For anyone following my aerosol art, I have done two portraits of music artists who are hyper-sexualised in their marketing or music. The funny thing about it as an artist and an older artist as well is, sex is the last thing on my mind. What I find about the marketing that I have cropped as portraits is that the artists are iconised which was Andy Worhol’s art legacy in POP art. Some images are arresting and that’s the work of marketing teams who themselves are like artists, though they limit themselves somewhat to popularity. That is also the fate of a lot of artists these days, I can’t criticise it but it’s not my thing to tailor my art around the merchandise or those types of products. Design and art have conjoined in the market economy we have the horrible luck to be stuck in, yet every disaster is also an opportunity. Do you have the strength to swim against the tide or do you want to sell your wares on the side? It’s all good really because some people need the money and they are good at that marketing hybrid art gig. 

As anyone following my art knows I am a big turn off in the popularity department, yet as I said any disaster also presents an opportunity, and the opportunity is unbridled self-expression without a marketing slant. I saw a rather gritty brand (wow I am either a hypocrite or completely insane) selling rough jewellery called entropy or at least alluded to entropy and that reminder of falling into disorder from an ordered state. I liked that, I like the idea of entropy in general and it is funny a brand had to remind me of that, though they are not the type of brand that is popular. So you can’t escape the market economy and I think my portraits have alluded to that quite a lot over the years. I am just using a copyrighted image from Google from the artists marketing catalogue that is meant to be shared anyway. Yet it is still alluding and sometimes I try and make the image somewhat my own rather than try to copy it exactly.

I never thought as a trained artist that I would dedicate some work to the POP art philosophy yet I have and still will, artists can be like a mirror to society and the marketing teams know this.