The Gaga world of Stefani Germanotta - Building the World of Lady Gaga
The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta by Julia O'Sullivan
Journal One — Behind the Mask of Lady Gaga
Introduction
This painting began with somebody else's idea.
It was 2011, and my friend Rhianna was a huge Lady Gaga fan. She thought I should paint a celebrity. Surely, she reasoned, creating something around one of the most recognisable performers in the world might get my artwork noticed.
At the time, I knew relatively little about Lady Gaga.
But the more I looked, the more I realised she offered exactly the kind of visual material my mind loves to pull apart.
There was Lady Gaga, the extraordinary public creation: theatrical, provocative, ambitious, excessive and almost impossible to ignore.
And somewhere underneath all of that was Stefani Germanotta.
That interested me far more than celebrity itself.
I have never been particularly interested in putting famous people on pedestals. Fame doesn't make another human being more important to me. I am far more interested in who somebody is, what drives them and what lies underneath the version of themselves they present to the world.
With Gaga, the distinction seemed particularly fascinating.
So I began researching.
And researching.
And, inevitably with me, researching some more.
The more I discovered, the more pieces began finding their way onto the canvas: her childhood, New York, Catholicism, music, ambition, outrageous clothes, tattoos, performances, Little Monsters, Madison Square Garden and the extraordinary visual machinery surrounding the Gaga persona.
Soon I wasn't really painting a portrait at all.
I was building a world.
Looking at the painting now, it isn't remotely as complex as some of the works that followed. Gaga was still relatively early in her career, so there simply wasn't the lifetime of material I would later encounter when I turned my attention to David Bowie.
I had no idea what I was going to stumble into with him.
But that came later.
At this point, I was still discovering something about myself.
Because The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta became the first painting where I really began pushing beyond the boundaries of the canvas. Painting started colliding with sculpture. Objects became part of the storytelling. The artwork could change depending upon whether something was open or closed.
And right at the centre of it all was a face I deliberately chose to hide.
Stefani.
Behind Gaga.
I couldn't possibly have known it in 2011, but the celebrity painting that was supposed to get me noticed was quietly pointing me towards something far more valuable.
A new way of making art
Chapter One — The Painting That Was Supposed to Get Me Noticed
This story began in 2011 with a suggestion from my dear friend Rhianna.
She was a huge Lady Gaga fan and thought I should create a painting around a celebrity. Her thinking was fairly straightforward: choose somebody enormously famous, create one of my strange paintings around them and perhaps somebody might finally notice my work.
It sounded like a plan.
At the time, I knew relatively little about Lady Gaga. I knew the outrageous clothes, the music, the performances and the enormous personality she projected into the world, but not much about the woman behind any of it.
So I started researching.
And that is usually where the trouble begins with me.
I don't seem capable of learning one interesting thing about somebody and leaving it there. One piece of information leads to another, which creates an image in my head, which connects with something else, and before long I have disappeared down a rabbit hole.
Lady Gaga gave me plenty to play with.
Here was a relatively young woman who had already created an extraordinary public identity around herself. There was music, fashion, theatre, sexuality, religion, ambition, New York, childhood, family and an intensely loyal relationship with her fans.
But underneath Lady Gaga was Stefani Germanotta.
That distinction interested me.
I wasn't interested in painting a conventional celebrity portrait. I wanted to take what I was discovering and turn it into a world — somewhere between biography, theatre and whatever peculiar place my own imagination decided to take it.
There was also something slightly naïve behind the whole adventure.
I genuinely thought this painting might get me noticed.
Perhaps Gaga might even see it.
Looking back, that makes me smile because I had absolutely no idea how far I was eventually going to take that particular thought.
But that comes later.
Something Was Beginning to Change
What matters at this point is that I started drawing.
I didn't know this painting would become particularly significant in the development of my work. It certainly wasn't going to become one of the enormous, obsessively complicated pieces I would create later.
Gaga was still relatively early in her career. There simply wasn't the lifetime of characters, reinventions and history that I would later encounter when I turned my attention to David Bowie.
And I had absolutely no idea what I was going to stumble into with him.
That was still ahead of me.
What Gaga gave me was a beginning.
