The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta - The Painting that Didn't Open the Door.
Journal Two — The Painting That Didn't Open the Door
Introduction
The painting was finished.
But I hadn't forgotten why I had started it.
Back in 2011, my friend Rhianna had suggested that painting someone as famous as Lady Gaga might finally get my artwork noticed.
And somewhere along the way, I had begun to believe it might actually happen.
I had researched her life, built my version of New York around her, hidden Stefani beneath a glass mask, filled the painting with tiny pieces of her story and pushed myself beyond the flat surface of the canvas.
I was enormously proud of it.
So naturally, I thought Lady Gaga should see it.
What followed was probably one of the more ridiculous adventures I have undertaken in the name of my art.
There were carefully timed emails.
A YouTube video.
A print delivered to a hotel.
A trip to Auckland.
Six hours standing outside that hotel with Rhianna and a collection of considerably younger Gaga fans, waiting for a woman who was never going to come downstairs.
And, six months later, a telephone call I certainly wasn't expecting.
At the time, I wanted one thing from this painting.
Recognition.
I thought that if the right person saw my work, perhaps something would happen. A door might open. Someone might notice what I could do.
That door never opened.
And looking back now, I'm rather glad it didn't.
Because while I was busy trying to get Lady Gaga to notice my painting, something much more important had already happened.
The painting had changed me.
It had pushed me beyond the canvas. It had made me think differently about storytelling, materials and how much information an artwork could contain. It had shown me that I didn't simply want to paint people.
I wanted to climb inside their worlds.
And not long afterwards, another person would wander into mine.
David Bowie.
If Gaga had opened the door I was desperately knocking on, perhaps my journey would have taken a completely different direction.
Instead, another door was waiting.
And when I eventually opened that one, I had absolutely no idea what I was about to stumble into.
But first, there is the small matter of me trying to get a painting into the hands of Lady Gaga.
It didn't exactly go to plan.
Chapter One — Surely She’ll See It
Once the painting was finished, I became determined to get it in front of Lady Gaga.
After all, that had been part of the reason this whole adventure had started.
Rhianna had suggested I paint a celebrity because she thought it might finally draw some attention to my work. I had researched Gaga, disappeared into her world and thrown everything I had into creating my interpretation of it.
I was enormously proud of the result.
Surely Gaga would love it.
Or perhaps somebody around her would see it and think, You really need to look at this.
There was just the small matter of getting it to her.
And this is where I behaved in a way that was actually rather unusual for me.
Trying to Get Noticed
I have never been particularly good at pushing myself or my artwork in front of people.
I don't like forcing things down people's throats, and marketing myself has never come naturally to me.
Yet with this painting, something took over.
Perhaps it was because the original idea had always been about getting noticed. Perhaps it was because everyone around me was rooting for it. Or perhaps some of the relentless ambition I had channelled into Gaga had rubbed off on me.
Whatever it was, for once I decided to really push.
On 5 June at 11am New Zealand time, I sent emails to the relevant companies connected with Gaga, hoping that somewhere along the line somebody might take notice.
But even the timing wasn't accidental.
I had worked out that it would be 4pm in Hollywood, connecting it in my own slightly obsessive way with something I had picked up during my research around Marry the Night and Interscope Records.
Yes.
I actually went that far.
Even now, it makes me laugh.
I had become so immersed in Gaga's world that apparently even sending an email couldn't just be sending an email.
And then I waited.
Nothing.
Perhaps a Video Would Do It
That didn't stop me.
My husband created a YouTube video showing the painting and its details.
Perhaps that would get it noticed.
The video achieved the spectacular total of about 269 views.
Not exactly the explosion of international attention I might have imagined.
Looking back, there is something wonderfully naïve about it.
I had spent so much time researching and creating the painting that I think I assumed effort somehow translated into attention.
It doesn't.
You can pour hundreds of hours into creating something extraordinary and the rest of the world can quite happily carry on without noticing.
Still, I wasn't giving up quite yet.
Then Gaga came to New Zealand.
Right, Let's Get It to Her
Rhianna was going to Auckland to see Gaga perform on the Born This Way Ball, and suddenly we had another opportunity.
I had a good-quality copy of the painting made and asked Rhianna to take it with her and leave it at Gaga's hotel as a gift.
I didn't want anything for it.
I just wanted Gaga to see what I had created.
The print was delivered to the hotel.
