David Bowie Art: Inside The Metamorphic Life of Davy Jones Part 1
Updated: Sep 9
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.
Chapter 5: From Ziggy Stardust to Halloween Jack
The Story Continues: Beyond the Masks →
Chapter One
Before Bowie: Inside the House of Davy Jones
Before David Bowie, there was David Jones.
That is where I wanted this painting to begin.
Not with the Starman, the costumes or the extraordinary characters that would eventually consume entire sections of these three canvases, but with the person underneath them.
I began with a house.
The building is based around Haddon Hall in Beckenham, where Bowie lived during an important period of his early creative life. But I wasn't interested in simply painting a house associated with a famous musician.
I wanted to open it up.
The windows allow us to look inside, and each becomes a small glimpse into the family, experiences and influences that existed before David Jones became David Bowie.
The Attic — Davy's Locker
At the top of the house is an attic.
For me, an attic is where we put the things we keep but don't necessarily want on display: possessions, memories, secrets and pieces of the past.
Inside mine sits a figure beside an open trunk marked Davy.
David Bowie was born David Jones, so I couldn't resist turning the trunk into my own version of Davy Jones's Locker.
But there is no treasure inside.
There are masks.
They represent the identities waiting to emerge: different faces, different possibilities and eventually Bowie himself.
I like the idea that before we have even properly met David Bowie, I have already hidden him inside David Jones.
He is there.
He just hasn't been let out yet.
The Masks
Masks run throughout all three paintings, but here they begin quietly.
The people inside the house are masked because I was entering the private world of people I had never known. I could research their lives, read stories and look at photographs, but I couldn't pretend to know them.
So we are allowed to look through the windows, but only so far.
That boundary became important.
Later, masks will become personas, performances and constructed identities. Here, they belong to something much more private.
They conceal the people behind the story.
What Is Hidden in the Attic
Behind the figure are two small paintings of distressed faces.
These refer to the more difficult aspects of Bowie's family history.
I didn't want to make those experiences into a dramatic scene. They didn't need to dominate the painting.
Instead, I placed them in the attic.
Stored away.
Present, but not immediately visible.
Like so many things carried through families, they are part of the house whether we choose to display them or not.
The Family Window
The middle window is particularly important because everything within it relates to Bowie's immediate family.
There is a small reference to David as a child playing with lipstick from his mother's handbag.
It is such an ordinary little story, but knowing the man he became makes it irresistible: the experimentation with appearance, transformation and the freedom to change how the world sees you.
I don't claim that a little boy playing with lipstick somehow predicts David Bowie.
I simply loved the connection.
In the same window is a gramophone representing his father and the word JAZZ, referring to the musical influence of his older half-brother.
I deliberately brought these references together.
Mother.
Father.
Brother.
All contained within one window.
Before Bowie created his own musical and visual world, there was a family around David Jones influencing the one he was beginning to discover.
Down in the Basement
Below them, in the basement, are the Konrads, one of David Jones's early bands.
I based the figures on an early photograph but masked his face, continuing the visual language of the house.
This is David Jones beginning to perform.
There is no Ziggy.
No great theatrical persona.
No carefully constructed Bowie universe.
He is simply playing, learning and discovering where music might take him.
That mattered to me because I didn't want to rush through David Jones just to reach David Bowie.
The transformation is far more interesting if we remember that he had to find his way there.
Looking Through the Windows
The windows hold this first part of the painting together.
Through them we see fragments.
Family.
Music.
Private history.
Early experimentation.
The beginnings of performance.
They are not intended to tell us everything about David Jones. Quite the opposite.
A window only gives us a limited view.
And that felt appropriate when painting somebody else's life.
But outside those windows, the painting is already beginning to change.
The familiar world starts becoming stranger. Clothing begins to enter the landscape. Lyrics begin taking physical form. Reality starts bending under the weight of imagination.
David Jones is still inside the house.
But Bowie is beginning to emerge.
And that is where we go next.
Chapter Two
When David Jones Begins to Become Bowie
Step outside Haddon Hall and the painting begins to change.
Inside the house were family, childhood, early music and the private world of David Jones.
Outside, imagination starts taking over.
The landscape becomes less reliable. Clothes become ground, lyrics become creatures and real places begin mixing with things that could only exist inside a Bowie song — or inside my head.
This is where David Jones begins to become Bowie.
