David Bowie Art: Inside The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones Part 1
- Julia O'Sullivan of Jupigio-Artwork
- 1 day ago
- 34 min read
Part One: From David Jones to the Thin White Duke
The Stories, Symbols and Hidden References Inside My David Bowie Paintings
There is no single David Bowie in these paintings.
There couldn't be.
The deeper I travelled into his life, the more Bowies I found.
There was David Jones, the boy before the name became famous. There was the emerging musician, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke. There was the actor, artist, husband and father.
And somewhere amongst all of them was the man himself.
That became the fascination behind The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones.
But if you look at these three paintings expecting a straightforward biography, you may become very lost.
And that is rather the point.
This Painting Has to Be Read
I have never been particularly interested in simply painting what somebody looks like.
I want to know what I can do with their story.
So throughout these paintings, facts collide with lyrics. Music becomes imagery. Anecdotes become strange little scenes. Costumes become landscapes. Films appear in unexpected places. People become creatures. Objects have double meanings and sometimes I have taken something completely literally simply because the resulting image amused me.
That last part is important.
Because Bowie gave me permission to have fun.
There is humour throughout this work.
Some of it is Bowie's.
Some of it is mine.
And occasionally the two became so entangled that even I had to wonder where one stopped and the other began.
Nothing Is Here by Accident
At first glance the paintings can appear chaotic.
They aren't.
Almost everything has a reason for being there.
A tiny object that seems insignificant may refer to a song.
A peculiar figure may have grown from a lyric.
Something absurd may originate from an anecdote I discovered about Bowie's life.
A piece of architecture might separate one period from another.
And sometimes the physical artwork itself becomes part of the story.
Look closely and you will find recurring masks, eyes, spiders, windows, doors, roads and stairs.
They lead us through the paintings.
They also lead us through Bowie.
Some references are relatively easy to recognise.
Others are buried so deeply that without an explanation you might never discover them.
That is what this journal is for.
Three Paintings, But One Journey
The paintings move broadly through Bowie's life, but I don't see them as three separate artworks.
One leads into another.
We begin inside the private rooms of David Jones.
Gradually that recognisable world starts changing.
The characters become stranger. The landscapes become more theatrical. Bowie begins constructing identities until eventually we enter a world almost completely populated by his creations.
Then the atmosphere changes again.
We move beyond the great personas and into film, theatre, art, relationships, family and the later stages of his creative life.
The physical journey through the paintings became my way of representing a life that seemed incapable of standing still.
Look for the Man Behind the Masks
There is one question I keep returning to when I look at this work now.
Where is David Jones?
He is there at the beginning.
Then Bowie arrives.
Then the personas arrive.
Masks appear again and again.
Characters consume entire landscapes.
The public image becomes enormous.
And yet underneath all of it there must still have been the person who created them.
Perhaps that is why I called the work The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones rather than simply David Bowie.
The transformation interests me as much as the star.
This journal is my opportunity to take the paintings apart again.
Not physically, thankfully.
But piece by piece.
Room by room.
Character by character.
I want to show you what I put there, where the ideas came from and how I interpreted the extraordinary collection of music, stories, performances and identities I discovered.
Some of it is serious.
Some of it is deeply symbolic.
Some of it is completely ridiculous.
That feels rather appropriate.
So don't stand back and look at the paintings as a whole just yet.
Come closer.
We're going to start at the beginning.
Before the Starman.
Before Ziggy.
Before Bowie.
We're going looking for David Jones.
The Story Continues: Beyond the Masks →
Chapter One
Before Bowie: Inside the House of Davy Jones
If you want to understand this painting, don't begin with David Bowie.
Begin with David Jones.
Before Ziggy Stardust, before Major Tom drifted into space, before the costumes, characters and carefully constructed identities, there was a boy growing up inside an ordinary family.
That is why I began the first painting with a house.
The building is based around Haddon Hall, the large Victorian house in Beckenham where Bowie lived during an important period of his early creative life. But in my painting I wasn't interested in simply recreating a building associated with him.
I wanted to use the house as a way of opening him up.
So instead of standing outside looking at Bowie, we are allowed to peer through the windows.
And what we find inside is David Jones.
The Attic
At the top of the house is the attic.
For me, attics have always felt like places where families put the things they don't quite know what to do with.
Old possessions.
Memories.
Secrets.
Things we keep but don't necessarily want on display.
So the attic seemed the natural place to begin.
Inside it sits a figure beside an open trunk marked Davy.
The name amused me immediately because David Bowie was born David Jones, and I couldn't resist the association with Davy Jones's Locker.
But inside my Davy's locker there isn't treasure.
There are masks.
Each represents another identity.
Another face.
Another possibility.
And amongst them is Bowie.
I find that particularly interesting looking back at the painting now, because I effectively placed the future Bowie inside David Jones before allowing him to emerge into the rest of the work.
The person the world would eventually know is still packed away.
Waiting.
Why the Masks Matter
Masks appear repeatedly throughout all three paintings.
At first I used them because they seemed perfect for Bowie.
His career became inseparable from transformation, performance and the creation of different identities.
But here, in the first painting, they mean something slightly different.
These aren't yet the spectacular public personas.
This is the private world.
The people inside the rooms are masked too.
I didn't want to pretend I could truly enter the private lives of people I had never known. I was working from stories, photographs, accounts and fragments of another person's history.
So their faces remain concealed.
We can look through the windows.
But we cannot completely enter.
I like that boundary.
Because however much we know about a famous person, there is always another life taking place behind the image we are given.
And David Bowie would eventually become exceptionally good at controlling that image.
The Pictures on the Wall
Behind the figure in the attic are two paintings of distressed faces.
They relate to the more difficult aspects of Bowie's family history.