As the ideas accumulated, I started thinking differently about what a painting could contain. I wanted biography, symbolism, humour and little pieces of information scattered throughout it. I wanted the viewer to discover things rather than simply look at a portrait.
And somewhere during that process, even the surface of the canvas began to feel restrictive.
I didn't know it yet, but I was beginning to push against it.
The painting that had started as an attempt to get somebody else's attention was quietly doing something much more important.
It was getting mine.
Chapter Two — Stefani and Gaga
Once I began researching Lady Gaga, the first thing I had to understand was that I wasn't really dealing with one identity.
There was Stefani Germanotta, and there was Lady Gaga.
Of course, they are the same woman, and I wasn't trying to suggest that Gaga was somehow false. If anything, she appeared to be an extraordinary extension of Stefani's creativity — a character through which she could become louder, stranger, more theatrical and more provocative.
But visually, the difference fascinated me.
Gaga could fill a room before she had even opened her mouth.
The costumes, make-up, performances, extraordinary shoes, sexuality and constant reinvention created a public figure that seemed almost larger than human.
So that is how I painted her.
Larger Than Life
Gaga towers over New York.
I deliberately exaggerated her scale so that she dominates the skyline around her. Buildings that should dwarf a human being instead become the backdrop to her presence.
At the time, I thought I was painting her ambition.
Looking back, I think I was painting some of mine too.
I recognised something in that relentless drive to create, to push further and to somehow make yourself heard. I had my own enormous ambitions for my art, even if I had absolutely no idea where they were going to take me.
Perhaps that is why this painting became so loud.
I was channelling something of myself through Gaga.
Her hunger, energy and determination gave me permission to exaggerate everything. She became enormous because, somewhere inside me, my own creative ambition felt enormous too.
I wasn't simply observing my subject from a distance.
I had found something in her that connected with something in me.
And whenever that happens, it inevitably finds its way into the work.
Painting the Energy
I didn't want Gaga simply sitting above New York looking glamorous.
That would have been far too normal for me.
Her body begins to distort. Fashion collides with anatomy. Clothing becomes architecture. Human parts merge with theatrical ones.
The further I went, the less interested I became in making something physically believable.
I wanted the painting to have the same restless energy I was feeling while creating it.
And I think that's important when I look at this work now.
Years later, when I created my David Bowie triptych, the result was surprisingly different.
Bowie had given me vastly more material to work with — decades of characters, reinventions, music, relationships, experimentation and extraordinary creative change — yet the artwork itself became more demure and mature in its design.
That seems almost contradictory.
But perhaps it isn't.
By the time I reached Bowie, I had grown too.
Gaga was part of that growth.
This painting is exuberant because I was exuberant. I was experimenting, pushing things out of the canvas and discovering what I could do. There is something almost breathless about it.
Bowie came later.
By then I didn't need everything to shout at once.
I had learned to let the story breathe.
I couldn't have known any of that while I was painting Gaga, of course. At the time I was simply following the excitement wherever it took me.
But Where Is Stefani?
The more spectacular Gaga became, the more interested I became in the person underneath her.
Where did Stefani end and Gaga begin?
Could you even separate them?
Perhaps Gaga wasn't a mask hiding Stefani at all. Perhaps she was another part of her — an amplified version that allowed certain parts of herself to become enormous.
I couldn't know that from the outside, and I wouldn't pretend that I could.
I was interpreting a public life through the information available to me and allowing my imagination to respond to it.
But artistically, the question was irresistible.
So somewhere within this enormous Gaga world, Stefani had to exist too.
Not the performer.
Not Mother Monster.
Not the celebrity.
The woman.
And I found two places for her.
One would be small and easily missed: a young Stefani sitting at her piano, long before the enormous figure above her had come into existence.
The other would be right in front of you.
Her face.
But simply painting Stefani's face didn't feel enough.
If I wanted the viewer to look beyond Gaga to find the woman underneath, then somehow the artwork itself needed to make that happen.
I was going to have to come off the canvas.
But before I could hide Stefani behind the mask, I had already started doing something rather peculiar to the anatomy surrounding her.
It began with a phrase I'd encountered during my research.
Lady Gaga had a great set of pipes.
Unfortunately, my imagination took that rather literally.
Chapter Three — A Great Set of Pipes
Some ideas begin with deep symbolism.