Surely this time it would reach her.
But apparently I hadn't quite exhausted my determination yet.
The following day, I headed to Auckland myself.
I didn't take the actual painting with me.
Instead, I took a small piece of painted canvas that I intended to attach to the artwork beneath the tour poster.
I had a plan.
If I could get Gaga to sign that little piece of canvas, I could take it home and incorporate it permanently into the painting.
Her signature wouldn't simply sit somewhere on the surface as an autograph added afterwards.
It would become part of the artwork itself.
I thought that would be rather fabulous.
There was just one small problem.
To get Gaga to sign it, I first had to find Gaga.
And that is how I found myself doing something I never imagined I would do.
Six Hours Outside Lady Gaga's Hotel
I stood outside her hotel.
For about six hours.
With Rhianna and a load of teenagers.
I have never been someone who gets giddy around famous people. Celebrity itself doesn't particularly impress me, and I've never naturally put famous people on some different level from everybody else.
Yet there I was.
Waiting outside a celebrity's hotel.
The irony is not lost on me.
Even at the time, the whole thing felt slightly ridiculous and rather funny.
Eventually one of Gaga's bodyguards came downstairs.
We asked whether the artwork had reached her, and he confirmed that there was indeed a copy of my painting upstairs.
Brilliant.
At least it had got that far.
After about six hours, however, it became fairly obvious that Gaga wasn't going to come down.
So we gave up and went home.
No meeting.
No signature.
No magical moment where somebody came running through the hotel doors shouting that Lady Gaga had seen my painting and absolutely had to meet the woman who created it.
Life isn't usually quite that accommodating.
But I still believed she had the print.
And then, six months later, my phone rang.
Would You Like Your Picture Back?
It was the hotel.
The concierge had my print.
Still.
They could see that a lot of work had gone into it and thought I might like to have it back.
I couldn't believe it.
After all the research, the carefully timed emails, the YouTube video, Rhianna delivering the print, my journey to Auckland and six hours hanging around outside the hotel...
it had apparently made it as far as the hotel.
That was it.
I still laugh about it now.
Did Gaga ever actually see it?
I have absolutely no idea.
Perhaps she did and didn't like it.
That's perfectly possible.
Art is personal.
Maybe she prefers landscapes.
Whatever happened, nobody could say I hadn't given it a bloody good go.
Riding the Wave
And I don't regret any of it.
For a brief period, everyone around me seemed to be caught up in this mad little adventure.
People were rooting for me.
There was excitement.
Hope.
That wonderful feeling that perhaps something completely unexpected was about to happen.
For one moment, I was riding the crest of a wave made from the sort of dreams artists probably aren't supposed to admit they have.
Maybe this is it.
It wasn't.
At least, not in the way I thought.
Lady Gaga didn't suddenly propel my work into the world.
No doors flew open.
My life carried on.
But something about that experience stayed with me.
Because I had done something completely against my usual nature.
I had pushed.
I had tried to make somebody notice.
I had chased the possibility that the right person's approval might somehow change what happened next.
And after all of that, I found myself confronting a much more uncomfortable question.
Why did I think I needed somebody else to notice me in the first place?
That question would change far more than getting Lady Gaga's signature ever could.
Chapter Two — Who Gives a Shit, Really?
There is something slightly contradictory about everything I did trying to get this painting in front of Lady Gaga.
Because I am actually terrible at selling myself.
I don't like pushing things down people's throats. I don't particularly enjoy saying, Look at me. Look what I've done. Aren't I wonderful?
Even when I have created something I am enormously proud of, there is usually another little voice somewhere in my head saying:
Who gives a shit, really?
Why would anybody be that interested?
I think I know where some of that comes from.
For years, some of the ways I thought and the strange places my imagination went were mocked by members of my own family. And generally, very little attention was paid to what I actually achieved with that imagination.
Eventually, I think you absorb some of that.
You stop expecting people to be interested.
So you don't tell them.
You don't market yourself particularly well.
You make another piece instead.
Ambition Without the Megaphone
The strange thing is that I have never lacked ambition.
Quite the opposite.
Inside my work, I am enormously ambitious.
I'll spend months or years making something. I'll research obsessively, learn new techniques, commission other makers, experiment with materials and follow an idea until I've taken it as far as I possibly can.
But when it comes to standing in front of people and saying, Look what I have achieved, I have always found that much harder.
Gaga temporarily changed that.
