A David Bowie Painting: Inside The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones
- Julia O'Sullivan of Jupigio-Artwork
- 1 day ago
- 30 min read
Part Two: Beyond the Masks
We left David Bowie at a door in the Berlin Wall.
Now we're going through it.
Behind us are Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, the Thin White Duke and the extraordinary procession of identities that dominated the second painting.
Ahead, the story changes.
The third painting looks beyond the great personas and into the much wider creative life of David Bowie.
Actor.
Performer.
Artist.
Collaborator.
Husband.
Father.
The masks haven't disappeared completely, but they no longer control the story.
So let's walk through the wall.
There is a staircase waiting for us.
And coming down it is a clown dragging a bath containing the Elephant Man.
We're definitely still in Bowie territory.
Chapter One
Beyond the Music
Walk through the door in the Berlin Wall and the world changes again.
The first thing that confronts us is a maze of stairs.
They climb.
They descend.
They lead somewhere and nowhere.
And travelling down them is one of the strangest scenes in the entire painting.
A clown is dragging a bath.
Inside it sits the Elephant Man.
Welcome to the third canvas.
By now you should probably expect nothing to be straightforward.
Bowie the Actor
Until this point, music has driven much of our journey.
Songs have become images. Albums have become landscapes. Characters created for the stage have taken over entire sections of the painting.
But Bowie wasn't confined to music.
His creativity moved into theatre and film, and I wanted the third canvas to open that world up.
I didn't want to create a neat row of famous film characters.
That would have felt too much like a list.
Instead, I went looking for the stories and images that caught my imagination.
And one of the strangest involved a bath.
The Elephant Man
Bowie played John Merrick in the stage production of The Elephant Man.
What interested me was that he performed the role without elaborate prosthetics.
He had to suggest Merrick's physicality through his own body.
For an artist so associated with extraordinary costumes, make-up and transformation, I found that fascinating.
Here was Bowie transforming again, but without hiding behind another spectacular visual creation.
The performance had to come from him.
That felt like an interesting development in the journey I had been painting.
We have spent so long looking at masks.
Now we meet a transformation that doesn't require one.
But naturally, that isn't why there is a bath in my painting.
The Bath
During my research I came across a story from the production that immediately appealed to my sense of humour.
There was a scene involving Bowie naked in a bath, and I read that members of the stage crew would play tricks on him by filling or decorating the bath with pornography and various inappropriate objects.
I couldn't possibly discover something like that and then paint a dignified portrait of John Merrick.
Where would be the fun in that?
So the bath came with him.
And yes, if you look closely, there are some deliberately phallic additions.
This is one of those moments where the story behind the artwork is probably considerably more ridiculous than the viewer initially expects.
But that is exactly what I enjoyed about creating Bowie.
One minute I could be dealing with identity, addiction or isolation.
The next I was painting questionable objects into a bathtub.
His life allowed the serious and the absurd to sit beside one another.
My painting does the same.
Why a Clown?
The clown pulling the bath helps move this bizarre little piece of theatre into the larger visual world of the third canvas.
By this stage I didn't feel any obligation to make the transitions sensible.
They needed to work visually.
They needed to carry the eye.
And sometimes they simply needed to make me smile.
The painting had developed its own logic.
Once you have accepted giant metal spiders, aliens on rooftops and musicians with eight legs, a clown dragging the Elephant Man down a staircase seems almost reasonable.
Almost.
The Stairs
But the stairs have another purpose.
They lead us directly into Labyrinth.
For many people of my generation, Bowie and Labyrinth are almost impossible to separate.
Jareth the Goblin King became one of his most recognisable roles.
I knew he had to be present.
But I also knew I didn't want him taking over the painting.
That was important.
Bowie had done too much.
If I had painted a huge image of Jareth, the Goblin King could easily have swallowed this entire section and reduced Bowie's film career to one famous character.
So instead of simply painting Jareth, I painted his world.
My Labyrinth
What I remembered most vividly from Labyrinth was the impossible architecture.
Stairs that seemed to ignore gravity.
Figures appearing above, below and sideways.
A world where the normal rules of space didn't apply.
That gave me exactly what I needed.
I could use the stairs to move us physically through the painting while allowing Labyrinth to exist without reproducing a scene from the film.
So I created my own version.
The staircases twist through the composition and connect different pieces of Bowie's story.
They become both a film reference and a device for navigating the canvas.
I like that much more than simply hiding another movie poster somewhere.
The reference becomes part of the structure.
Holding the Moon
Bowie appears later holding what looks like the moon in his hand.
Again, this allowed me to touch upon the strange visual magic associated with Jareth without allowing the character to dominate.
Scale becomes unreliable.
A man can hold a celestial object.
Stairs can lead in impossible directions.