Others begin because my brain takes something far too literally.
This was one of those.
During my research, I came across a comment about Lady Gaga having a great “set of pipes” — the familiar expression for somebody with a powerful singing voice.
My mind immediately saw actual pipes.
So I gave her some.
Turning a Voice Into an Instrument
Growing from around Gaga's neck and shoulders are long, twisting pipes that rise above her head.
But these weren't going to be ordinary pipes.
If they represented her voice, I wanted them to become part human anatomy and part musical instrument.
Along their length I added the keys and mechanisms you would find on a wind instrument — the things that allow the musician to alter the notes.
So Gaga herself becomes the instrument.
Her body creates the sound.
The pipes carry it.
The keys shape the notes.
And then, at their ends, everything returns to flesh.
I researched the vocal cords and the anatomy inside the human throat and used what I found to create the strange openings at the ends of the pipes. They resemble open mouths, and inside each one I painted forms mimicking the soft anatomy at the back of the throat.
They aren't quite pipes anymore.
They aren't quite mouths either.
They are somewhere between body, machine and musical instrument.
Making Sound Visible
The enormous red cape surrounding Gaga is part of this same idea.
It isn't simply a piece of clothing.
The red forms represent the muscles supporting and holding the pipes together, connecting this impossible vocal apparatus back into Gaga's body.
And I wanted those muscles to move.
The cape flows and twists around her rather than hanging naturally because I was trying to give physical form to something we cannot normally see.
Sound.
The movement of the red becomes the movement of her voice.
It flows outward from her body, carrying the energy of the sound with it.
So what initially appears to be an extravagant Gaga costume is actually doing something much stranger.
Her cape has become muscle.
Her throat has become machinery.
Her voice has become a wind instrument.
And sound itself has become something that moves.
That is very typical of the way my mind works when I'm painting. I take something invisible — a voice, an emotion, an idea — and wonder what it might look like if I could make it physical.
A Strange Piece of Anatomy
There is another layer to the pipes that I hadn't necessarily anticipated when I began them.
Look closely at their fleshy openings and they become strangely bodily.
While researching the inside of the human mouth and throat, I became fascinated by the shapes I found there. The folds, soft tissue and openings can bear a curious visual resemblance to other intimate parts of human anatomy.
Once I had seen that connection, it became part of the strange visual language surrounding Gaga.
It felt appropriate.
This was a performer whose public persona played freely with sexuality, the body, costume and provocation. In my painting, even her voice had become something bodily and ambiguous.
But what I didn't know was that somebody else was going to notice that visual language too.
When One Artist's Idea Meets Another
I had already decided that Stefani's face needed something more than paint.
I wanted to conceal her and reveal her.
That meant leaving the flat surface of the canvas behind.
So I turned to a dear friend of mine in New Zealand who worked in glass and asked her to respond to the painting.
I gave her this peculiar world of Little Monsters, flesh, pipes, mouths, music and Gaga.
And then I let her imagination take over.
What came back would transform the painting.
And, without either of us realising it at the time, her design would pick up the strange anatomical language I had already created and answer it in glass.
Chapter Four — The Mask
I knew I wanted Stefani's face to be hidden.
What I didn't yet know was quite how I was going to achieve it.
By this point, the painting had already become a strange collision of body, music, fashion and theatre. Simply painting a mask over her face wasn't enough.
I wanted something real.
Something that could physically open and close.
And achieving that eventually brought two other makers into the artwork.
Another Artist Enters My World
A dear friend of mine in New Zealand was a wonderfully talented glass artist, and I asked her to create a mask inspired by the painting.
I want to give her proper credit here because the glass mask was her design.
I didn't give her a drawing and ask her to reproduce it.
She looked at the world I had already created — the Little Monsters, the strange organic anatomy, the fleshy pipes and the theatrical excess of Gaga — and interpreted it through her own imagination and her own medium.
What she created belonged beautifully within the painting, but it was unmistakably her contribution.
The glass curls and twists into strange organic forms, almost as though something from inside the painting has escaped from the canvas and become solid.
And at its centre she created something particularly interesting.
An opening.
Mouth or Vulva?
The central opening of the glass mask is difficult to define.
It resembles a mouth.
But it also resembles a vulva.