For once, I really pushed.
Emails.
The video.
The print.
A trip to Auckland.
Six bloody hours outside a hotel.
I had done almost everything I could think of to put that painting in front of somebody I thought might matter.
And nothing happened.
Oddly enough, that was probably exactly what I needed.
Closing the Door
The Gaga experience cemented something in me.
I stopped trying to make art in the hope that the right person might notice me.
I stopped imagining that somebody important was going to appear, recognise what I could do and somehow validate the whole thing.
I closed that door.
From then on, I would make my art for me.
If somebody else loved it, wonderful.
If somebody paid attention, wonderful.
If they didn't, I was going to make it anyway.
That decision was incredibly freeing.
Because once you stop wondering whether something will impress somebody else, you can ask a much more interesting question:
What do I actually want to make?
And some of my most ambitious work was still ahead of me.
Looking Back Now
Writing these journals has forced me to do something I don't naturally do.
I've had to stop.
Look backwards.
And actually acknowledge what I've made.
And you know what?
I think it's amazing.
Not because I think I'm more important than anybody else.
Not because I expect everybody to like it.
But because I know what went into it.
I know the years.
The research.
The hundreds and thousands of hours.
The mistakes.
The things I had to learn because I didn't know how to make what was inside my head.
The paintings.
The sculptures.
The metal, glass, wood, stone and everything else I've dragged into them because a flat canvas wasn't enough.
Looking at all of it together while writing these journals has made me realise that perhaps I've spent far too long dismissing my own achievements before anybody else had the opportunity to.
And yes, even now that same little thought appears:
Who gives a shit, really?
Well, perhaps that isn't the point anymore.
I do.
So Why Am I Talking About It Now?
There is another obvious contradiction.
If I decided all those years ago that I didn't care whether anybody noticed, why am I suddenly opening all of this up now?
Because something has changed.
I am tired of spending my working life earning minimum wage for other people while this enormous body of work sits quietly in the background.
And, quite frankly, I have too much bloody art.
For years I wasn't particularly interested in selling the originals. I was happy creating them and living with them.
Now I'm ready to let some of them go.
I want my art to start earning its keep.
That doesn't mean I'm suddenly creating for an audience.
It means I'm finally prepared to show people properly what I've already created.
These journals are part of that.
For perhaps the first time, instead of putting a painting online and expecting somebody to somehow understand what they're looking at, I'm opening the doors.
I'm explaining where the ideas came from.
Why that strange little object is there.
Why one painting took months and another sculpture took years.
Why I made them in the first place.
I'm not asking anyone to think they're wonderful.
I'm finally allowing people to decide for themselves.
And perhaps that is the biggest difference between the artist standing outside Lady Gaga's hotel in Auckland and the artist writing this today.
Back then, I was hoping somebody else's attention might prove that what I was doing mattered.
Today, I don't need that proof.
But if you're interested...
come in and have a proper look.
Chapter Three — Nobody Sits on My Pedestal
There is something else the Gaga experience says about me.
I don't hero-worship people.
I never really have.
I can admire what somebody creates. I can be fascinated by their mind, their talent, their story or what they have achieved. I can spend months researching them and build an entire artwork around their life.
But that doesn't put them above me.
Fame is not a hierarchy of human worth.
Lady Gaga is my equal.
David Bowie was my equal.
The person serving me in a shop is my equal.
And I am theirs.
What determines how I feel about somebody is much simpler.
How do you treat people?
Famous Is Still Human
Perhaps this is why I don't become particularly giddy around famous people.
I'm interested in them, certainly. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent so much time disappearing down rabbit holes researching Gaga and, later, Bowie.
But I'm interested in the human being and their story, not in worshipping the celebrity.
There is a difference.
Which does raise an obvious question.
If I feel like that, what on earth was I doing standing outside Lady Gaga's hotel for six hours?
I Wasn't Only There for Me
Yes, part of it was about the painting.
I had taken that small piece of painted canvas with me in the hope that Gaga might sign it so I could incorporate her signature into the finished artwork.
But there was another reason I was prepared to stand there for so long.
Rhianna.
She was a huge Gaga fan. In fact, this entire adventure had begun with her enthusiasm in the first place.
If Gaga had appeared and Rhianna had actually got to meet her, that would have been wonderful.
I think I would have got as much pleasure from watching Rhianna's reaction as she would have got from meeting Gaga.
