Clermont Ferrand,

03.2019 

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"It’s all about my relationship with people. Often. I get very different things out because naturally how they allow you to connect with people is very different.
Take tattooing for example, it is very personal, very intimate. And what you do for that person is obviously a natural extension of yourself but it’s also quite often whenever it’s meant to be or not, it’s through guidelines, there’s restriction in the fact that someone is going to come to you and say “I want a skull, a heart, a butterfly.” Already you have a pressure to get it right for that other person. When you get it right, it’s a beautiful moment and you are able to share that transaction to creation. It’s between you and that person. And then they go away and it’s really for them and the connection they have with other people. You never see the benefit of it after that.

When you paint, it’s you. And the painting. You just work and work and work on it and there might be a small period when you get to enjoy the reaction of others with the painting but the majority of the time you will never see it again. They will hang on a wall and people appreciate in silence, contemplatively. They will sit in front of it and take what they need from the work.
So it’s very much like you’ve got one aspect of my life which is about this intimate creation together that walks away and leaves you. You’ve got another aspect of my life which is much deeper where I pull all my life into this painting I have an intimate connection with it and it’s gone and I don’t see how people appreciate it and then you have music.

I can share it with the world when I perform it. So they can take all of that away and they can listen to it on their own, in the train, in the car, in a bedroom, or they can come to a show and they can experience it with us. It’s the art form that transcends all boundaries, religion, racism, ages, countries, it’s just you don’t even have to be in the same room to appreciate it, you can hear it through the walls, you can hear it as you past the windows. The painting is hanging in someone’s house you’ll never ever seen. Tattoos are on someone’s body, you may never see it. Music is just like such a magical medium, it’s spreading everywhere.
And with photography… Photography is funny because it’s like, is kind of this strange mix of all. 

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I think that when you’re a creative person you have this insane urge to make something and sometimes it doesn’t matter if anyone sees it or not but you always know in the back of your mind, no matter what you tell yourself about the work, you know that the intention is for that to change people’s life. Like you really want to make a grand breaking record or a masterpiece of a painting, you want to adapt art into something that has never been seen before, because we all want to feel special, we want other people to feel special and we want to be loved. And a lot of time, painting, drawing, singing, dancing, anything creative, you feel that for the first time in your life you praised for just being, for just existing. When you’re a child you play, you dance or you sing a song and people clap and they celebrate you and it’s such a powerful feeling when you’re that young.

It is so important. So I think for creatives, artists, dancers, performers, whatever, there’s definitively got to be an element of that in it. That idea that at one point in your life, you are able to create just completely freely, and in doing so you celebrate, and then it stops. And then what happens when you grow old: you are criticized, you’re judged, relentlessly, on the art that you’re making: “is this art?” “is this important?” “is this good enough?” “is it as good as his old work?” “will it be as good as the next work?” Who fucking cares? How about we all lift each other up? “Well done you fucking did something”. So yes it’s tough but I make because I want to change the world. I do.

 

We have dedicated universities for art and it’s taken quite seriously because art and culture go hand in hand in Britain particularly. We had all movements of British artists who really challenged and disrupted the art world and the world in general: Damien Hirst, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Sue Webster and Tim Noble, even Grayson Perry. They all came from this place where they’re really trying to do different things and try to think about things progressively and they are trying to change not only the future but History as well. So yes it’s very different in the UK. However, for my journey, I went to art college right outside of school and I dropped out because I just felt that it was not teaching me anything. It was book learning. It was not inspired teaching at all. 

I dropped out and I started teaching myself how to tattoo and I moved out to a different town and I started work for my dad who was a picture framer at the time. So I went from making art to framing it. But it paid my bills and it gave me space to tour and learn in my own free time. So the reality is, unless you go down the higher education route, the formal route of art application, it’s fucking really difficult to break through and become a well-respected artist because they want to know. If you’ve taken a degree there’s a level of education in the art history and knowledge you’ve paid to introduce. If you haven’t gone through that route, then you don’t have the right references, your cv is not qualified enough for the job. The job is wherever I fucking say the job is, I am the artist.  