Reality is flexible again.
But this time we aren't inside Ziggy's alien mythology.
We're inside cinema.
Bowie has found another place where transformation is allowed.
Another Kind of Mask
There is an interesting difference between the characters we encountered on the second canvas and the roles appearing here.
Ziggy Stardust belonged to Bowie.
Halloween Jack belonged to Bowie.
The Thin White Duke belonged to Bowie.
He created them.
An actor does something different.
He enters somebody else's character.
John Merrick already existed as a role.
Jareth belonged to a film and a larger fictional world.
Bowie was no longer only constructing versions of himself.
He was using himself to become other people.
For a painting that began with a trunk full of masks, I find that fascinating.
The idea of transformation is still here.
But its direction has changed.
What Is Left When the Costume Goes?
The Elephant Man particularly makes me return to that question.
We have watched Bowie disappear beneath invented identities throughout the paintings.
Then here is a theatrical performance where much of the transformation depended upon what he could communicate without elaborate physical disguise.
Strip away the lightning bolt.
Strip away Ziggy's clothes.
Strip away the immaculate Duke.
Strip away the hair, make-up and spectacle.
Can the transformation still happen?
Of course it can.
Because by this point I was beginning to understand that Bowie's creativity wasn't contained within the costumes.
The costumes were simply one language he knew how to use.
A Much Bigger Bowie
That is what the third canvas begins revealing.
The earlier paintings might tempt us to define Bowie through the things we recognise most easily.
The face.
The clothes.
The songs.
The characters.
But the further I travelled through his life, the less adequate those things became.
He acted.
He performed on stage.
He made films.
He created visual art.
He collaborated.
He experimented.
He moved from one medium into another.
The more I explored his life, the more I realised I wasn't simply painting a musician.
I was trying to capture a creative mind.
And there was still much more of it to discover.
The staircases continue.
Around them other fragments of Bowie's screen life begin appearing.
A prisoner waits in a cage.
A Christmas tree hangs where you might not expect one.
A vampire lurks nearby.
A little drummer boy appears.
And a pair of red shoes is waiting to dance.
The Goblin King was only one part of this world.
There are many more Bowies on screen.
And naturally, I found some suitably peculiar ways of fitting them in.
Chapter Two
Bowie on Screen: Prisoners, Vampires and Red Shoes
Once I began exploring Bowie's acting career, the third canvas became wonderfully strange.
There was no reason to separate the actor from the musician.
By this stage of the painting, I had stopped putting Bowie's life into neat categories.
Music could sit beside film.
A song could become an object.
A film could become a tiny visual joke.
One reference could crash straight into another.
That seemed far more appropriate for Bowie.
So amongst the impossible staircases, the next collection of clues begins to appear.
Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence
One of Bowie's most significant film roles was in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence.
I hadn't seen the film when I created the painting, so I was working from the imagery and information I had discovered during my research.
The image that caught my attention was Bowie buried in the sand with only his head visible.
That was the moment I chose to bring into my painting.
But I also wanted to acknowledge that his character was a prisoner.
So I introduced the cage.
Again, I wasn't attempting to reproduce a scene exactly.
I was taking pieces of information and rebuilding them in my own visual language.
The cage tells us prisoner.
The buried figure gives us the image I had discovered.
And then I added something considerably less subtle.
A Christmas tree.
Merry Christmas.
Sometimes I enjoy making people work for a reference.
Sometimes I really don't.
The Hunger
Hanging from the cage is a vampire.
That takes us into The Hunger.
By now, a vampire appearing amongst staircases, cages and Christmas decorations doesn't seem particularly unusual.
But that is how much of this painting works.
Before you know the reference, something can appear completely random.
Once you understand it, another little piece clicks into place.
I never wanted every clue to announce itself.
Part of the enjoyment is discovering why it is there.
The Little Drummer Boy
Then there is the little drummer boy.
This refers to Bowie's wonderfully unlikely Christmas duet with Bing Crosby.
The pairing still makes me smile.
Bing Crosby and David Bowie seemed to occupy completely different musical worlds, and yet there they were together.
It was one of those strange moments from Bowie's career that I couldn't resist.
So rather than painting Bing Crosby, I reduced the entire encounter to one small clue.
A little drummer boy.
If you know, you know.
If you don't, he simply waits there until somebody tells you.
Ashes to Ashes
Music continues weaving through the film references.
Ashes to Ashes was impossible to ignore because its visual world is so distinctive.
The clown-like Pierrot imagery gave me another theatrical character to bring into this already surreal landscape.
But the song also does something particularly interesting within the wider story of my three paintings.
It brings Major Tom back.
We met him much earlier, sitting inside the metal telescope and pointing us away from the first canvas.