Haddon Hall
Haddon Hall anchors this part of the painting in reality.
The large Victorian house in Beckenham was associated with an intensely creative period in Bowie's life. Music was being made, people came and went, ideas were developing and his son was born during this period.
I used the familiar photographs of Bowie outside Haddon Hall as inspiration, but I wasn't interested in recreating them.
The house gave me something much more useful.
A point of departure.
Behind us is the private world we have just looked through.
In front of us, Bowie is beginning to create his own.
Wearing the Landscape
Bowie's clothes were never going to remain simply clothes in my painting.
His costumes became so closely connected with his performances that I wanted them to become part of the world itself.
So fragments of the kimono, quilted outfits and knitted catsuit spill across the ground.
You don't simply look at them.
You travel across them.
His visual identity is literally becoming part of the landscape.
London Begins to Dream
Behind Haddon Hall are the rooftops of London beneath an enormous moon and swirling sky.
This isn't intended to be an accurate London.
It is my Bowie London.
The city gives us something recognisable, but the scale and atmosphere are beginning to shift. Reality is still there, but it is becoming theatrical.
That gave me the freedom to start introducing some of the stranger references I discovered in his music and life.
The Monster Beneath the Tree
Hidden amongst the trees is a creature inspired by Bowie's song The Width of a Circle.
The song gave me the image of a man encountering a monster beneath a tree, only for the boundary between the monster and himself to become much less certain.
I turned mine into a distorted, almost Gollum-like Bowie creature.
This is one of the first places where I allowed a Bowie lyric to become physically real within the painting.
I wasn't interested in writing song titles across the canvas.
If Bowie gave me a monster, I wanted to paint the monster.
Bowie the Mime
Mime also finds its way into this landscape.
The more I read about Bowie, the more obvious it became that his creativity wasn't confined to music.
Movement, theatre and performance were already part of the language he was developing.
The body could become another instrument.
That interested me because the Bowie emerging from Haddon Hall wasn't simply learning how to make music.
He was learning how to present it.
From an Ice Cream Advert to an Alien
Some references became much more ridiculous.
And I make absolutely no apology for that.
Bowie appeared in a Lyons Maid ice-cream advertisement directed by Ridley Scott.
Ridley Scott later directed Alien.
I love Alien.
That was enough.
So there is an alien on the rooftop.
It isn't one of the great defining moments of Bowie's career, but that isn't how these paintings work.
If something I discovered gave me an image I couldn't resist, it went in.
Sometimes there is deep symbolism.
Sometimes there is an alien because my brain made a connection and thought it was funny.
Both belong in the painting.
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground appear here too.
They were part of the musical world Bowie was absorbing, and I wanted to acknowledge that influence without simply writing their name somewhere.
Throughout these paintings I preferred clues to labels.
Some references will be immediately obvious to Bowie fans.
Others may take a little longer.
That's part of the fun.
The Three Tuns
The Three Tuns gives us another piece of reality amongst the madness.
Real places matter in these paintings because Bowie's extraordinary creative world didn't appear from nowhere.
It grew through houses, clubs, streets, friendships, performances and encounters with other creative people.
The Three Tuns helps keep one foot in that real world while everything around it becomes increasingly surreal.
Something Is Coming
There are also clues to what Bowie will eventually create.
The famous telephone box associated with the Ziggy Stardust imagery appears, along with the tailor's shop I connected during my research with the name Ziggy and its cowboy-star imagery.
But I don't want to introduce Ziggy properly yet.
At this point they are clues.
Little pieces of a character that hasn't fully arrived.
That was important to the way I constructed the painting. I didn't want Bowie's different periods divided into neat boxes with a line drawn between them.
Things begin before other things have completely finished.
Ideas overlap.
One image leads into another.
And gradually the ordinary world outside Haddon Hall becomes something else entirely.
We began inside a house with David Jones.
Now clothes cover the landscape, a monster hides beneath a tree, an alien sits on a rooftop and pieces of a future Starman are beginning to appear.
Bowie has arrived.
But the first canvas still has more stories to tell.
And some of them were far too good not to paint.
Chapter Three
When Bowie's Songs Became Pictures
By this point, Bowie's music had started giving me pictures.
A lyric could become a creature. A song could become a scene. A person could be transformed into something completely unexpected.
