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I'm a very visual person and in my everyday life I'm constantly looking at my surroundings and the media to soak up ideas and inspiration. I'm not really interested in traditional painting. For me, the best artwork around today is in the form of adverts, video games and the imagery in music videos. I can spend hours watching music videos on MTV or You Tube. When anything inspires me, I store an image of it on my computer, so that I can go back to it at a later date.
When I was a kid, the first artist I really became aware of was Andy Warhol, through the bands and music I liked at that time such as David Bowie, Lou Reed and Blondie who worked with him. Most of his work was graphical in nature and photography was at the core of his artistic practice. His high contrast silkscreen editions are one of the main influences in my work. From these I learned that if the subject matter is strong, easily recognisable and iconic in nature, it can be reproduced in a simplistic way with just a couple of colours. This is relevant to what I do, because I produce very graphic artwork that I can reproduce in glass. Another artist from New York who has inspired me in the past few years is Joshua Davis, who pioneered the use of digital filters and computer code to randomly generate artwork.
Although I have experimented with other genres, cityscapes and architecture seem to have popular appeal, because people connect to it, through their own affinity with the various cities and buildings. Also, because glass is an architectural material, it seems to fit with the architectural subject matter. However, one of the exciting things about being an artist is that you never know what you might do next; so although I love what I'm doing right now, I know that I might come up with something completely different in the future!
I work in a very different way to most other artists, who draw or paint a picture and then publish an edition from the original. I produce every single number in my editions by hand in my studio, so every piece is a 'limited edition original' by the artist.
I'm self-taught, which gives me the edge, because I don't have any pre-conceived ideas about what is possible and I bring different ideas to the mix from outside the world of art and glass making. My attitude is 'do whatever it takes to achieve the end result'. I combine many completely different artistic disciplines together including photography, digital art, stenciling, ceramics and fused glass to achieve the end result. I'm definitely a 'jack of all trades' and although I'm not the best photographer, digital artist or glass maker in the world, when I combine all my different skills together, I like to think that I create something truly unique!
The starting point is to select a photo to work from. The most fun part of my work is going on a photography trips to take photos of the subject matter. I very occasionally work from a stock photo, but I get better results when I work from my own photos, because I can take dozens from all different perspectives to get the exact composition I'm looking for.
I then work from the photos to produce the artwork on my computer, building the final image up in individual layers of color, so that I can then create elaborate stencils for each layer to reproduce the artwork in glass. Working on computer enables me to produce stencils with a level of complexity that would be impossible by hand. You would not immediately guess that my work is stenciled when you see the final piece. The stencil stage is very time consuming and I like to print the artwork out and 'sit on it' for a few weeks to make sure I'm happy, before cutting out stencils by hand, which takes about a week for a single image!
The glass panels are made by painstakingly hand stenciling the several different layers of colour between a sandwich of two layers of glass. It is then fired in a kiln at over 1000 degrees farenheight, to form a single piece of glass. The image is then 'inside' the glass. The colours are created from special glazes I have developed myself (similar concept to pottery glazes) by combining various glass and metal compounds together to create a particular colour. It has taken years of experimentation and experience to produce the colour palette.
Random air bubbles form inside the glass during firing, emphasising the liquid and tactile nature of glass. This also means that no two pieces in the edition are ever identical. The firing process takes over 24 hours and when the glass is cooled down, the finished pieces are expertly finished off and engraved with my signature before bonding them onto specially designed frames to hang on the wall.
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