The issue of audience sometimes raises its troublesome head and an old debate comes back to haunt me. I can still remember a tutorial with Keith Arnatt that was held near to the end of my first year at Newport College of Art. I had been ill and confined to bed for several weeks. Whilst in bed I had continued to make work and had brought the results with me for the tutorial. Some of this work was in the form of collages and Arnatt seemed very pleased with them, but then I produced some small paintings, whereby I was trying to play a game with religious iconography and figures taken from the world of popular culture. He dismissed this work as being too illustrative. Here I am 55 years later still worrying about this artificial divide. In my mind Michelangelo worked to both illustrate the Bible for the Pope and at the same time make images that were transcendent of their initial function. It has always seemed to me that artists work at their best when having to squeeze meaning out of tight constraints as in for instance John Piper's stained glass, which I first saw in Coventry as a schoolboy; his New Cathedral Baptistery Window stimulating a long time fascination with the power of light shining through coloured glass to give spiritual uplift to imagery.
I have for some years been making votives and have been interested in how an animist world view might help us all build a better relationship with the world around us. Therefore when I had an opportunity to study stained glass in more detail, (thank you AN for the bursary), I wanted to see if the spiritual uplift I felt when I first encountered the technique, could still be harnessed. In this case Sooty uses his magical powers to ease the pain and cure the ailment. This was of course a case of "physician heal thyself." My own arm coming in from the side of the image, with my hand inside a Sooty that is rising alongside my leg, in preparation for an act of psychic healing. The ability to do this in reality would involve severe contortions of the body but somehow that seemed right, as the 'something's not right' bit of the brain, is what ignites those inner feelings of unsureness, which in turn open the door to the unconscious and the workings of psyche.
When I was working with the idea of Sooty as a contemporary fetish, I little realised that the imagery would chime with so many people, one of which was a musician who needed images for his forthcoming album and associated singles. By agreeing to provide the images for the purpose of illustrating these things was I demeaning the work, was I somehow diluting its impact by taking it out of the fine art arena? I have been 'accused' of being more of an illustrator than a fine artist several times during the course of what is now a long career and it still worries me. Illustrators have to listen to clients and work to a brief, in my work I hold conversations with people and listen to them and respond by making images; so perhaps yes part of what I do is illustration. I also make images that tend to be figurative but I am not a painter, so I cant use the rhetoric of painterliness that surrounds the painting profession. But I've always worked out of a fine art context. My DipAD is in Fine Art not design and I see myself as an artist. However I'm very aware that design offers many positive attributes to a fine artist, in particular the sense of visual problem solving, a clear recognition of communication theory and the need to pitch work in different ways to different audiences.
I still remember the image on the LP cover of King Crimson's 'In the court of the crimson king', an image cropped from a painting by Barry Godber, who at the time of my listening to the music, I wasn't aware of but I associated all sorts of ideas with this image, as it became part of my world. Like the work of many artists of the Medieval ages, these images went out into the world as anonymous products, in support of a main event, the Bible or more recently a CD, but now years later, the work is appreciated in its own right. For instance the Crusader Bible features Old Testament scenes in medieval settings, with brilliantly coloured illustrations attributed to seven anonymous artists.
As several of my Sooty images have been used and associated with different single releases, people will become aware of them as if they were being drip fed a narrative.
My Sooty images have been appearing randomly as different singles are released. Several of them are to do with the time I used to take my Sooty puppet to the Gaumont Cinema in Dudley. Sooty was a companion who would observe the films too difficult for myself to watch. My mum was an usherette back then in the 1950s and when I left school, sometimes I would go to meet her in the cinema and if she was tied up, I would sit in an empty back row seat and watch whatever was being projected, until she was ready to take me home. Into my Sooty series I have woven memories of 1950s film media, an awareness that inanimate objects can become animated and in certain cases operate as fetishes, something that as an older man I've become more and more interested in.
On the Trinity CD's cover is a more painterly image from my Sooty series and as in all the other covers, the designer has had to crop my originals to fit a square.
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