I didn't want to turn those experiences into a literal scene or make them into a spectacle.
Instead, they sit quietly in the background.
Almost like something inherited.
Something present without needing to announce itself.
That is another reason they belong in the attic.
Not everything that shapes us is visible to the outside world.
Some things remain stored away.
A Child With His Mother's Lipstick
Move down into another room and the atmosphere changes.
Here I used a much smaller, gentler story.
I had read an account of David as a young child sitting on his mother's bed and playing with lipstick from her handbag.
I loved it.
It was such a tiny human detail compared with the enormous theatrical figure he would become.
And perhaps that is precisely why it stayed with me.
When we look backwards at someone who became extraordinary, there is a temptation to search their childhood for evidence that they were always destined to become who they became.
I don't know whether a little boy playing with his mother's lipstick tells us anything profound about the future David Bowie.
Maybe it does.
Maybe it doesn't.
But knowing what came later makes the image irresistible.
The experimentation with appearance.
The refusal to be restricted by expectations.
The enjoyment of transformation.
The face as something that can be altered.
Perhaps I'm reading backwards.
But that is part of what this painting does.
We already know what the child does not.
We know who he is going to become.
The Music Enters the House
Elsewhere in the rooms is a gramophone representing his father.
His brother is also present through the story of music.
David's older half-brother was an important influence on his developing musical interests, introducing him to different sounds, including jazz.
That mattered to me because Bowie didn't simply appear fully formed.
Before all the extraordinary visual identities came listening.
Influence.
Discovery.
Other people opening doors.
The music had to enter the house before Bowie could eventually take it outside.
Down Into the Basement
Then we descend again.
In the basement I painted one of David's early bands, the Konrads.
The figures are based upon an early photograph, but once again I have concealed them behind masks.
Here we are much closer to the beginning of the performer.
The boy has discovered music.
Now he is beginning to participate in it.
But he still isn't Bowie.
Not yet.
That distinction was important to me.
I didn't want to rush towards the famous man because the transformation becomes far more interesting when we remember that it wasn't inevitable.
There was a period when David Jones was simply trying things.
Playing.
Learning.
Experimenting.
Finding out what fitted.
And perhaps, just as importantly, what didn't.
Looking Through the Windows
The windows became one of the most important ideas in this first painting.
They allow us glimpses.
We can see childhood.
Family.
Music.
Private moments.
Early ambition.
But a window works both ways.
It allows us to look in.
It also allows someone inside to look out.
And outside these rooms, something very different is beginning to happen.
The quiet interior cannot contain him for much longer.
The world beyond Haddon Hall becomes stranger.
Clothes begin turning into landscape.
Lyrics begin becoming creatures.
Reality starts bending.
The ordinary visual language of David Jones begins giving way to something far more theatrical.
Bowie is starting to appear.
But before we follow him outside, there is something worth remembering.
The world would eventually see the costumes.
The characters.
The performances.
The spectacle.
The star.
I chose to begin somewhere else.
With rooms.
With family.
With music.
With secrets.
With masks packed inside a trunk.
Because before David Bowie could spend a lifetime asking what else he might become, there first had to be someone underneath all those transformations.
His name was David Jones.
And he is where my painting begins.
Chapter Two
When David Jones Begins to Become Bowie
Step outside the windows of Haddon Hall and the painting changes.
Inside, I had kept David Jones contained within rooms: childhood, family, early music and the private beginnings of a life.
Outside, containment begins to disappear.
This is where I wanted the painting to start feeling less like the world David Jones inhabited and more like the world David Bowie was beginning to create.
Reality starts to bend.
Clothes become landscape.
Lyrics become creatures.
Music becomes imagery.
And the ordinary begins giving way to something much stranger.
Bowie is emerging.
Haddon Hall
Haddon Hall was an obvious anchor for this part of the painting because it represented more than somewhere Bowie lived.
It was a place associated with an intensely creative period of his life.
Friends came and went. Music was being made. Ideas were developing. His son was born during this period. The person living inside this house was moving increasingly towards the artist the world would eventually recognise.
I used the familiar image of Bowie outside Haddon Hall as inspiration for the structure and atmosphere of this section.
But I didn't want to reproduce a photograph.
I wanted to take the feeling of that period and allow my own imagination to get hold of it.
Once that happened, the world around the house began changing.
Wearing the Landscape
One of the things that fascinated me about Bowie was clothing.
Not simply fashion, but the way he understood that appearance could become part of performance.
So rather than just painting a collection of famous outfits onto figures, I started using fragments of his clothing as part of the environment itself.
The kimono.
The quilted outfits.
The knitted catsuit.
They become the ground beneath the painting.
Bowie's image has quite literally entered the landscape.
I liked the idea that you don't simply look at the clothes.
You travel across them.
Because as Bowie develops, appearance becomes increasingly difficult to separate from the music and the performance.
The visual identity is becoming part of the art.
London Begins to Dream
Behind Haddon Hall I created London rooftops beneath an enormous moon and a swirling sky.
I wasn't interested in painting London accurately.
This isn't a map.
It is atmosphere.
The recognisable city is still there, but something is happening to it.
It is becoming theatrical.
Almost dreamlike.
That was important because we are standing at a point in the painting where reality and imagination begin merging.
David Jones still belongs to this recognisable world.
Bowie is about to transform it.
The Monster in the Tree
Then things become stranger.
Amongst the trees is a creature.
This came from Bowie's song The Width of a Circle and the encounter with the monster beneath the tree.
What interested me most was the revelation that the monster was also the narrator himself.
So I didn't simply want a generic monster lurking in the background.
For me, the creature became a distorted Bowie-like being, almost Gollum-like in its appearance.
I loved the idea.
A man encounters a monster.
