distinct techniques, perspectives and styles which has produced a whole new kind of flower.
New WOW Hard Enamel Pin-Badges
I love making pin-badges from my work, its been far too long since I last had one out. These WOW pins have been released before and sold out. This is a brand new colour way that was produced for my show earlier this year at Cult Vision and Velorose Gallery, available in limited numbers.
These hard enamel pins, are made in the UK using traditional methods. They have a double clutch fastening on the back so you can make sure the cross shape stays on the diagonal for a punchy X on whatever you decide to pin them on. I think they look pretty good on a classic denim jacket like this one, which belonged to my Dad who loved a good pin-badge.