He helped take us from David Jones into Bowie's extraordinary constructed universe.
Now, years later in Bowie's own creative life, Major Tom resurfaces.
I love that.
It reminds us that Bowie could move forward without completely abandoning what he had created before.
Old characters remained available.
They could be revisited.
Changed.
Looked at differently.
The past could become new material.
Let's Dance
Then we come to the red shoes.
Let's Dance.
Sometimes I spent ages trying to find an unusual way of representing something.
And sometimes Bowie had already done the work for me.
Put on your red shoes.
So I did.
No complicated symbolism required.
Just the shoes.
They also demonstrate something that happens increasingly throughout the paintings.
Bowie doesn't always need to be physically present for us to recognise him.
A pair of red shoes can summon a song.
A lightning bolt can summon a face.
A spider can summon an entire era.
The objects begin carrying Bowie for me.
China Girl
In the distance is another deliberately literal piece of visual wordplay.
A Chinese rock carries the symbol for China Girl.
I enjoyed doing this enormously.
I could take a title apart and rebuild it as an image.
It might be slightly ridiculous.
But it worked.
And once again, it gave the viewer something to discover rather than simply read.
I didn't want to write song titles all over the canvas.
I wanted to make you find them.
Serious Moonlight
The Serious Moonlight stage also enters this section.
By now the scale of Bowie's career was enormous.
It is strange to think back to where we began.
A boy.
Rooms inside a house.
An early band in a basement.
Now we have reached global stages and an artist whose image is recognised almost instantly.
But I didn't want fame itself to become the subject.
The painting is interested in what Bowie did with that creative space.
Where did he go next?
What did he try?
What could I turn into another image?
Scary Monsters
Scary Monsters gave me a very easy decision.
There had to be scary monsters.
But no super creeps.
Sometimes that really is all there is to it.
Not every decision in these paintings contains a profound hidden meaning.
I think it is important to say that.
There are serious ideas running throughout the work, particularly around identity and transformation.
But there is also play.
I was having fun.
And I think art should be allowed to do that.
If a title gives me an excuse to paint monsters, I am perfectly capable of taking it.
Everything Starts Colliding
This is what I particularly like about the third painting.
The boundaries have almost disappeared.
Theatre leads into film.
Film collides with music.
Songs become objects.
Characters become clues.
A serious acting role can sit beside a terrible visual pun.
And somehow they all belong to the same person.
By this point I had stopped asking myself whether something belonged to the "music section" or the "film section."
It belonged to Bowie.
That was enough.
More Than a Musician
The further I travelled through his life, the more difficult it became to describe him simply as a musician.
He seemed creatively restless.
That interested me enormously.
Perhaps because I understand that feeling myself.
I don't particularly care whether something I am making is supposed to remain a painting.
If it needs metal, I want metal.
If it needs glass, I want glass.
If the canvas needs cutting, I'll cut it.
The idea dictates what happens next.
While creating Bowie, I found myself increasingly comfortable with that freedom.
And Bowie was a wonderful subject through which to explore it.
His creative life refused to stay in one place.
So did my painting.
The Story Opens Again
We are approaching another change now.
The obvious film references begin to fall away.
The world becomes wider.
Tin Machine appears.
A familiar creature returns, but this time it is made of glass.
Mountains rise behind Bowie.
Tibet and Buddhism enter the landscape.
His own visual art finds its way into mine.
And then a woman appears whose presence is very different from all the characters we have encountered before.
Iman.
We have spent a long time looking at the people Bowie pretended to be.
Now the painting begins moving towards the people he loved.
Chapter Three
The Returning Spider: Art, Tibet and Another Bowie
As I moved further across the third painting, Bowie became increasingly difficult to define, and I liked that. We had already travelled through music, invented personas, theatre and film, yet there were still other parts of his creative life waiting to be explored.
At this point the painting begins to open out. There are fewer characters demanding our attention, the landscape becomes larger, mountains appear and Bowie's interests beyond performance begin to enter the story.
And an old creature returns: the spider.
Tin Machine
Tin Machine gave me another irresistible opportunity to turn words into an object. If it was called Tin Machine, then somewhere in my painting there was going to be a machine, so I constructed my visual version from musical instruments.
It allowed me to represent another period of Bowie's musical life without simply painting another portrait of him. By now I had become increasingly comfortable allowing objects to carry the story. We don't always need Bowie's face; sometimes the clue is enough.
Hidden within the machine is another of those wonderfully inappropriate details that seemed to follow me throughout my research. I had read that one of the guitarists had been known to play his guitar with a phallic object.
Naturally, I included it.
There are times when I wonder whether I should pretend there was some profound artistic reasoning behind every detail in these paintings. There wasn't. Sometimes something simply made me laugh, and that was reason enough.