Probably more.
I've always had a tendency to think about other people first. If I can make something special happen for somebody I care about, their excitement becomes part of the pleasure for me.
Gaga never came downstairs, so Rhianna didn't get her moment.
Years later, however, somebody else did.
Megan and Bonnie
My friend Megan desperately wanted to meet Bonnie Tyler when we had the opportunity in New Zealand.
Bonnie already had a place within my own artwork. She appears in my painting of Taliesin and is also represented on one of the copper scales of my Great Welsh Dragon, Emrys, celebrating notable Welsh people.
So I was delighted to meet her and give her a copy connected with my Welsh Dragon.
Bonnie was fabulous.
Warm, approachable and lovely.
Bless her.
But for me, she was another Welsh person to say hello to on the other side of the world.
Megan was different.
Megan was beside herself.
And watching her get the moment Rhianna hadn't got with Gaga was priceless.
I remember the pleasure of seeing Megan's face far more than any excitement about being able to say that I had met Bonnie Tyler.
And perhaps that little story explains my relationship with fame better than I ever could.
Nobody Above. Nobody Below.
I can admire somebody's achievements enormously without believing that makes them more important than anybody else.
Money doesn't impress me.
Status doesn't impress me.
A famous name on its own doesn't impress me.
People do.
Kindness does.
Humour does.
Creativity does.
How somebody treats another person when there is absolutely nothing to be gained from doing so tells me far more about them than fame ever could.
Nobody gets the pedestal.
But that works both ways.
I don't put famous people above me, and I am finally learning not to put myself below them either.
Perhaps that second part took me rather longer to understand.
Because standing outside Gaga's hotel wasn't really about wanting to be close to celebrity.
I wanted an opportunity for my art.
I wanted Rhianna to have an extraordinary moment.
And yes, at that stage of my life, I still carried the hope that somebody with Gaga's reach might notice what I could do and somehow change things for me.
She didn't.
And looking back, I'm beginning to think that might have been one of the best things that could have happened.
Chapter Four — Perhaps Gaga Did Me a Favour
At the time, of course, I wanted Gaga to see the painting.
I wanted her to love it.
If she had taken the print, responded to it, signed my little piece of canvas or somehow drawn attention to my work, I would have been absolutely delighted.
That was the whole bloody point.
But looking back now, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I'd actually got what I wanted.
What If She Had Loved It?
Success has a funny habit of determining what we do next.
If something works, we tend to do more of it.
Had Gaga noticed the painting and suddenly brought attention to my work, perhaps I would have thought:
Right. This is what people want from me.
Perhaps I would have painted another celebrity.
Then another.
Perhaps I would have spent my time trying to recreate whatever had attracted that attention in the first place.
I will never know.
But I do know what actually happened.
Nothing.
And because nothing happened, there was nothing to chase.
So I moved on.
Free to Follow the Next Idea
That turned out to be rather important.
I wasn't suddenly known as the woman who painted Lady Gaga.
Nobody was asking me to make another Gaga.
There was no audience waiting for a particular kind of work and no successful formula I felt obliged to repeat.
I could go wherever my imagination wanted to go next.
And that is exactly what I did.
The strange thing is that Gaga had already given me something far more useful than the recognition I had been chasing.
She had given me experience.
I had learned that biography could become a landscape.
That tiny details could carry enormous stories.
That humour could sit beside serious ideas.
That another artist's medium could enter my work without taking away my own voice.
That glass and metal could become part of a painting.
That something could open, close, conceal and reveal.
And perhaps most importantly, I had discovered how much I enjoyed making an artwork that had to be read.
Not everything needed to reveal itself immediately.
I could hide things.
I could make people look.
I could create an entire world and let the viewer gradually work out why everything was there.
That was far more valuable than an autograph.
Gaga Was a Beginning, Not a Destination
I can see now that The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta sits at an interesting point in my work.
It isn't remotely as complex as some of the pieces that followed.
It isn't as physically ambitious.
It doesn't contain the years of accumulated symbolism that would eventually find its way into works such as the Seven Deadly Sins, the Great Welsh Dragon or the Book of Revelation.
But it didn't need to.
It was part of me learning how to get there.
There is a youthful exuberance to it that I rather like now.
Everything wants to be seen.
Everything wants to say something.
Gaga towers above New York. Pipes explode from her neck. Her cape flows around her. Little Monsters gather below. Windows are stuffed with clues. Glass opens from her face.
