INTERVIEW

When did you realise you wanted to be an artist, and please tell us more about your journey to where you are today? 
BR: I suppose I always wanted to be an artist, or be involved with some artistic practice, from a young age. I always used to draw as a young child & I remember doing drawing to escape into another world, my very own world. It was a means to do something in moments of boredom & to be creative, in making this inner world unconfined to rules outside. It was a time in which cinema burst out into the mainstream of popular culture with films like Star Wars & Jaws. Cinema back then was still seen as a bit of a luxury & because we had no money it was something I looked upon from the outside of the big screen. I used to make up the stories from these films with my imagination on paper with pencil, memories from what people told me & the stuff that was printed & shown in adverts about these films. In a way, the paper was my own screen in which I escaped into my own interpretations of these films, this popular culture. Art became my access to it, a kind of fantasy towards the real, the films, that was built already on fantasy. The paper became the screen for my own universe to project into.  

In a way, I still think of the studio like that now. 

Another aspect to the question above is more like a psychological position regarding my journey, to where I am now. My father wanted to be an artist when I was very young, but his path took a different direction when he got into trouble for various forms of criminal activity, resulting in him spending time at various prisons around London, from Pentonville to Wandsworth. During this time, my brother & I used to visit him. He used to do these cartoon drawings for us & ask us what picture we would like him to do while he spent time in his cell. He used to make us these fantasy pictures during his time based upon what we wanted, which usually reflected the things we saw on our own TVs advertising the films at the cinema we couldn’t see. Things like spaceships & films around fantasy. These usually resulted in my dad ripping off the illustrator Chris Foss (who some many decades later Glenn Brown appropriated). My father also used to draw & teach us how to sketch various cartoon figures that we used to be into at the time. Characters based on animations we used to watch on TV. He used to do this with us in the visiting rooms within the Prisons we visited him in.  

You must remember that me & my brother were very young at the time, both under the age of 10, going to see your father in these places was a somewhat traumatic, difficult & abstract experience. In some ways I feel this has affected all my work on some unconscious level & still does. The cartoons, the monsters I am doing now, & ideas around escape & play. The importance of art as a means of looking at the world & also venturing into one’s own interpretation of it. The abstract nature of belief systems (what to believe in, one’s own mind?) & dealing with disillusionment, failure & ideas around success (making something creative from negative circumstances). 

It also makes me think about the power of imagination, to use it when everything seems against the odds, a way to get through difficult situations. Also, using creativity as an outlet to get stuff out instead of negative stuff being boiled up inside, like a kind of exorcism of the mind at that moment. 

You are involved in an amazing charity, Carney’s Community; how did that start? 
BR: Carney’s Community is something my brother co-founded together with George Turner. I have been involved in the past with projects & help with any leads that may help towards the charity but it’s mainly Mark & George that run it. (To learn more about Carney’s Community and the amazing work they do, please click here).

I am looking into doing another project, but it takes time & planning. It’s important to get the young people involved in a way that is creative & where there is some form of return or reward at the end of it. I don’t want to do just a workshop but collaborate on making something & exhibit it after. Maybe even get the work sold & put the money back in the charity, like we did a few years back with Matches Fashion & Phillips auction house. We raised almost £10,000 from works we all made together. 


Where do you exhibit your work, and what have you found to be the most powerful tool for reaching new audiences? 
BR: I get asked to do exhibitions at various places & galleries around the world.  Also, alternative spaces like Bombay Beach Biennale in the desert of California, to old derelict warehouses like in Weston-super-Mare, near Bristol, for Banksy’s Dismaland, to sculpture gardens & digital spaces on the internet, like on the SuperRare platform.  

In regards to the most powerful tool for reaching new audiences, I would have said Instagram 5-6 years ago, but now it’s matured, it seems to rely on its algorithms for income (advertising & data research), it is so much less effective I feel now. Instagram (Facebook) now seems to favor users who seem to fit into its AI predicted codes & systems. Users that become a part of the brand, almost absorbed into its very own metaverse.  

Now I feel, which is less of a tool but instead a community, that it is young people, youth, that help more with reaching new audiences, young new audiences with fresh views on art. Even parents of teenagers contact me because their child is studying my work at school. I am starting to realize that this is building a new, fresh audience towards the work.  


What do you think the power of art is? 
BR: To find out who you are. 


What is your advice to young people who are interested in the arts? 
BR: Just do it & think of every day as a new & creative experience. Don’t let illusions spoil your passion and ideas around rules & systems stop your flow, output. One can make art with almost nothing. If you accept nothing is easy, then from there on, nothing is impossible. Most of all, enjoy it! That’s the flame that keeps it going. 