That immediately connected it visually with the fleshy openings I had already painted at the ends of Gaga's pipes.
Those had begun with my research into the throat and vocal cords, where I had become fascinated by the strange similarities between the folds and openings found in different parts of human anatomy.
My friend had picked up that same visual language and taken it somewhere of her own.
Within the world of Gaga, it felt completely at home.
Sexuality, the body and provocation were already part of the public persona I was exploring. Nothing needed to be explicit or explained away. The ambiguity itself was enough.
I had spoken in paint.
She answered in glass.
But now I had another problem.
I had a glass mask.
How on earth was I going to make it open?
Building the Gates
For that, I turned to a metal artist in Te Aroha, New Zealand.
I commissioned him to construct the metal framework and rod gates that would hold the glass mask and allow the two sides to open away from Stefani's face.
My instruction to him was very important.
I didn't want the mechanism to take away from the painting.
It had to work, and it had to be strong enough to support the glass, but I didn't want a great lump of engineering suddenly becoming the first thing you saw.
The painting still had to dominate.
So the framework was kept deliberately restrained.
Thin metal rods hold the glass pieces in place and form the gates, allowing them to swing open while visually disappearing as much as possible into the complicated lines and imagery already surrounding them.
It is engineering that deliberately doesn't shout about itself.
And I think he got it absolutely right.
Closed — Gaga
With the gates closed, the glass comes together over Stefani's face.
She disappears.
What you encounter instead is something elaborate, strange, beautiful, sexual and slightly unsettling.
The spectacle comes first.
Gaga.
Not because I considered Gaga false. She was clearly part of Stefani's creativity.
But this was the public construction — the costumes, performance, theatre and extraordinary visual identity through which the world encountered her.
The woman underneath was still there.
You simply couldn't see her.
Open — Stefani
Then the gates open.
The glass separates.
And there she is.
Stefani Germanotta.
Suddenly the quietest part of the composition is revealed at the centre of one of the loudest paintings I had created.
That contrast was exactly what I wanted.
Gaga towers above New York. Everything around her competes for attention.
Yet underneath the spectacle is simply a human face.
You have to physically open Gaga to find Stefani.
Three Artists, One Idea
Looking back, I particularly like that this part of the painting required three different creative disciplines.
I created the painted world.
My friend looked at that world and responded to it in glass.
Then the metal artist in Te Aroha solved the practical problem of how that glass could become a pair of working gates without overwhelming either of our work.
Paint. Glass. Metal.
Each did something the others couldn't.
And together they allowed the artwork itself to perform the idea.
Open.
Closed.
Gaga.
Stefani.
Breaking Free of the Canvas
This was also an important moment for me as an artist.
The canvas was beginning to lose its authority.
Why should everything have to happen on a flat surface?
Why couldn't something protrude from it?
Why couldn't it move?
Why couldn't another material become part of the storytelling?
I wasn't yet creating anything remotely on the physical scale or complexity of some of the works that would come later.
I didn't know where this experimentation would lead.
I was simply solving the problem in front of me.
But looking back, I can see another little piece of my future practice falling into place.
The story no longer had to stop where the canvas ended.
And now that Gaga's extraordinary public face could literally open to reveal Stefani beneath it, I could turn my attention to the rest of the woman towering over New York.
Mother Monster.
Chapter Five — Mother Monster
Once the face was established, I could move down into the rest of Gaga's body.
And there was plenty to work with.
By 2011, Gaga had already created an extraordinary visual vocabulary around herself. Tattoos, impossible shoes, religious imagery, outrageous costumes, sexuality and her relationship with her fans all became material for me.
But I didn't want to create a checklist of Gaga references.
I wanted them to become part of the woman.
Mother Monster and Her Little Monsters
Gaga referred to herself as Mother Monster, while her fans became her Little Monsters.
I loved that immediately.
It was playful, theatrical and slightly peculiar — exactly the sort of imagery that sits comfortably inside my own head.
So beneath Gaga I created my own Little Monsters.
They gather around her feet, looking upwards towards the enormous figure towering above them.
There is adoration in them.
She is their Mother Monster and they are looking towards the person who has created this extraordinary world in which they feel they belong.
At the time, I simply saw it as part of Gaga's story and her unusually powerful relationship with her fans.
