THE METAMORPHIC LIFE OF DAVY JONES

Three Paintings. One Life. Countless Identities.

Before Ziggy Stardust, before the Thin White Duke, before the characters, costumes and extraordinary transformations, there was David Jones.

And somewhere along the way, David Jones created David Bowie.

The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones is my three-part painted and sculptural exploration of that extraordinary life.

I didn't want to paint another portrait of David Bowie.

I wanted to enter his world.

Because the more I discovered about Bowie, the more I realised that his story contained everything I love as an artist—imagination, theatre, symbolism, eccentricity, reinvention and, perhaps most importantly, humour.

I connected with that humour.

Bowie could be strange, serious, theatrical and profound, but there was also something wonderfully playful running through his creativity.

That gave me permission to play too.

And I did.

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WHY BOWIE?

The journey began in 2012, shortly after I had completed my painting of Lady Gaga.

Gaga had been an important painting for me because she was my first real exploration into becoming braver with the physical canvas itself. I had started questioning why a painting had to remain a flat, rectangular object hanging obediently on a wall.

Why couldn't I interfere with it?

Why couldn't I add things to it?

Why couldn't the canvas become part painting, part object and part theatre?

Gaga opened that door.

Bowie blew it off its hinges.

I had been considering who to paint next. Freddie Mercury and Elton John were possibilities, but two Bowie fans were quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—urging me towards David.

One was a close friend in Wales.

The other was my dear friend in New Zealand, a glass artist and enormous Bowie fan who would later become involved in creating some of the glass elements for the finished artwork.

Eventually, I gave in.

And I am very glad I did.

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FALLING INTO BOWIE'S WORLD

I began researching.

And then I kept researching.

I read a biography of Bowie's life and filled pages with notes. More than a decade has passed and frustratingly I can no longer remember the title of that particular book, but I remember how much information it gave me to work with.

I even sent a photograph of the completed artwork to the author afterwards.

He loved it.

That meant a great deal to me.

But something else happened while I was researching Bowie.

I began connecting with him creatively.

Perhaps part of that connection came from being British myself. Bowie's music and cultural world felt closer to me. There were things I recognised, songs I knew and references that belonged to the cultural landscape I had grown up around.

Creating Gaga had been exciting.

Creating Bowie was fun.

Really fun.

His life was almost ridiculously rich material for an artist like me.

Every time I thought I had found something interesting, another strange story, character, outfit, lyric, performance, film, friendship or piece of creative madness appeared.

I could see pictures everywhere.

And that is when Bowie began to take over.

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HOW DO YOU FIT DAVID BOWIE ONTO A CANVAS?

The simple answer is:

You don't.

One canvas wasn't going to contain him.

So I stopped trying.

I divided the work across three large canvases, allowing the story to move broadly through three periods: the early David Jones and emerging Bowie; the extraordinary years of characters and personas; and the later artist, actor and man beyond those famous creations.

But even three ordinary canvases weren't enough.

I wanted to cut through them.

See through them.

Build onto them.

Join them together.

Allow objects to escape from them.

I wanted one canvas to physically lead into another so that the viewer didn't simply look at three separate pictures.

They travelled through them.

The finished work eventually stood almost two metres high and took around eight months to create.

It became painting, sculpture, glass, metal and construction all working together to tell one enormous story.

Bowie had broken my canvas.

And I loved him for it.

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THE METAMORPHOSIS

The title came from what fascinated me most.

Transformation.

David Jones didn't simply become famous.

He repeatedly created, inhabited and discarded identities.

The musician changed.

The clothes changed.

The characters changed.

The sound changed.

The visual language changed.

And so I wanted the artwork itself to transform as we travelled through it.

The first canvas leads into the second.

The second changes completely before opening into the third.

There are things protruding from the surface, things hidden behind other things and tiny details that can disappear amongst much larger scenes.

Some references are obvious.

Others are decidedly not.

I have hidden music, film, people, places, stories, humour and pieces of Bowie's life throughout the three paintings.

And because this is my interpretation of Bowie rather than an illustrated biography, my own imagination occasionally gets involved too.

Quite shamelessly.

You'll have to enter the journal to discover just how far I took that.

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A TRIBUTE TO ONE GREAT ARTIST FROM ANOTHER

David Bowie never saw the finished artwork.

Sadly, he never knew it existed.

I would have loved to know what he thought of it—particularly some of the more ridiculous things I did with his story.

I have a feeling he might have appreciated the humour.

I'll never know.

But what I do know is how much I enjoyed creating it.

Bowie gave me an extraordinary playground.

He allowed me to experiment with narrative, construction, painting, sculpture, glass and the physical boundaries of the canvas in ways I hadn't attempted before.

And looking back at the work more than a decade later, I still believe I did what I set out to do.

I think I created a great tribute to a great artist.

Not by copying David Bowie.

Not by painting one famous face.

But by responding to his creativity with my own.

That, for me, is what The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones is really about.

One artist looking at another and thinking:

You don't play by the rules.

Neither will I.

 

THREE PAINTINGS. ONE EXTRAORDINARY STORY.

The three paintings take us from the beginnings of David Jones, through the explosion of Bowie and his famous personas, and onwards into the wider creative life that followed.

But I'm deliberately not going to explain everything here.

That would spoil the fun.

There are hundreds of references hidden across these paintings, and some are considerably stranger than others.

If you want to know how I physically created this enormous work, enter the Creation Gallery.

If you want to know what on earth all of it means, enter the Artist Journal.

Because with Bowie, looking once is nowhere near enough.​​