It is loud.
And perhaps I was loud too — at least inside my own head.
I had enormous creative ambition and was still working out what the hell to do with it.
This painting allowed me to experiment.
Failure Can Be Surprisingly Useful
I don't really consider the Gaga adventure a failure now.
The attempt to get it noticed failed spectacularly.
That's different.
The painting did exactly what it needed to do.
It pushed me forward.
Perhaps there is a danger in getting exactly what you want too early. You can become so busy walking through the door that has opened that you stop looking for all the other doors around you.
Gaga's door stayed firmly shut.
So I kept looking.
And eventually another subject appeared.
At first, I had no idea just how different he would be.
Enter David Bowie
If Gaga had been an explosion of information, Bowie was going to become an excavation.
When I painted Gaga, she was still relatively early in her career. There was only so much history available for me to uncover because much of her story hadn't happened yet.
With Bowie, I was suddenly looking at decades.
Different identities.
Different periods.
Different countries.
Music, art, theatre, fashion, relationships, spirituality, humour, experimentation and reinvention.
There seemed to be another Bowie behind every Bowie I found.
And when I started researching him, I had absolutely no idea what I had stumbled into.
I certainly didn't think:
This is going to become a three-canvas work filled with different worlds and characters.
I just started looking.
But this time I wasn't quite the same artist who had begun Gaga.
I had learned something.
From Gaga to Bowie
There is a noticeable difference between the two works.
Gaga is exuberant.
Bowie became more considered.
More demure.
More mature in its design.
Which is slightly ridiculous when you consider how much more information I had to deal with in Bowie.
But perhaps that is exactly why.
By then, I had learned that I didn't have to make every idea shout at the same volume.
I could control the narrative.
I could allow one part to lead into another.
I could let quieter details sit alongside enormous ones.
I had grown.
Gaga helped me do that.
So perhaps the fact that Lady Gaga never swept in and changed my artistic life was fortunate.
Because she had already changed it without ever knowing.
I didn't need her to take the painting.
I needed to take what I had learned from making it.
And I did.
Straight into a world that was about to become considerably bigger.
Chapter Five — And Then Came Bowie
And then came David Bowie.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was about to take everything I had begun discovering with Gaga and push it somewhere completely different.
The connection between the two works seems obvious to me now.
It wasn't then.
I wasn't sitting there thinking, Gaga worked, so I'll do another famous musician.
If anything, the experience with Gaga had taught me not to think like that.
I wasn't looking for another celebrity.
I was looking for another story.
And with Bowie, I stumbled into an extraordinary one.
I Had No Idea What I Had Found
When I began researching David Bowie, I genuinely had no idea what I was getting myself into.
With Gaga, I had been researching a woman still relatively near the beginning of her career. There was plenty to work with, but her story was still being written.
Bowie was something else entirely.
The deeper I went, the bigger he became.
David Jones.
Major Tom.
Ziggy Stardust.
Aladdin Sane.
Halloween Jack.
The Thin White Duke.
Berlin.
Tin Machine.
The Glass Spider.
His art.
His relationships.
His spirituality.
His humour.
His mistakes.
His constant need to change.
Every time I thought I had found the man, another version appeared behind him.
And I loved it.
A Much More Interesting Subject — For Me
This isn't about saying Bowie was somehow better than Gaga.
He was simply a much more interesting subject for me.
There is a difference.
By then, I knew something about the way my own mind worked.
I liked layers.
I liked contradiction.
I liked research that sent me off in completely unexpected directions.
I liked finding one tiny piece of information that suddenly changed how I understood everything around it.
And Bowie gave me decades of it.
He didn't just change costume.
He seemed to dismantle himself and rebuild.
Again and again.
For an artist fascinated by identity, transformation and what sits behind the surface, I couldn't have asked for much more.
I had stumbled into a creative playground.
Gaga Had Prepared Me
The strange thing is that I don't think I could have approached Bowie in quite the same way without first creating Gaga.
Gaga had taught me to stop thinking of a portrait as a face.
A person could become a world.
Their surroundings could tell their story.
Architecture could become biography.
Objects could become clues.
A tiny joke could sit beside something deeply meaningful.
Different materials could leave the canvas and become part of the narrative.
Most importantly, I had learned that the viewer didn't need to understand everything immediately.
They could discover it.