Then discovers himself within it.
Considering how much of this artwork eventually became concerned with identity, alter egos and the different versions of ourselves that we construct, it felt perfectly at home here.
And it is one of the first moments where a Bowie lyric stops being words and becomes something physically alive inside my painting.
That happens increasingly from this point onwards.
Bowie the Mime
Another Bowie appears through his connection with mime.
It would have been very easy to think only about Bowie as a musician, but the more I researched him, the clearer it became that performance was much broader than singing.
Movement mattered.
Theatre mattered.
Presentation mattered.
The body itself could communicate.
That interested me because the Bowie I was beginning to discover wasn't simply someone who wrote songs and then found interesting clothes to wear while performing them.
The visual and theatrical elements were becoming inseparable from the music.
He wasn't just making songs.
He was learning how to create worlds around them.
An Ice Cream Advert and an Alien
Then there are the references that simply delighted me.
Bowie appeared in a Lyons Maid ice-cream advertisement directed by Ridley Scott.
Ridley Scott would, of course, later direct Alien.
I love Alien.
That was enough for my brain.
So an alien appears on the rooftop.
Is it an important moment in the history of David Bowie?
Probably not.
Did it belong in my painting?
Absolutely.
This is where understanding how I work becomes important.
I wasn't trying to create an academic diagram of Bowie's career where every image had to be ranked according to historical importance.
I was responding to what I found.
Sometimes something fascinated me.
Sometimes it moved me.
Sometimes it offered an interesting visual metaphor.
And sometimes a connection was simply too much fun to ignore.
The alien was one of those.
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground also enters this world.
Their influence formed part of the musical landscape Bowie was absorbing, and their famous visual imagery gave me another opportunity to make the reference without simply writing a band name somewhere in the painting.
That is something I enjoyed throughout this entire work.
I didn't want labels.
I wanted clues.
If you recognise them, wonderful.
If you don't, the painting should still work without them.
And if you discover them years later, even better.
The Three Tuns
The Three Tuns appears too, another place connected with this period of Bowie's creative life and the people around him.
Places matter in these paintings.
They ground all the madness.
Amongst the monsters, costumes and increasingly surreal imagery are real locations where people actually met, talked, performed and experimented.
Bowie's extraordinary world didn't appear from nowhere.
It grew from rooms, streets, clubs, friendships and other creative people.
That ordinary foundation makes the extraordinary parts more interesting to me.
Finding Ziggy Before Ziggy Exists
There are also little clues pointing towards what is coming.
Among them is the famous telephone box associated with the Ziggy Stardust album imagery.
There is also the tailor's shop connected in my research with the name Ziggy, with the cowboy-star imagery incorporated into the scene.
At this point in my painting, Ziggy hasn't properly arrived.
But I wanted his shadow to begin appearing.
The future is starting to leak backwards into the present.
Just as the Bowie mask was already waiting inside the trunk in the attic, pieces of the characters to come are beginning to gather outside.
Something is forming.
When Biography Becomes My Imagination
This part of the painting probably tells you a great deal about the way my mind works.
I could read a fact about Bowie and immediately see an image.
Then that image would connect with something else.
A lyric connected to a creature.
A director connected to a film.
A piece of clothing became a landscape.
A building became a container for a period of someone's life.
One reference led to another until the painting became a giant visual puzzle.
I wasn't illustrating a list of facts.
I was allowing those facts to collide inside my imagination.
That is why the painting sometimes makes perfect sense and at other times becomes completely absurd.
Both belong there.
Bowie's world gave me room for both.
The World Outside the Window
When I look back at this section now, the difference between the inside and outside of Haddon Hall feels particularly important.
Inside are small rooms.
Private stories.
Family.
Beginnings.
Outside, everything expands.
The moon is enormous.
Clothes cover the ground.
Creatures inhabit trees.
Aliens appear on rooftops.
Music, theatre and imagination begin changing the physical world.
David Jones hasn't disappeared.
But he is becoming increasingly difficult to see.
Something larger is taking his place.
And waiting nearby is a man looking through a telescope.
Major Tom.
He is pointing us away from London.
Away from Haddon Hall.
Away from Earth itself.
The transformation is about to become much bigger.
Chapter Three
When Bowie's Songs Became Pictures
By this point in the painting, I had stopped thinking about David Bowie purely as a person whose life I was depicting.
His music had started giving me pictures.
That was when the real fun began.
A lyric didn't have to remain a lyric.
A song title didn't have to be written somewhere for the viewer to recognise it.
A person Bowie knew didn't necessarily have to appear as an ordinary portrait.
Everything could be altered, exaggerated, hidden or turned into something else.
I could take Bowie's words and run them through my own imagination.
Sometimes the result was symbolic.
Sometimes it was ridiculous.
Often it was both.
And because Bowie himself seemed to have such an extraordinary sense of theatre and humour, somehow none of it felt out of place.
Andy Warhol in Stained Glass
The stained-glass windows became one of my favourite parts of this first canvas.
They were also slightly torturous to paint.
The portraits are tiny, less than an inch square, and I had seven of them to create.
At that scale there is very little room for error.
Andy Warhol was particularly troublesome.
My first attempt was dreadful.
Instead of Andy Warhol, I had somehow managed to paint something resembling a goat.
Once I had seen the goat, I couldn't unsee it.
So out he came.
I searched for another way of representing Warhol and eventually found one that immediately made sense to me.
Rather than simply reproducing his face, I turned the idea back onto Warhol himself.
I recreated the visual feeling of his famous Marilyn Monroe portraits, but replaced Marilyn with Andy.
That was much more satisfying.
Bowie had written a song about Warhol, and now I was creating my own artistic tribute to Bowie creating an artistic tribute to Warhol.