I wasn't trying to illustrate Bowie's songs literally from beginning to end.
I was taking the fragments that caught my imagination and turning them into my own visual language.
Sometimes the result was symbolic.
Sometimes it was ridiculous.
Quite often it was both.
Andy Warhol in Stained Glass
The stained-glass windows contain several tiny portraits, each less than an inch square.
Painting them was torturous.
Andy Warhol was particularly troublesome.
My first attempt looked less like Warhol and more like a goat.
Once I had seen the goat, there was no saving him.
So I started again.
This time, rather than simply painting Warhol's portrait, I borrowed the visual language of his famous Marilyn Monroe works and replaced Marilyn with Andy himself.
That felt much more appropriate.
Bowie had made a song about Warhol, Warhol had made art from famous faces, and now I was making art about Bowie making art about Warhol.
A rather satisfying little circle.
And, thankfully, no goats.
Becoming the Laughing Gnome
I have a habit of hiding myself somewhere in my paintings.
For Bowie, there was only one sensible choice.
I became The Laughing Gnome.
There was something mischievous and absurd about the song that fitted perfectly with my own sense of humour, so between the first and second canvases I sit on a tiny toadstool with a glass of dandelion wine.
But that isn't the last you see of me.
My final appearance is even more ridiculous.
I'm in the chimney with the honey, another little visual joke taken directly from the lyrics.
There are other distorted versions of me hidden around the work too, including private jokes between my husband and me.
Not everything in these paintings needs a profound meaning. Sometimes Bowie handed me an image that was simply too much fun not to paint.
And if a song gives me an excuse to put myself in a chimney with honey, I'm going to take it.
From Painting to Object
As the first canvas developed, I increasingly wanted objects to escape the flat painted surface.
If something could physically exist, why only paint it?
That question eventually brought glass and metal into the work and allowed me to use the spaces between the three canvases as part of the story.
The painting was becoming more than three pictures placed beside one another.
I could actually build the transitions between them.
And that became particularly important when I reached the end of Canvas One.
Major Tom — Leaving Earth
This is where Major Tom finally appears.
I deliberately placed him at the transition between the first and second canvases because he had a job to do.
He had to take us away from Earth.
Major Tom sits inside a metal telescope, physically projecting from the artwork. The telescope points away from the world we have just travelled through and towards Planet Earth on Canvas Two.
The reference, of course, comes from Space Oddity and the image of Planet Earth appearing blue as Major Tom drifts into space.
But I used that idea compositionally as well.
Canvas One has kept us relatively grounded.
We began inside a house with David Jones. We looked through his family windows, followed his early music, stepped outside Haddon Hall and watched reality gradually become stranger.
Major Tom is the point where I finally cut that connection.
Look through the telescope and we leave the first canvas behind.
Earth is now something viewed from a distance.
And on the other side, the rules are going to be very different.
The Spider Between Worlds
Near this transition, another creature appears.
A spider.
At first it is simply a reference to what is coming, but the spider became much more important as the work developed.
I didn't want all of it confined to paint.
The idea would eventually grow beyond the canvas and become a physical piece of metalwork, allowing the Spiders from Mars to invade the construction of the artwork itself.
But we aren't quite there yet.
First we have to follow Major Tom.
The telescope has taken us away from David Jones, Haddon Hall and London.
Ahead is space.
Mars.
Black holes.
Starmen.
And spiders.
Welcome to Canvas Two.
Chapter Four
Creating Ziggy Stardust
We have left Earth.
Major Tom has carried us across the gap between the first and second canvases, and immediately the rules change.
This is space. This is Mars.
And this is where Ziggy Stardust takes over.
I didn't want to simply paint Bowie dressed as Ziggy. He had created a character with his own mythology, so I wanted to give that character a world of his own.
Mars, Starmen, black holes and impossible creatures could all exist together here.
And, of course, there had to be spiders.
The Spiders from Mars and the Yellow Brick Road
Sometimes my interpretation of Bowie's work is complicated.
Sometimes it really isn't.
They were called the Spiders from Mars.
So I painted them as spiders.
Actual spiders, complete with their musical instruments, travelling from Mars towards the foreground of the painting.
Their route is a yellow brick road, which came from Starman. The song has a musical reference to Over the Rainbow, famously associated with The Wizard of Oz, and that immediately gave me my road.
It was perfect for Ziggy.