Looking back, however, I can see the beginning of another idea.
Years later, when I painted Pride for the Seven Deadly Sins, I would again explore the relationship between the elevated figure and the people looking towards them — admiration, image, attention and the strange power we give to those we place above ourselves.
I certainly wasn't planning Pride while painting Gaga.
But sometimes an idea seems to sit quietly in my work for years before finding somewhere else to grow.
Writing Her Life Across Her Body
Gaga's tattoos also became part of the story.
I tried to include as many of the significant ones I knew about at the time as I could, including the Born This Way unicorn on one thigh.
But on the opposite thigh I added something of my own: a large red Marilyn Monroe kiss.
That wasn't one of Gaga's tattoos. It was my visual reference to something I had discovered while researching her — the idea of the two different sides of her body, one associated with Marilyn Monroe and the other with Iggy Pop.
I loved that contrast.
Marilyn and Iggy.
Glamour and rawness.
Two very different forms of performance and sexuality existing within the same person.
So rather than simply writing that reference somewhere in the painting, I turned Marilyn into an image and placed that great red kiss directly onto Gaga's skin.
Her body was becoming another surface on which I could tell the story.
Faith and Provocation
Around her body I included the rosary and an oversized cross, acknowledging the Catholic upbringing that appeared repeatedly within the imagery I encountered during my research.
Religion and sexuality then begin rubbing against each other.
Bodies become playful and provocative. The sacred sits alongside the theatrical and sexual.
I wasn't trying to make a judgement about either.
I was recording the contradictions I saw within the Gaga persona.
That collision interested me much more than creating a neat interpretation of her.
She could use religious imagery while simultaneously challenging expectations around the body and sexuality.
To me, contradiction makes a subject more interesting.
Human beings are full of it.
Dressing Gaga
Then, of course, there were the clothes.
It would have been impossible to explore Gaga at that point without acknowledging just how important clothing had become to her public identity.
The extraordinary platform shoes had to be there.
So did the elaborate nails.
And some of the outfits had stories of their own.
The Kermit the Frog dress referenced her stance against wearing fur, while the infamous meat dress became another example of clothing being used for something beyond simply covering the body.
Whatever anyone thought of those outfits, people talked about them.
That fascinated me.
Gaga understood that an image could become a message.
As a visual artist, I could certainly relate to that.
The Pink Panther
But one of my favourite details is much quieter.
The Pink Panther.
During my research I discovered a story from Gaga's childhood piano lessons. Her teacher apparently used a little Pink Panther toy to encourage her to keep her hands positioned correctly while she practised.
I loved that.
Among all the enormous costumes, sexuality, celebrity and spectacle was this wonderfully small image of a child learning to play the piano.
So into the painting it went.
Those are often the details I enjoy most.
Not necessarily the famous ones.
The human ones.
Because somewhere inside this enormous creature I had painted towering over New York was still the girl who had once sat at a piano learning where to put her hands.
And that girl was about to appear again.
This time beneath Madison Square Garden.
The child dreaming below.
The superstar standing above.
And between them, an entire journey.
Chapter Six — The Dream Below Her
At the centre of the city sits Madison Square Garden.
I made it an important focal point because, during my research, I discovered what performing there represented to Gaga. She had grown up in New York watching other artists perform there and dreamed of one day doing the same herself.
By the time I was creating this painting, that dream had become reality.
Her Monster Ball Tour had taken her there.
That gave me something much more interesting to paint than simply a famous building.
I could paint the distance between wanting something and achieving it.
The Girl Beneath the Star
In one of the windows beneath Madison Square Garden sits a young Stefani at her piano.
This is the second time the person rather than the Gaga persona appears in the painting.
She is small.
Quiet.
Almost hidden amongst everything else.
On the piano is her sheet music, and I included a tiny Mickey Mouse reference because I had discovered that as a child she used Mickey Mouse paper when writing music.
It is such a little detail.
But those are exactly the things I love finding.
Above this young girl is the enormous Gaga I had created, dominating New York.
The placement was deliberate.
Stefani dreams below.Gaga exists above.
One is learning.
One has arrived.
And Madison Square Garden sits between them as the point where the dream becomes real.
I Am Here
There is something almost defiant about the Gaga at the top of the building.