There was something wonderfully circular about it.
Apparently Warhol wasn't particularly impressed by Bowie's song.
I could only hope he might have been slightly kinder about my window.
Hiding Myself Inside Bowie
Then I did something I have a habit of doing in my work.
I put myself in it.
I like appearing somewhere in my paintings, although rarely as an obvious self-portrait.
For Bowie, there was only one sensible choice.
The Laughing Gnome.
I connected with the character because there was something mischievous and slightly absurd about him that appealed to my own sense of humour.
So I became the gnome.
Hidden between the first and second canvases, I sit on a little toadstool with my glass of dandelion wine.
There are other distorted versions of me tucked into the imagery too, including private jokes between my husband and me.
I even played with the song's strange little world elsewhere in the painting, including the gnome inhabiting the chimney.
It amused me enormously.
And I think that matters.
This was never intended to be a solemn shrine to David Bowie.
It was a tribute made through creativity.
Bowie could be profound, but he could also be wonderfully strange.
I wanted the painting to have that freedom too.
A Private Joke in a Public Painting
I love putting details into my work that perhaps only a handful of people will ever completely understand.
There is something intimate about it.
Thousands of people might look at the same image, but one tiny detail can belong to just two people.
It doesn't matter if everybody else understands it.
The painting still works.
That became particularly appropriate with Bowie because his own work gave me so many opportunities to hide things.
There are references for devoted Bowie fans.
There are references most people will recognise.
There are things that require a little knowledge.
And there are things that may make absolutely no sense until I explain them.
The painting became layered according to how deeply you wanted to look.
The Canvas Was No Longer Enough
Something else was happening at the same time.
The images I could see in my head were beginning to resist staying flat.
I didn't always want to paint an object.
Sometimes I wanted the object to actually exist.
That becomes increasingly important as we move through the three canvases.
Things begin projecting outwards.
Glass enters the work.
Metal enters it.
The physical space between the canvases becomes useful.
The artwork starts behaving less like a conventional painting and more like a constructed world.
And one of the most important examples is waiting at the edge of this first canvas.
Major Tom
Major Tom gave me the perfect way to leave the first world behind.
I didn't simply want to paint an astronaut.
I placed him inside a metal telescope.
The telescope points towards Planet Earth on the next canvas.
The reference comes from Space Oddity and that unforgettable image of Earth appearing blue while Major Tom drifts beyond it.
But for my painting, Major Tom had another job.
He had to move us.
Until now we have remained relatively close to David Jones.
We have travelled through the rooms of his private world.
We have stepped outside Haddon Hall.
We have watched London become increasingly strange.
Songs have become creatures and anecdotes have become images.
But we are still, just about, on Earth.
Major Tom changes that.
The telescope physically bridges the journey towards the next canvas.
He looks away from the world we have just explored and points us towards another.
That was exactly what I needed.
Because the Bowie waiting on the other side is no longer simply an emerging musician from London.
He is about to become something otherworldly.
And Then There Was a Spider
Near that transition another creature begins to appear.
A spider.
At this point it is easy to dismiss it as another playful Bowie reference.
Don't.
The spider will become increasingly important.
It will change form.
It will grow.
It will become part of the physical construction of the artwork and eventually return much later in Bowie's story.
For now, it simply helps pull us forward.
The rooms of David Jones are behind us.
Haddon Hall is behind us.
Even Earth is beginning to fall away.
Ahead are Mars, black holes, Starmen and a group of musicians who, in my world at least, are about to grow eight legs.
David Jones has spent the first painting becoming Bowie.
Now Bowie is going to create someone else.
His name is Ziggy Stardust.
Chapter Four
Creating Ziggy Stardust
We have left Earth.
And almost immediately, the rules change.
The second painting is where David Bowie stops simply transforming himself and begins creating entire characters with worlds of their own.
The first of them had to be Ziggy Stardust.
By the time I reached this part of the artwork, realism no longer seemed particularly useful. Ziggy wasn't real in the conventional sense anyway.
He was theatre.
Fantasy.
Music.
Science fiction.
Performance.
So rather than trying to make my version of Ziggy's world sensible, I decided to accept the madness and go with it.
And that began with the Spiders from Mars.
If They're Called Spiders, Why Not Paint Spiders?
Sometimes my thought process really is that simple.
The Spiders from Mars were Bowie's band.
So I painted them as spiders.
Actual spiders.
With instruments.
There are moments when symbolism needs careful thought and there are moments when taking something completely literally creates a far more interesting image.
This was definitely the latter.
I didn't want three conventional musicians standing behind Bowie.
That would have been far too normal for the world I was entering.
Instead, his band crawls into the painting.
It immediately tells us that we have crossed somewhere else.
The London rooms and rooftops of the first painting have disappeared.
We're in Bowie's imagination now.
And anything can happen.
But Which Spider Is Bowie?
The smaller spiders may represent the band, but there is another spider dominating this part of the work.
A huge metal one.
That spider is Bowie.
I had the metal spider made from my design because I didn't want him contained entirely within the painted surface.
He needed presence.
He needed to sit over the world he had created.
And I gave him ball bearings for eyes.
One is larger than the other.
It is a small reference to one of Bowie's most recognisable physical features: the unusual appearance of his eyes.
But turning Bowie himself into the spider gave me something more interesting than a physical likeness.
The Spiders from Mars exist inside Ziggy's story.
Bowie created the story.
So I placed him above it.
Watching.
Constructing.
Controlling.
The character exists within the fantasy.
The artist who created the character sits outside it.
For me, that distinction became increasingly important.
Because Bowie isn't Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie invented Ziggy Stardust.
And somewhere underneath both of them is still David Jones.
There are already several identities occupying the same painting.