Dorothy follows the yellow brick road through a strange world in search of something beyond the ordinary. My road begins on Mars and carries Bowie's equally strange cast of characters through his own fantastical world.
So I took the connection one step further.
If Bowie gave me Starman, Starman gave me Over the Rainbow, and Over the Rainbow gave me the yellow brick road.
Then I put the Spiders from Mars on it.
They travel down the road from Mars towards us, instruments in hand, while elsewhere in the same landscape Ziggy is moving in the opposite direction.
He is beginning to disappear.
Bowie Becomes the Spider
Above this strange procession is another spider.
A much larger one.
This spider represents Bowie himself.
I designed the concept and commissioned a metal artist in New Zealand to create the spider from my design idea. I wanted it to exist beyond the painted surface, physically projecting over the world below.
Its eyes are made from different-sized ball bearings, referencing the distinctive appearance of Bowie's own eyes.
The placement is deliberate.
The Spiders from Mars exist within the world below.
Bowie sits above it.
He is the creator looking down upon his creation.
Bowie's Eyes Become Black Holes
I repeated the reference to Bowie's eyes within the painted landscape, but this time I transformed them into black holes.
Rather than continually painting Bowie's face, I wanted parts of him to become the environment itself.
His eyes become space.
And one of those black holes has another purpose.
It is where Ziggy will eventually disappear.
The Three Ziggy Stardusts
There aren't just one but three versions of Ziggy within this section.
That repetition is deliberate.
I wanted Ziggy's transformation to happen visibly across the painting rather than simply showing him once and then moving on to the next character.
The first Ziggy is solid and recognisable.
The second takes us further into the transformation.
The third is disappearing.
His body begins to break apart and evaporate upwards into the black hole.
This is Ziggy being consumed.
I didn't want his story to end with a neat dividing line. I wanted to show the character physically losing his form.
And there is an interesting movement happening across the composition.
The Spiders from Mars travel towards us, advancing along the yellow brick road from Mars to the foreground.
At the same time, Ziggy is moving away from us, dissolving upwards into space.
One comes forward.
The other disappears.
Leaving Ziggy Behind
This is also why I didn't want Ziggy's disappearance treated as a separate dramatic ending later in the journal.
His ending is already happening here.
We can actually watch him disappear.
The character who arrived so spectacularly is being dismantled inside the painting while the rest of Bowie's story continues around him.
And that movement leads us towards the next transformation.
Because Ziggy's world does not simply merge unnoticed into what follows.
I placed something between them.
A physical divide.
A flash of stained glass.
The lightning bolt.
It separates the world of Ziggy Stardust from the world we are about to enter.
On the other side waits Halloween Jack.
Chapter Five
From Ziggy Stardust to Halloween Jack
Ziggy is disappearing.
By the time we reach this part of the painting, his final form is evaporating into the black hole. I didn't need to kill him again or create another elaborate ending.
We have already watched him go.
What interested me now was what Bowie created next.
And, as always, he didn't stand still for long.
Aladdin Sane
As Ziggy disappears, Aladdin Sane emerges.
The famous lightning bolt immediately gave me a way of representing him, but I wanted it to do more than identify another Bowie persona.
I wanted the bolt to become a physical division within the artwork.
It marks the transition out of Ziggy's world and towards the darker world of Halloween Jack.
The Lightning Bolt
Between these worlds stands one of the most important physical elements in the painting.
The lightning bolt.
The Aladdin Sane lightning bolt is such an iconic image of Bowie that I felt it had to be prominent. It is instantly associated with him; in many ways, the bolt is Bowie.
That is why I didn't simply paint it onto the canvas.
I designed the idea as a substantial piece of stained glass and commissioned a glass artist to create it for the artwork. I wanted the light, colour and physical presence of the glass to make the bolt stand apart from everything surrounding it.
The artist was herself a huge Bowie fan, and she brought some of her own interpretation to my design. She incorporated the British flag into the glass and, in the centre of the lightning bolt, added an eye.
I loved what she had done.
The eye connected unexpectedly with imagery I was already using throughout the paintings, while also leaving something of another Bowie fan within the work.
Compositionally, the bolt also became the perfect divide.
On one side, Ziggy's strange world is coming to an end, with his final form evaporating into the black hole.
The lightning strikes through the composition.
And on the other side waits Halloween Jack.
