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friends and icons concept

Friends & Icons is the first stage of a continuing project featuring portraits in mixed media of talented individuals who are based in the U.K.

Some of the personalities featured are personal friends and others are people I admire but have never met.

The emotions I hope to evoke with this group of work are admiration, familiarity and devotion.

techniques and materials

These portraits are deliberately slow in the making and the patience involved in their creation is a calculated sacrifice of time in a world that likes to do things fast.

it is a continuing “Labour of Love” as they are, to a degree, devotional objects.

Techniques include using photography, computer graphics, painting, embroidery and beading.

My choice of media is significant.

The tiny scale of the beads used and their subtle colour changes have a resonance with the ancient Roman and Aztec artefacts that utilise the craft of micro-mosaics. Diamante, glass beads and sequins are also reminiscent of the elaborate jewelled icon covers that protected the original Russian and Greek icons.

The reflective quality of the glass beads, with their silvered interiors, and the crystals used in the eyes add a simulacrum of life to the images I create. It is appropriate to make the “windows of the soul” in crystal and glass. Beads provide a highly shiny surface, and in doing so evoke the glossiness of a magazine or a television screen, in fact the glossiness of the media through which we familiarise ourselves with celebrities.

A major source of inspiration is the description of a specialised Sri Lankan painter in Michael Ondaatje’s book  “Anil’s Ghost”, whose job it is to paint just the eyes of Buddha images, so that they have a quality of spirituality in them and transcend the material of which they are made, in this case, flat, lifeless paint on wood. To achieve this requires the painter to go into a special trance-like state, he prepares himself with recitations and ceremonies until it is time to attempt to achieve this small but vital task. This is the ultimate challenge of portraiture, to impart vitality, by use of technique and imagination, into lifeless materials.

My intention is that as one walks past each image, the beads become more than just beads, they suggest a hyper-real vitality by imitating the sparkle in a human eye.