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Time for our end of week show and tell…
Throwback to around 2001/2002 this time. I’d have been about 17 or 18 doing art at college.
I’d just discovered Crass and was full of that proper wide-eyed teen punk anti-war energy… right as the Iraq war was kicking off. Felt like everything was boiling over at once.
This was part of a little zine-style anti-war project I was putting together. This particular page mixed Crass lyrics with my own visuals… probably some of my earliest political work, trying to make something that actually said something rather than just looking nice.
Funny really, the main image was literally just my mate in a gas mask in the drama corridor… shot on one of those new fangled digital cameras, then dragged into Photoshop and torn apart.
This was also around the time I first started properly using Photoshop. Before that I’d been doing digital bits since the Amiga and Spectrum days, but this was me starting to pull everything together and mix in physical media too.
It was tricky before then to even get images into the computer properly beyond scanners, so this felt like a bit of a turning point.
Scans of paintings, photos, painted pages… all mashed into one noisy collage.
That process ended up leading into my final exam pieces… three 6-foot expressionist paintings, all built from that same kind of chaos.