Discipline is the road to freedom

there was no art and very few books in our house growing up and i didn’t know any different the one other house i can remember going to was equally devoid of such things so when i saw a picture of elvis by andy warhol in a book i’d bought i didn’t know what was going on but i knew i liked it i stared at the image for long periods of time trying to work out what i was looking at i couldn’t believe what i was seeing it was 1978 and i was fourteen and that was the last art i saw for a while until around 84. saying that i didn’t have a clue what was happening with pistols record covers around the same time in the 70’s so i guess i was subconsciously aware that punk was art and the first picture sleeve single i had was no more heroes and i couldn’t work that out either i didn’t know what it was but i liked it and that is still very much what i like what i’m drawn to and what i like to produce with my own work now stuff that draws you in to something unknown or indescribable familiar alien that kind of thing what it was with the picture of elvis was that it was there and it was not there how an image i’d seen any number of times before had been transformed and rendered magical and mysterious simply by having aspects of it removed colour density areas it was elvis in black and white standing face on with six shooter drawn parts of his side his leg were missing faded out some years later when i was obsessing over marlon brando i picked up an 8×10 photograph from the chelsea antiques market on the kings road the classic one of him as johnny in the wild one when he’s leaning over the fuel tank of his triumph the trophy strapped to it and elbows on handlebars and knowing there was a photocopier i could get to at the place i was working nights at the time i took it in and printed off a couple of hundred copies and blu tacked them in rows all over a wall in the bedsit i was living in and would put records on and stare at them wishing i knew someone who’d call round and look at it and think it was great too i’d not seen any andy warhol art at all since that picture of elvis in the book in 78 and had no idea about his work or screen printing or anything like that it just seemed like a good idea to me i got red lipstick and daubed it on and around his mouth and tore some of them in two and distorted his face kind of collaging it felt like the right thing to do i was doing a lot of speed at that time so i suppose unknowingly i had that in common with warhol i remember at some point the wall of brando had been up like that for a couple of weeks my brother and a mate of his were due to come round for a jam and i shat myself and hurriedly took all the pictures down shoved them in a bag and hid them under the bed i didn’t know what i was doing was art but i knew they’d likely think it was weird queer offensive and somehow attack me for it as my father had when i showed him a drawing i’d made the day grandpa died in 74 a portrait in black biro of a bearded man wearing a fedora and dark glasses right hand raised a gun pointing at the viewer underneath written harrys the name murders the game art for me bar a selected few friends remained a secret for the next forty or so years.