Bowie's Eyes Become Space
I carried the reference to Bowie's eyes further into the landscape.
The unusual appearance of his pupils was caused by an injury when he was young, leaving one permanently dilated.
I didn't want simply to reproduce his eyes again.
So I made them enormous.
They became black holes.
I loved being able to take something physically recognisable about Bowie and turn it into part of Ziggy's universe.
An eye becomes a cosmic object.
A physical characteristic becomes landscape.
The man disappears and a piece of him remains hidden inside the world he has invented.
That happens repeatedly throughout these paintings.
Bowie is everywhere without necessarily appearing as Bowie.
Building a Starman
Ziggy fascinated me because he wasn't simply a costume.
He had a story.
Bowie had created an alien rock star and surrounded him with a mythology involving Starmen, the end of the world and beings arriving from beyond Earth.
That gave me wonderful material.
I could treat Ziggy almost like a character from a book rather than simply a stage persona.
So I built his world accordingly.
Space.
Mars.
Black holes.
Impossible journeys.
Strange creatures.
A place where rock music and science fiction become the same thing.
The transformation that began quietly in the attic of the first painting has now become enormous.
The boy with the masks in the trunk has created a character capable of inhabiting another planet.
The Yellow Brick Road
And then I put Ziggy on a yellow brick road.
This came from something I had read or heard discussed about Starman.
There has long been a comparison between part of the melody of Starman and Over the Rainbow.
Whether everyone agrees with that connection doesn't particularly matter to me.
Once I had heard it, I could see it.
And once I could see it, it was going into the painting.
So Ziggy's cosmic journey became a yellow brick road.
I liked what that did visually.
The Wizard of Oz is another story about travelling from an ordinary world into an extraordinary one.
Reality gives way to colour, strange characters and fantasy.
That seemed wonderfully appropriate for Bowie.
It also appealed to his theatricality.
I could imagine Ziggy walking along it.
So I let him.
Following Ziggy Through Space
The road gives the eye something to follow.
That's important in a painting containing this much information.
I wanted the viewer to travel rather than simply scan a collection of references.
Ziggy moves through this strange universe.
The road carries him.
The black holes surround him.
The spiders inhabit it.
And above everything sits Bowie, transformed into that enormous metal creature.
But the road isn't simply taking Ziggy somewhere.
It is taking him towards something.
When I created this section, I wasn't only interested in the birth of Ziggy Stardust.
I knew how his story ended.
That changed the way I saw the character.
We are looking at something spectacular that has already been given an ending.
The Creator and the Creation
This is perhaps my favourite idea within this part of the painting.
There are two Bowies here.
Not literally.
But conceptually.
There is Ziggy—the extraordinary character travelling through the fantasy.
And there is the metal spider—the creator hovering above that fantasy.
One is the invention.
The other is the inventor.
Except even that isn't completely true.
Because David Bowie is also an invention.
Underneath the spider is Bowie.
Underneath Bowie is David Jones.
Inside Bowie is Ziggy.
And suddenly trying to decide which one is the "real" person becomes almost impossible.
I think that is why painting Bowie became so fascinating to me.
Every time I thought I had found him, another version appeared.
How Do You Kill a Character?
The extraordinary thing about creating an alter ego is that eventually you have to decide what happens to it.
Ziggy had become enormous.
Recognisable.
Successful.
People wanted him.
Fans copied him.
His image had escaped Bowie and entered popular culture.
And yet Bowie wasn't going to remain Ziggy Stardust forever.
That interests me enormously as an artist.
Creating something successful is difficult enough.
Walking away from it is something else entirely.
What happens when the identity you invented becomes the identity everyone expects you to remain?
What happens when your creation becomes bigger than you?
And how do you escape it?
In my painting, the answer is waiting at the end of the yellow brick road.
Ziggy is travelling towards it.
The Spiders are playing.
Bowie watches from above.
And ahead, the Starman's journey is coming to an end.
Because before Bowie can become someone else,
Ziggy Stardust has to die.
Chapter Five
The Death of Ziggy Stardust
Follow the yellow brick road far enough and it doesn't lead to the Emerald City.
It leads to the end of Ziggy Stardust.
That ending was important to me because I didn't want to paint Ziggy simply as the spectacular character everyone remembers.
Characters have stories.
And stories have endings.
The strange alien rock star Bowie had created wasn't going to remain forever.
So somewhere in all that colour, theatre and fantasy, I needed to destroy him.
At the End of the Road
In the story I was interpreting, Ziggy's journey eventually ends violently.
The beings he has encountered turn upon him and tear him apart.
So that is what happens at the end of my yellow brick road.
The fantasy leads towards destruction.
I liked the contradiction of that.
A yellow brick road should take us somewhere magical.
Mine takes us to a dismembered rock star.
That probably says something about my sense of humour.
But it also gave me a powerful way of showing that Ziggy was never intended to be permanent.
He had been created.
He had lived.
And now he had to disappear.
When the Character Becomes Bigger Than the Man
What fascinated me was how successfully Bowie had created him.
Ziggy wasn't merely an outfit Bowie wore on stage.
People believed in the character.
They copied him.
They dressed like him.
They wanted more of him.
So I included those fans within the painting too.
They become part of Ziggy's world because once an artist releases something into the world, it no longer belongs entirely to the person who created it.
Other people take possession of it.
They imitate it.
Interpret it.
Love it.
And sometimes they don't want you to change it.
That is the strange bargain of creating something successful.
Everyone wants you to do it again.
But Bowie Moved On
This is something about Bowie that I find particularly interesting.
He could have remained with the familiar.
Instead, he kept moving.
For me as an artist, that idea resonates.
There is safety in repeating something that people already like.
There is much less safety in saying:
I've done that.