Heathen
The imagery from Heathen seemed to settle naturally into this part of the painting. Some references were like that; I didn't have to force them because they simply seemed to belong.
By this stage, the composition had developed a world of its own. I would discover another piece of Bowie's story and almost instinctively know where it should go.
That was one of the strange things about working on the paintings for so long. Eventually I stopped feeling as though I was filling a canvas and began feeling as though I was inhabiting it.
The Spider Comes Back
We first encountered spiders as we left the early Bowie behind. The Spiders from Mars became actual spiders playing their instruments, and Bowie himself became the enormous metal spider presiding over Ziggy's world.
Now, much later in his story, another appears: the Glass Spider.
This time I wanted the material itself to become part of the reference, so the spider had to be made from glass. Once again, the painting refused to remain simply a painting.
My Glass Spider
I designed the spider and asked my very talented artist friend in New Zealand to create it for me. She was also a huge David Bowie fan, which makes this particular element of the artwork especially meaningful to me.
She wasn't simply producing an object to my specifications; she understood the subject and loved Bowie too. Her creativity therefore became part of the tribute.
Although the enormous work began inside my head, there were moments when I needed skills I didn't possess to make what I imagined physically possible. The Glass Spider is one of those moments, and I like knowing that another Bowie fan left her mark on the finished piece.
A Real David Bowie Spider
Then my research gave me another wonderful connection.
I discovered that a large yellow-haired spider found in Malaysia had actually been named after David Bowie: Heteropoda davidbowie.
After turning Bowie's band into spiders and Bowie himself into a spider, discovering that a real species carried his name felt almost as though the universe had decided to join in.
It was a coincidence, of course, but a very satisfying one.
Fire at Its Feet
I also associated the Glass Spider stage with its dramatic ending, so flames lick around the spider's feet.
This is the kind of detail I enjoy hiding because the image works whether or not you understand the reference. Once you know why the fire is there, however, another layer of the painting opens up.
That became one of my favourite qualities of the finished work. You don't need to solve everything to enjoy it, but there is almost always something else waiting if you decide to look more closely.
Then the Landscape Changes
Behind all this, something quite dramatic happens as mountains rise and the space opens.
After the claustrophobic darkness of the Thin White Duke, the ruined cities, crowded stages and impossible staircases, the Tibetan mountains and Everest give the painting distance and room to breathe.
These mountains aren't another Bowie persona or theatrical stage set. They point towards interests that existed beyond the machinery of fame and performance.
Bowie and Tibet
During my research I discovered Bowie's long-standing interest in Tibet and Buddhism, which gave me another aspect of him to consider.
Much of the painting until this point has dealt with things Bowie projected outward: songs, characters, costumes, performances and films. His interest in Tibet made me think instead about what he absorbed from the world around him.
What fascinated him beyond performance? What ideas remained important when there wasn't an audience?
I couldn't know the private Bowie. I could only respond to the pieces of his life I discovered, but those pieces mattered because they made the man I was painting increasingly complicated and increasingly human.
A Buddhist Temple in London
To the left I created a Buddhist temple, although naturally I couldn't leave it as a straightforward temple. I gave it something of the shape of the Tower of London, combining the two to point towards The Buddha of Suburbia.
Buddhism, suburbia and London become compressed into a single piece of architecture.
This is exactly the kind of visual puzzle I loved creating throughout the work. Rather than simply illustrating a title, I could pull its ideas apart and rebuild them into something that initially looked slightly strange.
Once the reference is understood, the strange object suddenly has a reason to exist.
Bowie the Artist
There was another Bowie I couldn't ignore: the visual artist.
As a painter myself, this interested me enormously. For most people Bowie's music understandably dominates his legacy, but his creativity wasn't confined to sound, and his own visual artwork therefore had to find its way into mine.
There is something beautifully circular about that: an artist painting an artist who is usually described as a musician, while placing that musician's artwork inside her own.
It also returned me to something I had gradually realised while creating the paintings. I wasn't fascinated simply by David Bowie's fame; I was fascinated by his need to create and by the many different places he found for that creativity to go.
I understood that.
Creativity Doesn't Stay in Its Box
Perhaps that is one reason this artwork became so physically adventurous for me.
I began with paint, but paint wasn't enough. I wanted metal and glass, openings through canvases, objects sitting above the painted surface and physical connections between one canvas and another.
The idea kept demanding more from me.
While researching someone who seemed equally unwilling to remain confined to one creative language, breaking those boundaries felt completely appropriate. Bowie had become more than my subject; his creative freedom was giving my own creativity permission to misbehave.
Something More Personal Is Approaching
Amongst the art, music, mountains and strange creatures, the atmosphere now begins changing again.
The public Bowie is still present, but another life is coming forward.