So the bolt works on several levels at once. It represents Aladdin Sane, separates two Bowie worlds and physically dominates this part of the canvas.
But above all, I wanted it prominent for one very simple reason.
You see that lightning bolt and you think of David Bowie.
It had to be there.
Halloween Jack
Waiting on the other side is Halloween Jack.
I gave him the eyepatch and scarf and placed him within the broken city of Diamond Dogs.
The difference from Ziggy's world is immediate.
Space gives way to a city.
Fantasy becomes dystopia.
The bright Starman is replaced by something dirtier, darker and more dangerous.
This is Hunger City.
Diamond Dogs
I treated the Diamond Dogs section almost like a comic-book world.
The buildings bend and distort. The city feels unstable. Ragged figures move through it on roller skates, and Halloween Jack belongs amongst them.
There is also the influence of George Orwell's 1984, which was important to the world Bowie was developing around Diamond Dogs.
But, as with everything else in these paintings, I wasn't trying to recreate an album cover.
I wanted to take the world Bowie suggested and see what it became inside my own imagination.
So Hunger City became my city.
Crooked.
Threatening.
Slightly ridiculous.
And populated by another Bowie creation.
One World Into Another
This is why the lightning bolt is so important to the composition.
It isn't there simply because it is one of the most recognisable images associated with Bowie.
It separates two worlds.
Behind it, the Spiders have travelled from Mars and Ziggy is disappearing into space.
Beyond it, Halloween Jack stands amongst the collapsing architecture of Hunger City.
Bowie has changed the scenery again.
And soon the colour and theatricality begin to drain away altogether.
Because beyond Halloween Jack is a Bowie persona I found much more unsettling.
The Thin White Duke.
Chapter Six
The Thin White Duke — Behind the Control
After the colour and theatrical chaos of Ziggy, Aladdin Sane and Halloween Jack, the atmosphere changes.
The Thin White Duke enters a much darker world.
I painted him immaculate and controlled on the outside, but surrounded him with fragments of a period in Bowie's life that appeared anything but controlled.
This isn't intended as a judgement of Bowie.
It is my interpretation of what I discovered while researching him.
And some of it became very uncomfortable.
Alone in the Darkness
I placed the Duke in an emptier landscape, with figures wandering separately through the darkness.
Isolation was important here.
By this point Bowie was enormously famous, yet the accounts I was reading described heavy drug use, paranoia and an increasingly troubled existence.
That contradiction interested me.
The Duke looks composed.
Everything around him suggests otherwise.
The Cut-Up Words
Strips of words circle through this section like ticker tape.
They refer to Bowie's cut-up method of writing, where words and phrases could be separated and rearranged to produce unexpected combinations.
I connected with that process because my paintings are constructed in a similar way.
I collect fragments — lyrics, stories, photographs, objects and strange little facts — and bring them together until they create something new.
Bowie did it with words.
I do it with pictures.
The Masks Return
The masks we first encountered inside the house of David Jones return here.
But their meaning has shifted.
Back then they concealed the private people whose lives I could only glimpse through windows.
Here they sit around a man who has already created and discarded extraordinary versions of himself.
Ziggy.
Aladdin Sane.
Halloween Jack.
Now the Thin White Duke.
The mask has become part of the performance.
Televisions — Windows Into Bowie's Worlds
Around the Duke are numerous television screens.
Their use is deliberate.
In Canvas One, windows allowed us to peer into the private world of David Jones.
Here, the windows have become televisions.
Each screen opens onto another fragment of Bowie: his personas, dramas, experiences, obsessions, influences and stories I encountered while researching him.
They are windows into different Bowie worlds.
Some are serious.
Some are disturbing.
And some are completely ridiculous.
Together they create the fractured environment surrounding the Duke.
MainMan
One television refers to MainMan and the management arrangements surrounding Bowie's rise through the Ziggy years.
I wanted some of the machinery behind fame in the painting too.
Music and costumes may be what the public sees, but behind them are contracts, money, managers and business.
Amongst these references is the wonderfully impossible date 31 September.
There is no 31 September.
Which was precisely why I painted it.
UFOs
Another television contains a UFO.
Bowie's fascination with extraterrestrial ideas fitted naturally into these little worlds.
After Major Tom, Starmen, Mars and Ziggy, space was never very far away.
So here it is again, contained inside another screen.