When I look at her now, she seems to be saying:
I am here. I made it. Now look at me.
And perhaps, as I've already admitted, there was some of me in that too.
I understood ambition.
I understood wanting to create something significant and desperately wanting somebody to notice that you were doing it.
That doesn't mean our ambitions were remotely comparable in scale or circumstance, but I recognised the feeling.
Perhaps that is why I made the contrast between the little girl and the enormous woman so dramatic.
Dreams rarely begin at the size they eventually become.
The Monster Ball
Around Madison Square Garden I included references to the performances that marked this period of Gaga's career.
I recreated imagery connected with the Monster Ball Tour, the tour that had brought her to the venue she had dreamed about.
Nearby is another reference to Born This Way, which places the painting firmly within the moment in Gaga's career when I was creating it.
That matters to me now.
This painting isn't a retrospective of Lady Gaga's entire life.
It couldn't be.
I was painting somebody whose career was still unfolding in front of me.
That is one of the great differences between this work and the David Bowie painting I would create later.
With Bowie, I would have decades of creative history to disappear into.
With Gaga, I was almost painting in the present tense.
Fame Arrives in a Limo
At the bottom of Madison Square Garden is the white limousine.
Its number plate references Marry the Night, another little clue connecting the city back to Gaga's visual world.
Nearby sits the yellow New York taxi, carrying FAME on its number plate.
I couldn't resist that.
The ordinary yellow cab and the white celebrity limousine occupy the same city.
One belongs to everyday New York.
The other belongs to the world Gaga had fought her way into.
And above both of them sits the woman who had once been the girl at the piano.
Bubbles
There are bubbles in another of the windows, referencing the extraordinary bubble dress and bubble imagery associated with Gaga.
But I liked them for another reason too.
Bubbles make me think of childhood.
They are playful, fragile and temporary.
So they sit comfortably within this part of the painting, where childhood dreams and adult achievement are beginning to overlap.
That's how these paintings tend to work for me.
A reference begins with the person I'm researching, but something of my own inevitably slips into it.
The City Becomes Memory
By now, New York was no longer simply the background to the painting.
It was becoming a map of Gaga's life.
Not an accurate geographical map.
That would have bored me rigid.
I pulled buildings, places, memories and references together regardless of where they actually stood in relation to one another.
I wanted the city to work like memory works.
Things that belong together emotionally don't necessarily sit beside one another geographically.
And then there were the windows.
I have used windows again and again in my work, although I don't think I fully understood at the time why I was so attracted to them.
A window gives me a perfect little compartment.
A glimpse into somewhere else.
A tiny box in which I can hide another piece of somebody's story.
Almost like a memory.
And Gaga's New York was about to become full of them.
Chapter Seven — Windows Into Gaga's New York
Once I had built the main structure of the painting, I began doing what I love most.
Filling the gaps.
This is where my paintings can become slightly obsessive.
A window isn't just a window if I can put something inside it. A number plate doesn't need to contain a random number if it can tell you something. A street sign can lead somewhere. A poster can place the painting at a particular moment in time.
Eventually the whole city becomes a puzzle.
And Gaga's New York gave me plenty of pieces.
New York — Rearranged
I wasn't remotely interested in creating a geographically accurate New York.
I had visited the city myself years earlier with Pat. We stayed in a pokey little room that cost a fortune and spent our time absorbing as much of the place as we could, including plenty of pub crawling.
As usual, I photographed everything that interested me.
Buildings. Architecture. Details. Life.
I do this everywhere.
I photograph tree bark, stones, mud pools, buildings, landscapes — anything that catches my eye — because I never know when something apparently insignificant will eventually find its way into a painting.
Years later, those New York photographs suddenly had a purpose.
I brought together buildings that mattered to Gaga's story and moved them wherever I needed them.
The Empire State Building and Chrysler Building rise through my version of the skyline, alongside the Woolworth Building and other pieces of New York architecture.
This isn't New York as a map.
It is New York as memory.
176
Some clues are tiny.
176 appears because it was the address I associated through my research with Gaga's first flat.
Elsewhere, East 91st Street references the area of the school she attended.
There is also Rivington Street, another location connected with the New York world I was uncovering.
These details aren't there because I expect everybody to recognise them.