Iman appears, and she isn't a character, persona or lyric that I have transformed into a visual joke. She belongs to the real life behind all of it.
That distinction matters because, after spending so long chasing Bowie through everything he created, I was finally approaching something quieter: marriage, children, family and the people behind the performer.
Perhaps this is where the title of the entire artwork begins to turn back on itself.
We started with David Jones and then almost lost him inside David Bowie.
Towards the end of the final painting, the man behind all those creations begins to come back into view.
Chapter Four
Behind Bowie: Love, Family and the Man Himself
Iman has a strong presence in this final section of the painting because she had a strong presence in Bowie's life.
After all the invented women, men, aliens, monsters and alter egos we have encountered, there is something very different about painting the person with whom he actually chose to share his life.
I didn't want Iman tucked away as another small biographical reference. By this stage I was interested in what existed when Bowie wasn't performing for us, and his marriage offered a glimpse towards a life that belonged to the man rather than the mythology surrounding him.
Iman
Bowie and Iman married in 1992, and from everything I discovered while researching them, theirs appeared to have been a deeply important relationship.
For an artwork filled with transformations, there is something grounding about her presence.
She doesn't need a costume or an elaborate visual joke to explain why she is there. She represents something real within a painting populated by so much invention.
I had spent months chasing Bowie through characters he had constructed for the world. With Iman, I began looking instead at the life he had constructed for himself.
That distinction interested me.
The Man Who Came Home
Fame creates a peculiar illusion that somebody somehow belongs to everybody.
We see the photographs, watch the performances, read the interviews and gradually build our own version of a person we have never met. Bowie complicated that even further because he deliberately gave us so many versions to choose from.
But none of those versions went home at the end of the day.
There was still a husband and father underneath them.
I liked allowing that Bowie into the painting because it quietly challenges everything that came before. The enormous metal spider, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke and the Goblin King may be visually spectacular, but none of them is the whole man.
Perhaps they never were.
The Children
Family enters the imagery through Bowie's children.
His son Duncan was born Zowie Bowie, a name so wonderfully suited to this entire story that it almost sounds like another character. He later became known as Duncan Jones, stepping away from the extraordinary name he had been given and establishing his own identity.
That interested me because identity has been running through these paintings from the very beginning.
David Jones became David Bowie.
David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust and countless other creations.
Then his son, born Zowie Bowie, chose Duncan Jones.
Names change.
Identities change.
People decide what they want to carry forward and what they want to leave behind.
In a work called The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones, that felt particularly appropriate.
Moon
Bowie and Iman's daughter Alexandria, known as Lexi, also belongs within this more personal part of the story.
Around this area I used moon imagery and flowers to create connections between names, family and the visual world of the painting.
By now I wasn't interested in separating a reference neatly from its surroundings. I wanted one idea to grow into another, so names could suggest objects, objects could suggest landscapes and personal references could sit beside musical ones.
The moon also gave me another beautiful circular form to play with.
Earlier in the paintings, celestial objects belonged to Bowie's enormous science-fiction universe. We had Major Tom looking towards Earth, Starmen, Mars and black holes.
Here, the celestial imagery feels different.
It has become intimate.
The Moon Flowers
The flowers around Bowie are moonflowers.
I chose them because they allowed the natural world to become part of this web of lunar references, but they also changed the atmosphere of the painting.
Look back at some of the landscapes we have travelled through: the dystopian city of Diamond Dogs, the darkness surrounding the Thin White Duke, the Berlin Wall and the impossible architecture of Labyrinth.
Now there are flowers.
It is a surprisingly gentle place to arrive after everything that has happened.
I didn't consciously set out to create a conventional happy ending, and I don't think that would have suited Bowie anyway. What I wanted was a sense that the landscape itself had changed as his life changed.
The theatrical worlds haven't completely disappeared, but something softer has been allowed to grow amongst them.
The Cat's Whiskers
Then, because this is still my Bowie painting and I couldn't remain sentimental for too long, there are the cat's whiskers.
This was another tiny personal reference I discovered and couldn't resist incorporating.
These details are important to me because they bring the enormous cultural figure back down to earth. They remind us that a life isn't made entirely from career-defining moments.
It is also made from private jokes, family stories, pets, habits and peculiar little details that would never appear on a list of someone's greatest achievements.
Those are often the things that make a person feel most real.
Hours
Hours also enters this later landscape.
By this point I had become interested in the older Bowie looking backwards as much as forwards. The idea of time feels particularly appropriate towards the end of an artwork that has physically carried us through decades of one person's life.
We began with a child and an open trunk in an attic. Since then we have watched identities appear and disappear, fashions change, music evolve and entire worlds rise and collapse around him.