What else can I do?
Bowie seemed willing to let one creative identity finish so another could emerge.
That doesn't mean the previous one vanished.
Ziggy never really disappeared.
We are still talking about him.
People are still dressing as him.
The image survives.
But Bowie himself kept travelling.
And that is exactly what happens in my painting.
The road doesn't stop with Ziggy.
The painting keeps moving.
Aladdin Sane
Another face begins to emerge.
Aladdin Sane takes us towards America and particularly New York.
The world around Bowie shifts again.
I wanted the painting to feel as though one identity was dissolving while another atmosphere was already beginning to form.
This is something I increasingly noticed while constructing the whole work.
There are very few clean endings.
One Bowie bleeds into another.
An idea appears before the previous one has completely disappeared.
It feels less like a series of separate boxes and more like continual mutation.
That is why the word metamorphic became so appropriate.
The form changes.
But something of what existed before remains inside it.
Halloween Jack
Then we meet Halloween Jack.
By now the landscape has changed dramatically.
We are entering the world of Diamond Dogs.
I gave Halloween Jack his eyepatch and scarf and placed him amongst a much darker city.
This isn't the bright theatrical fantasy surrounding Ziggy.
Something has happened.
The world feels more dangerous.
More broken.
More dystopian.
Bowie's characters are changing, and I wanted their environments to change with them.
Diamond Dogs
I approached Diamond Dogs almost like a comic-book world.
That seemed appropriate to me because so much of Bowie's imagery from this period had that larger-than-life quality.
The city becomes distorted.
There are ragamuffin figures on roller skates.
The characters become increasingly strange.
The whole environment feels as though society has begun to collapse.
I associated the album strongly with George Orwell's 1984, so I allowed that feeling of an oppressive, damaged future to enter the landscape.
Again, I wasn't trying to illustrate an album cover.
I wanted to paint the world the music suggested to me.
That distinction matters.
This is not Bowie's Diamond Dogs.
It is what Diamond Dogs became inside my head.
The Lightning Bolt
Separating these worlds is one of the most recognisable Bowie symbols of all.
The lightning bolt.
But I didn't paint it.
I wanted it to exist physically.
So I had the bolt created in glass.
The glass artist incorporated the British flag into it, which gave the piece another layer that I loved.
For me, it became more than the familiar Aladdin Sane image.
It began to suggest movement.
Bowie leaving one place and moving towards another.
Britain behind him.
America ahead.
Once again, something recognisable had become a pathway through the painting.
That's what I wanted these objects to do.
Not simply decorate it.
Move us.
Bowie Keeps Escaping
By this stage, David Jones feels very far away.
The quiet rooms of the first painting have been replaced by aliens, spiders, black holes, ruined cities and invented characters.
But something interesting is happening.
Every time one identity threatens to become Bowie, he changes again.
Ziggy cannot contain him.
Aladdin Sane cannot contain him.
Halloween Jack cannot contain him.
The painting keeps refusing to settle.
And perhaps that is why the end of Ziggy matters so much.
His destruction establishes a pattern.
Creation isn't enough.
There also has to be the willingness to let the creation go.
Towards the Darkness
But the next transformation feels different.
The colours begin to fall away.
The theatrical characters are still there, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly isolated.
The landscape opens into darkness.
The masks return.
Fragments of information flicker from television screens.
Words surround the figure.
And the Bowie we are approaching no longer feels like the playful alien who travelled along my yellow brick road.
There is something colder waiting ahead.
Something more fractured.
The next figure is immaculately dressed.
Controlled on the outside.
Far less controlled underneath.
The Thin White Duke has arrived.
Chapter Six
The Thin White Duke: Behind the Control
The Thin White Duke frightened me a little.
Not because of the character himself, but because of what seemed to be happening behind him.
Until this point, many of Bowie's creations had felt theatrical.
Colourful.
Playful.
Extravagant.
Even when the worlds around them became dark, there was still a sense of performance.
The Thin White Duke felt different.
On the outside he appeared immaculate.
Elegant.
Controlled.
But the more I read about this period of Bowie's life, the more that control seemed like a façade.
So I wanted the painting to become uncomfortable.
Alone in the Darkness
I placed the Duke within a much emptier world.
There are figures wandering through darkness, but they feel isolated from one another.
That emptiness was deliberate.
I had been reading about Bowie's turbulent lifestyle during this period and trying to imagine what it might have felt like to exist inside it.
Obviously, I couldn't know.
This is my interpretation from the outside.
But what I kept coming back to was isolation.
Imagine becoming one of the most recognisable people in the world while becoming increasingly disconnected from yourself.
Surrounded by people.
Surrounded by attention.
And somehow alone.
That was the feeling I wanted rather than another glamorous portrait of the Thin White Duke.
Words That Don't Quite Behave
Around him are strips of words resembling ticker tape.
These refer to Bowie's cut-up method of songwriting.
He would take words and phrases, cut them apart and rearrange them, allowing unexpected combinations to emerge.
I loved this.
It felt very Bowie.
But it also felt strangely familiar to me.
My paintings develop in a similar way.
I collect fragments.
A story.
A photograph.
A lyric.
An object.
Something funny.
Something disturbing.
Something apparently insignificant.
Then I pull them apart and reconnect them until they become something else.
His fragments became songs.
Mine became pictures.
So the words surrounding the Duke are not simply another piece of Bowie trivia.
They belong to the creative process.
Order created from disorder.
Except here, surrounded by darkness, they can also feel slightly frantic.
Thoughts circling a man who outwardly appears completely composed.
The Masks Return
And there are the masks again.
They were waiting in the attic when we first met David Jones.
They appeared around the private figures of his early life.
Now they return in a very different environment.
By this stage, the idea of a mask has changed.