 

I fail constantly. Failure is like a constant in my life. How do I deal with it… I try not to punish myself too hard. When you fail things as a child, the first thing that normally happens is that you’re taught of: “you haven’t’ done enough of this, you’re not smart enough, fast enough, you’re not clever enough, strong enough.” All these things lead to a massive way of insecurity in yourself you know, so I am very aware now to try and look for the best in everything. I don’t always do this. It’s very easy to say so we speak but that is what I would like to do. When I fail something, I try to analyse what went wrong. I try to think to what I was trying to achieve in the first place. And then if I got close to achieving that, if I did achieve it but it still looks shit, then I know why was I trying to achieve that in the first place. It’s about just constantly skipping along the timeline, going forwards, going backwards, trying to analyse every decision you made, “why am I doing this?” “why this direction now?” And never being too hard on myself when things go wrong. And even if things go wrong to a point of finality, you HAVE to accept it. That’s the risk you take as being an artist. Every single move is a roll of a dice. Sometimes the universe is kind, sometimes is not. But automatically, it’s always your teacher. Who decides when it’s done? You do. 

If you’re never happy with something you’ve been working on, then probably you need to find the part of that that you’re happy with. Because I am certain there will be a moment in that… For example, if you’re doing a portrait, every single portrait I have ever painted I haven’t liked, but I know there’s moment when I got this shadow on this hand perfect. I just focus on that “what the fuck did I do there that I can’t apply to the rest of it?” An eye socket, the light on a lip, or the colour of a skin ton? Every time I get something right I congratulate myself, not for too long, I just make sure to look and to understand how I got there, so that when I do the next one, it’s there, it’s present. It’s never about losing focus. The next time I paint an eye socket it might be slightly off, but at least I know I am getting better.

 

There’s this quote in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, it’s fucking really difficult read, really hard read, super poetic, really beautiful, an absolute savage book, and in that book there’s a quote that says “there is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto” which basically just means like “wherever you’re fucking going, you’re going to have a bad time on the way, the journey is the important part of life. You think your destination is the goal, but when you get there, you always want more, naturally.” So, with art, if you apply that to art, you’ll never find happiness in your final work, ever. Because the all point is to enjoy it along the way. If you make the process a problem, if you start making that the hard part of your life because you’re not happy with the result, then you just undermine every aspect of creativity and creation. How lucky are we that we have time to create? We’re so privileged that we have money and time and space to make anything, ever. Or that anyone will want to see it. So while you’re doing that you have to smile, you have to enjoy the decisions you’re making. And you have to be bold and to challenge yourself and you have to create fiercely. You cannot create in tribulation or in fear because if you do that you’re coming from the wrong place. Because the all point is to enjoy every single step of the creation. And then when you get to the end piece where it may not be finished but its time to move on, at least you know that you enjoyed every aspect of that. Even if you cannot enjoy the final piece. And the all fucking part is it doesn’t matter because you’re supposed to sell that to someone else anyway who hasn’t seen any of the process. They will look at that painting, sculpture, object, whatever it is and for them it will move them cause this is the joy of perspectives. Just because you know what went into it doesn’t mean everyone else know what does. Just because you know what it’s about, it doesn’t matter because someone else will sit down in a chair and will look at that painting and it will speak to them about what’s important in their life, if it’s meant to. It is again the universe that is taking care of those things. And they will want it. And the minute they want it, it’s priceless, it can be worth £5 or a million, it doesn’t matter because art is worth whenever someone is willing to pay for it. That’s the reality.    

 

I HAVE to create. So I never ever ever make for anybody else. Always for myself. And you should too. Never ever make for other people. That’s the first step you can go wrong because if you’re trying to create because you want to be recognized as a great artist, you’ll always fail because you’re not enjoying the work, you’re not thinking properly about the work, you’re thinking about whether or not people are going to like it and that will constantly tripped you up. So what you need to do is relax with yourself. Start creating for you so you can start feeling better about your life, and then start challenging about the feeling you’re having in your work.     

We’re all here just desperate to understand why we are here, desperate to understand the things around us that we don’t, we can’t understand. So every now and again, someone comes along and they paint a figure in two strokes and it’s just like the most perfect beautiful Matisse, he just understood femininity. And he cut out paper with a pair of fucking scissors and you see it and it’s perfect and it moves you. Picasso understood emotions like anyone else. He’s a fucking asshole but he understood like sorrow and contemplation and fear and terror and madness and anxiety and he was able to drag out of people through abstraction and create like absolutely tormented pictures of people. The minute you look at it, it stops you in your tracks because it’s affective, it's just “what I am looking at here?”, it doesn’t make any sense to me but yet I completely understand. So the gift that we have on the curse when we are creatives, we have this amazing opportunity to find new simple ways to explain very complicated situations and emotions and feelings and every time you get that right, it’s like such an enormous fucking victory in the world. It really is."