Time has been present all along, even when I wasn't painting clocks.
Now we are becoming increasingly aware of it.
Earthling
Earthling gave me another Bowie to paint, but by this point I saw the personas differently.
The Union Jack coat is unmistakable, and visually it was irresistible to me, particularly because of my own British connection with Bowie and his music.
Yet this no longer feels like Ziggy.
I don't look at Earthling Bowie and see a character threatening to consume the person underneath. I see an established artist still experimenting with his own image and still refusing to become visually predictable.
That difference matters.
The young Bowie seemed to use transformation to create himself.
The older Bowie could transform because he already knew he didn't have to remain anything.
The Man Holding the Moon
Towards the end of the painting Bowie sits amongst the flowers holding the moon.
For me, it became one of the quieter images within an artwork that is often determined to shout.
There is still surrealism. A man holding the moon in his hand is hardly realism.
But the feeling has changed.
I no longer needed Bowie to become a giant spider or send him travelling through a black hole. I could allow him simply to sit within the world his life had created around him.
Family is nearby. His art is nearby. The mountains are behind him. References to decades of creativity surround him.
The spectacle has begun to settle.
David Jones Is Still There
Perhaps this is the point where I began finding the person I had placed inside the attic at the very beginning.
Not because I believed I had discovered the "real David Bowie." I hadn't met him, and no amount of research could give me ownership of somebody else's private self.
What I had discovered was something simpler.
Behind every extraordinary public identity was still an ordinary human life being lived.
Bowie could become almost anything on a stage, but he could also love someone, raise children, make art, grow older and go home.
That humanity mattered to me by the end.
It prevented the painting from becoming a shrine to celebrity.
I wanted a life.
And just when I thought I was approaching the end of that life story, something happened that I could never have planned.
I had begun these paintings believing David Bowie had effectively withdrawn from music.
Then, while I was still working on them, he suddenly returned.
No announcement.
No great build-up.
A new song appeared.
Where Are We Now?
And the artwork I thought I understood had to change with him.
Chapter Five
Where Are We Now? Bowie Changes the Painting
There is a problem with painting the life of someone who is still alive.
They can change the ending.
When I began The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones in November 2012, David Bowie had been largely absent from public musical life for years.
I was working backwards through the extraordinary story he had already created, gathering references, reading about his life and trying to compress decades of creativity into three interconnected paintings.
I thought I knew the story I was painting.
Then Bowie surprised everyone.
Including me.
Where Are We Now?
On 8 January 2013, his sixty-sixth birthday, Bowie released Where Are We Now?
There had been no long promotional campaign preparing the world for his return. After years of relative silence, suddenly there was a new David Bowie song.
And I was in the middle of painting David Bowie.
I couldn't believe the timing.
Here I was trying to document this enormous creative life, carefully working my way through the different periods, when the person I was painting suddenly stepped back into his own story.
The painting was no longer dealing entirely with the past.
Bowie had caught up with me.
The Story Wasn't Finished
There was something wonderfully appropriate about it.
I had spent months painting a man who repeatedly refused to stay where people expected him to remain.
Every time one version of Bowie became familiar, another appeared.
Now he had done it again.
Only this time I wasn't reading about it in a book written years later.
It was happening while my paint was still wet.
That changed how I felt about the final section.
I couldn't simply ignore it because it wasn't part of my original plan. If this artwork really was going to follow Bowie's metamorphic life, then the metamorphosis had just continued.
The painting had to respond.
Adding Berlin Again
Where Are We Now? immediately returned Bowie to Berlin, the city we had already travelled through in the second painting.
That fascinated me because the journey suddenly began folding back on itself.
Earlier, Berlin had represented movement forward. We passed through the wall and physically entered the third canvas.
Now, towards the end of the artwork, Bowie was looking backwards towards that same city.
Places from his past reappeared in the song.
Memory had entered the story.
The younger Bowie had gone to Berlin and created.
The older Bowie was looking back and remembering.
That gave the Berlin imagery another meaning for me.
It was no longer simply somewhere we had passed through.
It had become somewhere Bowie himself was returning to.
Time Changes Everything
That is one of the things I find most moving when I look at the three paintings now.
At the beginning, everything is ahead of David Jones.
The masks are waiting in the attic. The music is waiting. Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, Berlin, the films, the enormous stages and all those extraordinary creative lives have yet to happen.
By the time we reach Where Are We Now?, Bowie can look backwards at them.
The same places mean something different because the person looking at them has changed.
I think that is true for all of us.
We return to places, songs, photographs and memories, but we never return as exactly the same person who left them.
Time changes the viewer as much as it changes the view.
The Painting Became Alive
Until that moment I had been responding to Bowie's history.
Now, briefly, the artwork and its subject were moving forward together.