Milk, Peppers and Cocaine
Other televisions take us somewhere much darker.
One contains milk and peppers, referencing the notoriously restricted diet associated with Bowie during this troubled period.
Another contains the chemical structure of cocaine.
I didn't want to glamorise the excess.
These details are here because they help explain the contradiction I was painting.
The Thin White Duke appears elegant and controlled.
His televisions tell another story.
Urine in the Refrigerator
Then there are stories so strange that they almost demand to be painted.
I came across accounts of Bowie storing his urine in a refrigerator because he feared it might be used against him through witchcraft.
So into the painting it went.
On its own, it sounds almost comical.
Placed alongside the drugs, occult interests and paranoia of the period, it becomes considerably less funny.
That mixture of absurdity and darkness is exactly what I wanted this section to hold.
Numbers, Symbols and Fear
Numerology and occult imagery also appear amongst the screens.
I wasn't trying to diagnose Bowie or claim to know exactly what was happening inside his mind.
I was painting the fragments I found.
Numbers.
Symbols.
Superstition.
Drugs.
Occult imagery.
They accumulate around a figure who, outwardly, remains beautifully composed.
The Swastika I Wouldn't Paint
One symbol required a very deliberate decision.
This period of Bowie's life included deeply troubling flirtations with fascist and Nazi imagery, and I needed to acknowledge that because it formed part of the story I was researching.
But I felt extremely uncomfortable painting a Nazi swastika into the artwork.
It also felt unfair to allow one disturbing period of Bowie's life to become a symbol that might visually define him within my painting.
So I reversed it.
Although the image refers back to that darker period, the symbol I actually painted faces the opposite way and refers instead to the ancient Buddhist symbol.
That choice mattered to me, particularly because Bowie had explored Buddhism and would return to it later in his life.
I could acknowledge the darkness without permanently branding him with something I didn't feel comfortable placing upon him.
Rock and Roll — The Toothless Old Woman
Nearby sits an old woman in a rocking chair.
She is not a witch.
She is rock and roll.
In 1975 Bowie famously declared that rock and roll was dead and described it as a “toothless old woman.”
There was absolutely no chance I was going to read that and not paint her.
So I took Bowie literally.
There she sits: rock and roll transformed into the toothless old woman he described.
This is exactly the sort of reference I loved finding.
Bowie supplied the words.
My imagination supplied the woman.
The Black Candles and Pentagram
Around her are black candles and a pentagram, bringing the darker occult imagery of this period into the same space.
The humour of the old woman therefore sits uncomfortably beside something much darker.
That contrast suited the Duke perfectly.
Almost everything in this part of the painting seems to have two faces.
Control and chaos.
Humour and fear.
Appearance and reality.
NIPPLE
Then there is one tiny detail that could easily be missed completely.
Braille.
And the word written in Braille is:
NIPPLE.
It references one of Bowie's own artworks.
Amongst all the enormous Bowie imagery, I rather enjoy the fact that somewhere in this painting I quietly wrote nipple in Braille.
Not everything needs to shout.
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange also appears.
Its visual language had connections with Bowie's styling, particularly around his earlier work, and it became another influence I wanted hidden amongst these television worlds.
Film feeds fashion.
Fashion feeds performance.
Performance feeds Bowie.
Everything becomes connected.
The Bicycle and the Sausages
And then there are sausages.
The bicycle and sausages refer all the way back to Bowie's early job as a butcher's delivery boy.
I love that detail because it punctures the mythology.
We have travelled from David Jones to Ziggy Stardust, Mars, giant spiders, dystopian cities and the Thin White Duke.
And somewhere underneath all of that extraordinary mythology is still a young man who once delivered sausages on a bicycle.
That is why the ordinary details matter too.
Leaving the Duke
When I look at this section, the Thin White Duke isn't defined by one symbol.
It is the accumulation that matters.
The darkness.
The masks.
The cut-up words.
The televisions.
Drugs, superstition, occult imagery, strange stories and flashes of humour.
At the centre stands the Duke, immaculate amongst the chaos.
But I didn't want to leave Bowie there.
Ahead, the darkness begins to break.
A city appears.
Bars.
Cafés.
Friends.
Music.
And a wall with a door through it.
Bowie is heading to Berlin.
Chapter Seven
A Door in the Berlin Wall
After the Thin White Duke, the painting changes again.