So when Bowie arrived, I already had some of the tools.
I just didn't yet know how far I was capable of taking them.
Something Else Had Changed
There is another difference between the Gaga and Bowie works that I find fascinating now.
I had changed.
Gaga is loud.
It is exuberant, youthful and slightly chaotic.
Ideas compete for attention. Gaga herself towers over the city. Pipes burst from her body. Glass opens from her face. Little Monsters gather beneath her.
Everything wants to speak.
There is a tremendous energy in it.
And I think some of that energy was mine.
I was ambitious, experimenting and discovering what I could do.
By the time I reached Bowie, I was more confident in my own visual language.
I didn't need every idea to shout.
The Bowie work became more restrained, more demure and more mature in its construction, despite containing vastly more information.
I had learned to control the noise.
That didn't happen because somebody taught me how.
It happened because I had made Gaga.
From One Canvas to Three
And Bowie wasn't going to fit comfortably into one world.
The more I researched, the more impossible that became.
Eventually the story spread across three canvases.
Different periods began occupying different spaces. Characters appeared and disappeared. Windows opened into other identities. One part of his life led physically into another.
The ideas I had tentatively begun exploring with Gaga were becoming much more sophisticated.
But the most interesting thing is that I couldn't see any of this from where I stood at the beginning.
You rarely can.
You make one thing.
It teaches you something.
Then you make another.
Years later, you look backwards and suddenly see the path.
My Alpha
Looking back now, I don't see The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta as the painting that failed to get Lady Gaga's attention.
I see it as something much more important.
It was my Alpha.
My beginning.
Not the beginning of me making art, obviously. I had been creating long before Gaga entered my world.
It was the beginning of me discovering what kind of artist I actually was.
This painting started me on a road of exploration — not only into the subjects I chose, but into my own talent and imagination.
I began to understand that I wasn't simply interested in painting something beautifully.
I wanted to tell stories in oils.
I wanted to take something people thought they already knew, pull it apart, rummage around inside it and rebuild it through my own imagination.
Sometimes the starting point would be a person.
Sometimes a myth.
A biblical text.
A sin.
A mental state.
A country and its history.
Even something that might initially seem completely uninteresting.
That became part of the challenge.
Could I make the uninteresting interesting?
Could I take information somebody might ordinarily walk straight past and turn it into something they wanted to stop and explore?
I discovered that I could.
Finding My Own Language
Since Gaga, I have created countless works in which I've done exactly that.
I've taken stories, histories, people and ideas and retold them in ways that could only really have come out of my head.
David Bowie would come next and give me a far richer world to explore.
Then the journey kept growing.
The paintings became more complex.
The materials became more adventurous.
Paint met glass.
Glass met metal.
Wood, stone and sculpture entered the conversation.
Eventually I stopped worrying very much about what category any of it belonged in.
Is it fine art?
Narrative art?
Illustration?
Painting?
Sculpture?
Some peculiar combination of all of them?
People can call it whatever they like.
Because somewhere along this road I realised that the label isn't particularly important to me.
This is simply how I speak.
This Is Me
My voice is unusual.
I know that.
My imagination goes off in directions I can't always explain until I've followed it there. I make connections between things that perhaps aren't supposed to connect. I can take a phrase like “a great set of pipes” and somehow end up researching the inside of a human throat and building a musical instrument out of somebody's body.
That's me.
That is how my mind works.
For years, parts of that way of thinking were something I learned to keep to myself.
Art gave it somewhere to go.
And Gaga was the point where I began to recognise that this peculiar way of seeing things wasn't something I needed to suppress.
It was my artistic voice.
I am a storyteller in oils.
I am an explorer of other people's stories and of my own imagination.
I take things apart and put them back together differently.
I make the familiar unfamiliar.
And occasionally I can make something seemingly uninteresting rather bloody interesting.
Whether somebody chooses to call what I do art, illustration, sculpture or something else entirely is up to them.
I know what I call it.
Mine.
My voice.
My imagination.
My own rather unusual way of seeing the world.
And perhaps that is the greatest thing The Gaga World of Stefani Germanotta ever gave me.
I had created it hoping Lady Gaga might notice who I was.
Instead, somewhere in the process,
I noticed myself.
And from there, everything began.
WHAT CAME NEXT?
Gaga had shown me that I was a storyteller in oils. Then I stumbled into David Bowie — and discovered just how far I could take it.
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