I loved that.
It made the painting feel strangely alive.
I could plan the composition, research the references and decide where everything belonged, but I couldn't control Bowie.
He was still capable of throwing something new into the story.
Perhaps I should have expected that.
After everything I had learned about him, the least surprising thing David Bowie could possibly do was surprise me.
One More Bowie
Where Are We Now? also introduced another Bowie into the work, but this one felt very different from the characters we encountered earlier.
There was no Ziggy spectacle.
No lightning bolt announcing another enormous persona.
No Thin White Duke standing immaculately within the darkness.
This was an older Bowie.
Reflective.
Looking backwards.
The transformation hadn't stopped, but it had become quieter.
And perhaps that was the most appropriate Bowie to encounter towards the end of my painting.
An Ending I Couldn't Paint
Of course, when I created the work, I didn't know what would happen next.
I couldn't know that Bowie would release more music.
I couldn't know how the final years of his life would unfold.
And I certainly couldn't know that he would die in January 2016.
That knowledge belongs to me looking back at the painting now, not to the woman who was creating it then.
I think that distinction is important.
This wasn't painted as a memorial.
David Bowie was alive.
I had every hope that he might see it.
Sadly, he never did.
But I am glad the painting captured him while his story was still moving.
There is something rather wonderful about that.
A Tribute to a Living Artist
I had two enormous Bowie fans encouraging me while I worked: my dear glass-artist friend in New Zealand and my friend in Wales.
Their enthusiasm became part of the experience of creating it.
I also sent an image of the finished work to the author of the Bowie biography I had used during my research. More than a decade later, frustratingly, I can no longer remember which book it was, but I remember his response.
He loved the painting.
That meant a great deal to me.
I had spent months entering someone else's extraordinary creative world and trying to make something worthy of it.
I think I did.
Where Are We Now?
The title of Bowie's song asks a question that feels unexpectedly perfect for this point in my own artwork.
Where are we now?
We have travelled from a boy called David Jones sitting inside the rooms of a house to one of the most recognisable artists in the world.
We have followed him into space, along a yellow brick road, through ruined cities, across Berlin, down impossible staircases and into films, art, marriage and family.
We have watched him create identity after identity.
But there is one journey left.
We need to go back to the beginning.
Back past the Goblin King and the Thin White Duke.
Past Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane and Ziggy Stardust.
Past Major Tom.
Past Bowie.
Back to the attic.
Because after spending all this time looking at who David Jones became, there is one final question I want to ask.
Did we ever really find the man behind all those masks?
Chapter Six
Finding David Jones
We began this journey in an attic.
Inside was a trunk marked Davy, and inside that trunk were masks.
At the time, they represented possibilities: the different faces and identities waiting to emerge from the young David Jones.
Now, after travelling through all three paintings, those masks mean something more to me.
We know what happened when the trunk was opened.
David Jones became David Bowie, and Bowie discovered that identity could be something wonderfully fluid. He could construct it, perform it, abandon it, revisit it and completely reinvent it.
The masks escaped the attic and eventually filled almost the entire artwork.
Who Was David Bowie?
When I began researching Bowie, I thought I was going to paint the life of one man.
Instead, I found dozens of him.
There was the boy playing with his mother's lipstick, the young musician finding his way, Major Tom looking towards Earth and Ziggy Stardust walking towards his own destruction. There were Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke, followed by the actor, painter, collaborator, husband and father.
Every time I thought I had found Bowie, another version appeared.
Eventually I realised that perhaps trying to identify one definitive Bowie was missing the point.
Transformation wasn't something that happened around his career.
It was part of his creativity.
The Things That Followed Us
Looking across the finished work, I can now see ideas travelling through it that I hadn't necessarily understood fully when I first began.
Masks appear and reappear as identity changes. Eyes become something much larger than physical features, eventually expanding into the black holes of Bowie's universe. Spiders begin with the Spiders from Mars, grow into the enormous metal Bowie spider and return much later in glass.
Windows allow us to look into the private rooms of the first painting, while doors and openings take us from one period into another.
Even the materials transform.
Paint becomes metal. Metal gives way to glass. Objects escape from the surface, and the boundaries between the three canvases begin to disappear.
The artwork itself metamorphoses alongside its subject.
Perhaps that is the part I find most satisfying now.
I didn't simply paint transformation.
I allowed transformation to happen to the painting.
The Bowie I Found
After all my research, I don't believe I found the "real" David Bowie.
I wouldn't make that claim.
I never met him, and knowing somebody's music, reading about their life and studying their public history doesn't give us access to the person they were behind closed doors.
What I found instead was my interpretation of him.
I found someone enormously curious and creatively restless, someone capable of taking influences from music, theatre, fashion, film, art and the world around him and turning them into something unmistakably his own.