Most people won't.
That's part of the fun.
You can look at the painting without knowing any of this and see a strange city.
Or you can start reading it.
Before Gaga
I wanted traces of the life before the enormous figure towering above the city.
The Bitter End appears as a reference to the venues associated with Stefani's early performances, when she was still making her way through the New York music scene.
There is also a reference to the Stefani Germanotta Band.
These little details matter because they bring us back to the central idea of the painting.
Lady Gaga didn't simply appear fully formed above Madison Square Garden.
There was a journey before her.
Freddie, Bowie and the People Who Came Before
Some of Gaga's musical influences and associations also found their way into the windows.
Freddie Mercury appears, along with a radio, referencing the connection I had found between Queen's Radio Ga Ga and the origins of the Gaga name.
There are references to other performers and creative influences too.
At this point I was looking at them entirely through Gaga.
I had no idea that one of those names — David Bowie — would eventually send me into a completely different artistic rabbit hole of my own.
That story was still waiting for me.
Guys, Dolls and Hitchcock
The theatrical side of New York gave me another opportunity to play.
Guys and Dolls appears because of Gaga's connection with the stage musical and her interest in performing.
Then there is Alfred Hitchcock.
I had discovered her interest in his work, so rather than simply writing his name somewhere, I hid his unmistakable silhouette inside one of the windows.
That's much more fun.
If you notice him, wonderful.
If you don't, he simply watches from the building.
Thunder Road
Another window contains Thunder Road, referencing Bruce Springsteen and a story I came across about Gaga learning the piano as a child.
Her father had apparently promised that if she learned to play a particular song, he would buy her a baby grand piano.
So naturally, somewhere in my Gaga city, there had to be a piano.
Again, these weren't the enormous public Gaga moments.
They were the little human details I kept finding underneath them.
Haus of Gaga
The creative machine surrounding Gaga also appears.
I included a reference to the Haus of Gaga, the creative team behind so much of the visual world associated with her performances and image.
That interested me because Gaga wasn't being created in isolation.
Behind the individual was a whole structure of creative people helping construct the spectacle.
Perhaps that also resonated with what was happening in my own painting.
My glass-artist friend had brought something of herself to it.
The metal artist in Te Aroha had solved another part of it.
One person's creative world can contain many hands.
Eggs, Aliens and Other Oddities
Then there are the details that simply made me smile.
The egg references Gaga's extraordinary arrival at the Grammy Awards.
The aliens around the Chrysler Building replace the expected gargoyle-like forms, inspired by the science-fiction imagery I associated with Gaga's visual world.
There is the dog from Poker Face.
The blue telephone and Do Not Cross imagery reference Telephone.
Paparazzi cameras appear throughout the work.
Nothing was safe from becoming a Gaga reference.
And that's when I know I'm enjoying myself.
Clothes Become Clues
Even some of the most outrageous outfits appear almost like historical markers.
The Kermit dress.
The meat dress.
The impossible shoes.
The nails.
The costumes weren't merely things Gaga wore. They had become part of the public language surrounding her.
That interested me enormously because I understood the idea of communicating visually.
You don't always need words.
Sometimes an image can do the shouting for you.
A Painting You Have to Read
By the time I finished, I had created something that couldn't really be understood with a single glance.
From a distance, you see Gaga towering over New York.
Move closer and the painting begins breaking into stories.
Look through a window.
Read a sign.
Notice a number plate.
Find a face.
Recognise a costume.
Open the gates.
There is always something else behind something else.
And that, perhaps more than anything, was what this painting gave me.
I had discovered how much I enjoyed making artwork that could be read.
Not simply looked at.
The viewer could enter it, hunt through it and gradually discover why things were there.
I would take that idea much, much further in the years that followed.
But in 2011 I didn't know any of that.
I just knew I had finished this slightly bonkers painting of Lady Gaga.
And I was enormously proud of it.
There was only one problem.
I hadn't forgotten why the whole adventure had started in the first place.
This painting was supposed to get me noticed.
So now that it was finished, I decided I was going to get it in front of Lady Gaga.
Somehow.
That decision would lead to emails, a YouTube video, a trip to Auckland, six hours standing outside a hotel with a group of teenagers...
...and one rather unexpected phone call six months later.
Comments