We aren't simply looking at theatrical characters anymore.
I began thinking about the distance between what someone presents to the world and what may actually be happening underneath.
The Thin White Duke is almost the perfect image of that contradiction.
The surface is polished.
The interior appears increasingly chaotic.
Which one is Bowie?
Which one is the performance?
And after so many years of constructing identities, how easy is it to take the mask off?
The Televisions
Around this section I painted a collection of television screens.
I treated them almost like tiny windows into Bowie's mind and life.
Some contain recognisable references.
Others are deliberately peculiar.
Together they create a fragmented stream of information.
And there is a lot hidden inside them.
MainMan
One screen refers to MainMan and Bowie's management arrangements during the period surrounding his rise through the Ziggy years.
I liked including things such as contracts and management because fame isn't created entirely on a stage.
Behind the costumes and music is another machinery.
Managers.
Money.
Agreements.
Business.
The rather wonderful date of 31 September appears amongst these references.
Of course, 31 September doesn't exist.
That absurdity was precisely why I couldn't resist putting it in.
UFOs
Another television contains a UFO.
Bowie had a long fascination with UFOs and extraterrestrial ideas, which seems entirely appropriate for someone who gave us Major Tom and Ziggy Stardust.
But by placing it amongst all these fragmented screens, it becomes another little piece of the puzzle.
Space in Bowie's world was never very far away.
Milk, Peppers and Cocaine
Then the screens become darker.
One contains a carton of milk.
During this troubled period, Bowie was reported to have existed on a notoriously poor diet dominated by milk and peppers.
Another screen contains the chemical structure of cocaine.
I didn't want to romanticise that period.
There is sometimes a tendency to turn the excesses of famous musicians into part of the glamour.
I don't see anything glamorous about someone disappearing into addiction.
So these references sit amongst the other fragments as evidence of what was happening beneath that immaculate exterior.
The Duke may look controlled.
The details surrounding him tell a different story.
The Urine in the Refrigerator
And then we reach one of those stories where you wonder whether you have read it correctly.
I came across accounts of Bowie keeping his urine in a refrigerator because of fears connected with witches or people using it against him.
How could I possibly leave that out?
It is bizarre.
But it also becomes rather sad when placed alongside everything else.
Extreme drug use, fear, superstition and paranoia begin colliding.
Something that initially sounds funny becomes much less funny when you consider the state of mind behind it.
That tension appears frequently in my work.
Sometimes the ridiculous and the disturbing occupy exactly the same space.
Numbers Everywhere
Numerology also enters the televisions.
Numbers had become another fascination during this period, so I included them amongst the visual fragments.
Again, I wasn't trying to diagnose Bowie or explain precisely what he believed.
I was recording the world I encountered through my research.
Numbers.
Symbols.
Superstitions.
Drugs.
Fragments of language.
Occult imagery.
They accumulate.
And the more they accumulate, the stranger the world surrounding the Duke becomes.
Black Candles and the Pentagram
Nearby sits the old hag in the rocking chair.
She grew from something Bowie once said about rock and roll, and she seemed perfectly suited to this part of the painting.
So I surrounded her with the pentagram and black candles.
By now I had read about Bowie's interest in occult ideas during this period, and I wanted that darkness to seep into the environment.
Again, this isn't me making a judgement about his beliefs.
I'm painting my impression of what I found.
And what I found was an extraordinarily strange mixture.
Creativity and fear.
Control and chaos.
Intelligence and superstition.
Fame and isolation.
It made the Thin White Duke far more interesting to me than simply another famous Bowie look.
Black Tie White Noise
There are references that don't belong chronologically to the Duke period too.
Black Tie White Noise appears amongst the screens, for example.
That is worth pointing out because these paintings aren't rigid timelines.
Sometimes I placed something because visually or conceptually it worked.
I was telling Bowie's life broadly through time, but I wasn't creating a museum display where every object had to remain inside its correct decade.
Memory doesn't behave like that.
Neither does my imagination.
The paintings overlap.
References echo backwards and forwards.
That is part of their construction.
Nipping in Braille
One of the stranger little references is the word or idea of nipping represented through Braille, connected with one of Bowie's own artworks.
It is exactly the sort of tiny detail that could disappear completely amongst everything else.
And I rather like that.
Not every reference needs to shout.
Some can whisper.
Some are there for the person who looks long enough.
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange also enters this collection of images.
Its visual language had connections with Bowie's early styling and ideas surrounding his work, and photographs exist of Bowie adopting an Alex-like appearance.
For me, it became another fragment of the cultural material feeding into Bowie.
Film enters music.
Fashion enters theatre.
Theatre enters identity.
Nothing remains neatly in its own box.
The Bicycle and the Sausages
Then there is a bicycle.
And sausages.
Amongst cocaine, occult imagery, fractured identities and artistic experimentation, I have included a bicycle and sausages.
This goes back to an early job Bowie had as a butcher's delivery boy.
I love details like this.
They puncture the mythology.
We have travelled from a boy called David Jones to an alien rock star, through black holes and ruined cities, and into one of the darkest periods of Bowie's life.
And somewhere amongst it all:
sausages.
Because however enormous the legend becomes, there are always these wonderfully ordinary pieces of a life underneath it.
Cracks in the Mask
When I look at this section as a whole, I don't see the Thin White Duke as simply another persona.
I see contradiction.
The beautifully controlled figure surrounded by evidence that control was slipping.
The masks.
The scattered words.
The drugs.
The strange beliefs.
The television screens flashing fragments of different Bowies back at us.
Everything feels fractured.
Perhaps that is why I made the world around him so empty.
There is plenty of information.
But very little comfort.
And then, fortunately, the painting begins to move again.
The darkness doesn't continue forever.