The darkness begins to lift and Berlin appears.
Bars, cafés, people, music and city lights replace the isolation of the previous section.
But something else has changed too.
Bowie is Bowie again.
After moving through the great personas of Canvas Two, we are no longer following another invented character. We are following the man himself into Berlin.
For me, that makes Berlin an important turning point — not only in the atmosphere of the painting, but in the way I begin to portray Bowie.
Bowie Becomes Bowie Again
Something important happens when we reach Berlin.
For much of Canvas Two, Bowie has been presented through the characters he created.
Ziggy Stardust.
Aladdin Sane.
Halloween Jack.
The Thin White Duke.
Each gave him another identity and another world for me to explore.
But in Berlin, Bowie appears as Bowie again.
He isn't an alien Starman or a dystopian character. There is no invented persona standing between us and the man.
He is simply David Bowie.
I wanted that change to be felt in the world around him too. The invented landscapes begin to give way to recognisable places, friends, bars and ordinary human encounters.
After spending so much of Canvas Two inside Bowie's creations, Berlin brings us back to the person who created them.
Berlin at Night
I painted Berlin as a city after dark.
Bars.
Cafés.
Cabaret.
People moving through the night.
Real places associated with Bowie during his time there begin to appear, bringing us back into a recognisable world.
The painting is still unmistakably mine, but the fantasy has loosened its grip.
For a while, we are back amongst real streets and real people.
Bowie and Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop had to be part of Berlin.
Their friendship and creative relationship belonged to this period, so I painted Bowie and Iggy having a drink together at the Paris Bar.
It is a tiny scene compared with the giant spiders, planets and characters we have just left behind.
That is precisely why I like it.
Two friends having a drink.
After everything Bowie has become in the painting, the ordinariness feels important.
The Kiss at the Wall
Elsewhere is a kiss beside the Berlin Wall, another reference that came from my research into Bowie's life and the people around him during this period.
I wanted other people to remain present throughout these paintings.
Bowie's story wasn't created in isolation.
Musicians, artists, friends, lovers and collaborators continually move in and out of it.
They are part of the landscape too.
The Berlin Trilogy
The Berlin Wall gave me a wonderful surface to work with.
So I covered it in graffiti.
Hidden amongst it are references to the three albums associated with this period:
Low.
"Heroes".
Lodger.
I didn't want three neat album covers sitting in the painting.
I wanted the music absorbed into Berlin itself.
So the albums became graffiti.
Bowie's work is literally written across the city.
A Wall That Doesn't Stop You
The Berlin Wall also solved a compositional problem for me.
I had three canvases telling one story, and I didn't want them to feel like three separate paintings placed beside one another.
The transitions had to mean something.
Major Tom and his telescope physically carried us from Canvas One into Canvas Two.
Now I needed another way through.
And I had a wall.
A wall should stop you.
So naturally, I put a door in it.
A Door in the Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall also gave me the transition I needed between Canvas Two and Canvas Three.
I didn't want the canvases to simply stop and start. The eye needed somewhere to go.
So I painted an open doorway in the Berlin Wall.
The door isn't physically cut through the painting. It is an illusion: an open corridor painted in perspective that appears to lead through the wall and towards the third canvas.
It draws you in.
After everything we have travelled through on Canvas Two, the wall should feel like a barrier.
Instead, I give you a way through it.
The Corridor to Canvas Three
That painted corridor becomes the route into the next part of Bowie's story.
Major Tom and his telescope helped direct us from Canvas One into Canvas Two.
Here, I use perspective instead.
The Berlin Wall marks the end of one world, while the open corridor encourages your eye to continue beyond it.
And what lies beyond is deliberately different.
Canvas Two has been dominated by Bowie's great constructed identities — Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack and the Thin White Duke.
By Berlin, Bowie has become Bowie again.
Now the corridor draws us away from those great personas and towards another side of the man.
Actor.
Artist.
Performer.
Theatre.
Film.
Relationships.
Family.
Follow the corridor through the Berlin Wall and the first thing waiting for us on Canvas Three is a staircase.
Then another.
And another.
They twist through impossible spaces.
A clown is dragging a bath down them.
Inside the bath is the Elephant Man.
And somewhere amongst those stairs waits the Goblin King.
The personas haven't entirely disappeared, but the story is about to become much bigger than the rock star.
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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