What more could local communities and the government at large do to support young people, and what role could the arts play in this? 
BR: There needs to be more support for people who would like to get into the creative arts but either did not have the support strategy through school (i.e., qualifications) or do not have the sufficient funds to pay for further education now. There is a gap for young people who are from less privileged backgrounds, a huge generational gap now, that was less than when I grew up. Art is an important structure for young people, no matter what background you are from, it helps with generating a creative mind & being inventive in the way one looks at the world, even dealing with their own mental health via expression, an outlet, & being an entrepreneurial person in whatever they do.  

Where do you find your inspiration, and who are some artists that have inspired your work, or that you are especially a fan of? 
BR: First of all I find inspiration from everywhere, but focusing on a more artistic context, I grew up with looking at illustration & what we called back then, commercial art, e.g., album cover illustration & comics etc. I was into illustrators like Philp Castle, Jim Phillips, Hajime Sorayama, Basil Wolverton & Ed (big daddy) Roth. I was also into graphic artist Brian Schroeder, who’s known for album covers for heavy metal bands.

 I was inspired by 80’s graffiti & the custom airbrush designs over motor vehicles mainly from the West Coast of America. I was really into this stuff & still am, now. For me, it is a kind of underground, outside art aesthetic from so-called contemporary art. Something that connects for me, both art & life.  

Artists who inspired me were people like Robert Crumb, Mike Kelley, Philip Guston (drawings & later works), Aaron Curry, Charlie Von Heyl, James Ensor, René Magritte (Vache period), Peter Saul, and even James Rosenquist’s large paintings. 

Are you interested or involved in the NFT space at all? 
BR: I am interested in the NFT space, but I also know it’s still very new & has not touched on the possibilities to where this technology will go. For example, the blockchain technology will be more immersed into our day-to-day activities & even involved within our very own personal health systems & its management. Which can be progressive but also dark. 

I have dabbled a bit in NFTs & am looking to adapt some projects into that space later but it’s a very fast-moving technology that is not as easy as it may seem i.e., just dropping a jpeg image or MPEG animation. It’s getting much more complicated, gamified & more about designing a brand, than selling just digital art. 

One thing that is opening up in the space is the more community aspect of funding a project, like crowd funding, to for example, finance a film, animation etc. I think this is interesting but still needs a lot of investigation.  

Has the pandemic affected your practice at all?  
BR: I actually made a load of work during the pandemic. In a way, being locked down & on my own in a space allowed me to go off a bit on a tangent and explore new ideas… in a good way.  I feel sometimes one must get things out of their system, a bit like a detox… Sometimes making stuff is like an exorcism of the mind. Better out than in.

I think the pandemic allowed me to flush out these ideas, but the madness over the last 24 months also made me realise that we all live in a make-believe world… Everything is constructed… Money is even an imaginary idea, systems we always believed in seemed to be falling apart. The pandemic really blurred the line between truth & fiction. Everything felt like theatre & also so binary… It made me really think about the way our world was being portrayed through media & also through our distorted / individual perceptions… In a way it’s like we’ve been living in a Science Fiction film.

The world now almost feels like a projected fantasy… It’s a fine line between fact & fiction, make believe and reality… and sanity & insanity.   

The pandemic also made me start to think about the concept of monsters. What are monsters? Are they about fear of 'the other’ (the unknown) or fear of oneself? Is a monster like a mirror reflecting back some dark aspect of ourselves? Do we all have monsters within us, which we either nurture or allow to control us? This interest in monsters has led me to re-examine my work, in a way to revisit my past. I wanted to rediscover painting as something immediate & instinctive, in the same way I approached my drawing as a child. I wanted to escape into the studio, away from the insanity of the outside world. I drew these imaginary creatures with an airbrush, which gave me an immediate freedom, and spontaneity. It was a continuous exploration into a fantasy world, a fantasy world which ironically kept me sane. Thinking too much can be a curse in today’s overloaded world of information. Sometimes it’s good to just let things roll. Through this application, making the monster paintings, the monsters become salvation. 

What’s next for you? 
BR: I am working on several commissions, large paintings, and I am looking at spaces to show the Monster paintings. I may show the Monsters independently, in a warehouse space maybe. I have several options to investigate, but I need to think more on this as it is quite a lot of work away from the works themselves to make this happen. This May, the 6th edition at Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer opens. I have three outdoor cartoon-esque sculptures placed in their gardens (in fact, they have been in their gardens for the last year).

I have also started making the larger cartoon collage paintings I am known for; I am re-visiting them. So, I am working together on two styles of painting at once in my studio, which I like, as I find they both inform each other in their making. 

I am also working on another project with a friend, a writer, on a cartoon character that I have been drawing over the last decade or so. We want to maybe enter the NFT space with it. We have several leads with people to work within this new space. It would involve physical works as well as digital & hopefully a small animation episode. If it works, I would even like to develop a game & have some link that would be educational or help with young people to connect them to a more creative space. This is all hypothetical for now, but I am looking more into this, the further along we get with this project.

@BarryReigate