Ahead is a city.
Lights.
Bars.
Music.
Friends.
A wall dividing one world from another.
Bowie is heading towards Berlin.
And for the first time in a while, my painting begins to breathe.
Chapter Seven
A Door in the Berlin Wall
After the Thin White Duke, I needed light.
Not necessarily daylight.
Berlin gave me something better.
Nightlife.
The atmosphere of this part of the painting changes almost immediately. The emptiness and isolation surrounding the Duke begin giving way to cafés, bars, people and city lights.
It still feels like night.
But it no longer feels quite so lonely.
For me, Berlin represented a turning point.
Bowie had arrived there after an extraordinarily turbulent period of his life. From everything I read, I understood these years as a time when he was trying to move away from the excesses that had consumed him and find another way of living and creating.
So I wanted Berlin to feel different.
Not perfect.
Not healed.
But alive.
Bowie Comes Back Down to Earth
There is something else I like about Berlin.
Bowie becomes smaller again.
Think about where we have just been.
Major Tom took us away from Earth.
Ziggy became an alien Starman.
Bowie became an enormous metal spider.
We travelled through black holes, fantasy landscapes and ruined cities.
By the time we reached the Thin White Duke, even reality itself seemed unstable.
Then suddenly we are back in cafés.
Sitting at tables.
Having drinks.
Walking through a city.
I liked bringing Bowie back down to human scale.
After all those extraordinary characters, he is once again a man occupying real places.
Berlin at Night
I wanted this section to have the feeling of a lively European city after dark.
Bars.
Cafés.
Cabaret.
People moving through the night.
Places Bowie was associated with during his time there found their way into the painting.
I had spent so long creating imaginary Bowie worlds that it was enjoyable to return to something recognisable.
But of course, being me, I wasn't going to leave it entirely alone.
The real city still had to become part of my visual story.
Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop belongs here.
Their friendship was an important part of this period, and I wanted that companionship visible.
So rather than turning Berlin into another solitary Bowie scene, I allowed the two of them to share the space.
I painted Bowie and Iggy having a drink together at the Paris Bar.
It is a small scene compared with some of the enormous imagery elsewhere in the work.
But that is precisely why I like it.
After all the personas and spectacle, two friends having a drink feels wonderfully ordinary.
Iggy was also travelling through his own creative period alongside Bowie, and their lives and music intersected during these years.
For once, Bowie doesn't need to dominate the scene.
He has company.
The Kiss at the Wall
Elsewhere I included the kiss beside the Berlin Wall, another image that came from my research into the people surrounding Bowie during this period.
Again, these details allow other lives into the painting.
One danger when creating an artwork about someone as famous as Bowie is that everybody around them can become little more than background scenery.
I didn't want that.
His creative life was populated by other artists, musicians, friends and collaborators.
Berlin wasn't something Bowie experienced in isolation.
The people mattered too.
The Berlin Trilogy
The Berlin Wall gave me an enormous physical surface to work with.
So naturally, I covered it in graffiti.
Amongst it are references to the three albums associated with this period:
Low.
"Heroes".
Lodger.
Rather than presenting them neatly as album covers, I allowed them to become part of the wall.
That seemed right.
Music becoming part of the city.
Art becoming graffiti.
Bowie's creative output literally written onto the landscape through which we are travelling.
The albums mark another period of extraordinary experimentation, but I didn't need to explain that by adding more characters.
The wall could carry the story.
A Wall Should Stop You
And then I realised I had something rather useful.
A wall.
Walls divide things.
They separate one place from another.
They prevent us from seeing what is on the other side.
And my Berlin Wall happened to sit exactly where I needed to separate two major sections of Bowie's life.
The second painting was coming to an end.
The third was waiting behind it.
So I put a door in the wall.
And a Door Lets You Through
This is one of those moments where the physical construction of the artwork and the story become the same thing.
The door isn't merely painted symbolism.
It actually takes us somewhere.
Open it and the journey continues towards the steps of the third canvas.
I love that.
Throughout the work I had been looking for ways of preventing the three canvases from behaving like three unrelated pictures hanging beside one another.
I wanted movement between them.
The telescope had helped carry us from the first world into the second.
Now the Berlin Wall carries us from the second into the third.
But instead of looking through something this time, we pass through it.
That difference feels important.
Leaving the Personas Behind
Look back before we go through the door.
The second canvas has been extraordinary.
Ziggy Stardust.
The Spiders from Mars.
Aladdin Sane.
Halloween Jack.
Diamond Dogs.
The Thin White Duke.
Characters piled upon characters.
Bowie repeatedly constructing another version of Bowie.
But the third canvas isn't going to work in quite the same way.
There are still outrageous clothes.
There are still strange images.
There is still plenty of Bowie madness waiting for us.
But the great procession of alter egos begins to loosen its grip.
Something else comes forward.
Acting.
Film.
Theatre.
Art.
Relationships.
Family.
The wider creative man.
Perhaps that is why the door works so well for me.
We aren't simply crossing from one canvas into another.
We are leaving one kind of Bowie behind.
Through the Wall
So walk through.
Behind us are the black holes, spiders, ruined cities, masks and fragmented world of the second painting.
Ahead is something completely different.
The first thing we encounter is not another alien rock star.
It is a staircase.
Then another.
And another.
They climb, fall and twist through impossible spaces.
A clown is dragging a bath down them.
Inside the bath is the Elephant Man.
And somewhere amongst those impossible stairs lurks the world of the Goblin King.
We've crossed the Berlin Wall.
Now Bowie is going to the theatre.
And the movies.
THE STORY CONTINUES
Walk through the Berlin Wall and enter the third painting, where Bowie moves beyond the great personas into film, art, love, family and the man behind them.
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