I found humour too.
That mattered enormously to me.
There were so many moments during the creation of these paintings when Bowie made me laugh, whether through something he had done, something I had discovered or simply the ridiculous visual connection his story had triggered inside my own head.
That sense of play became part of my tribute.
And Somewhere in There, I Found Myself
There is another transformation hidden inside these paintings.
Mine.
Lady Gaga had already encouraged me to question what a canvas could be, but Bowie allowed me to push much further.
By the time I had finished, I wasn't particularly interested in whether something still qualified neatly as a painting.
If I needed a metal telescope, I used one. If Bowie needed to become a giant spider, I put him above the canvas. If the Glass Spider needed actual glass, I found someone who could create it. If one part of his life needed to lead physically into another, I cut openings and built pathways between the canvases.
The story decided what the artwork needed to become.
That freedom stayed with me.
Perhaps that is one of the greatest things one artist can take from another: not imitation, but permission to trust your own imagination.
Back to David Jones
So we return to the attic.
The trunk is still there.
The masks are still waiting inside it.
But now we know what they are capable of becoming.
We know the extraordinary distance between David Jones and David Bowie, while also knowing that one could never have existed without the other.
And perhaps that is why I still love the title The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones.
This was never really a painting about a collection of costumes.
It was about becoming.
About creativity refusing to stand still.
About the identities we construct and the parts of ourselves we reveal, conceal, discard and carry forward.
Bowie made that process spectacularly visible.
Three Paintings. One Metamorphosis.
When the three paintings are viewed together, I don't see them simply as a beginning, middle and end.
I see three different states of becoming.
The first painting belongs to David Jones.
It begins inside the house, with childhood, family, early music and the masks waiting in the attic. As we move outside, reality gradually begins to loosen. Lyrics become creatures, clothes become landscape, humour creeps into the architecture and Major Tom eventually points us away from Earth.
David Jones is still visible, but Bowie is beginning to escape from him.
The second painting belongs to the personas.
This is where Bowie explodes.
Ziggy Stardust arrives with his Spiders from Mars, followed by Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, Diamond Dogs and the Thin White Duke. The landscape becomes as unstable as the identities inhabiting it: Mars, black holes, yellow brick roads, ruined cities, masks and darkness.
This is the painting in which Bowie almost disappears inside Bowie.
The characters become enormous, and the question running underneath them is no longer simply who Bowie can become, but whether the person creating all these identities can remain visible amongst them.
Then comes Berlin.
I built the wall between these worlds for a reason.
And I put a door through it.
Because the third painting needed to feel as though we were entering another kind of life.
Here the great procession of personas begins to recede. Bowie becomes actor, performer, collaborator and visual artist. We travel through theatre and film, impossible staircases and the Glass Spider before the landscape opens into Tibet, Buddhism, art, Iman, children, family and the quieter references of a life beyond the stage.
The first painting asks:
Who might David Jones become?
The second asks:
How many David Bowies can one man create?
And the third asks something much quieter:
Who remains when he no longer needs the masks?
That is why these could never have been three unrelated paintings.
The telescope carries us from one into another. The Berlin Wall divides them, but its door invites us through. Images disappear and return. Spiders change material. Characters die and re-emerge. The private becomes public before gradually becoming personal again.
The three canvases don't simply sit beside each other.
They depend upon each other.
Take away the first and we lose the man before the mythology.
Take away the second and we lose the extraordinary act of self-creation.
Take away the third and we never discover that Bowie was larger than the personas that made him famous.
Together they form the metamorphosis.
David Jones becomes David Bowie.
David Bowie becomes everyone.
And eventually, somewhere behind them all, we begin looking for David Jones again.
More Than a Decade Later
More than a decade after creating this work, I can see things in it that I probably couldn't see while I was buried inside the research and the making.
It is chaotic, funny, serious, theatrical, personal and occasionally completely ridiculous.
I wouldn't want it any other way.
David Bowie never got to see it, and I will always wish that he had. I would particularly have loved to know whether he understood some of my more mischievous references and whether they made him laugh.
I hope they would have.
What I do know is that I loved creating it.
I entered the project intending to paint a tribute to David Bowie and came out having pushed my own work somewhere new.
So did I ever find David Jones behind all those masks?
Perhaps not.
Perhaps none of us outside his private world ever could.
But somewhere across these three paintings, between the boy in the house and the man sitting amongst the moonflowers, I found something that interested me even more.
I found the extraordinary creative journey between them.
And that is my David Bowie.
The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones.
START AT THE BEGINNING
Begin inside the attic with David Jones and follow the extraordinary creation of Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and the personas that followed.
YOU'VE READ THE ART. NOW SEE THE WHOLE WORK.
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