Portrait of an Artist - My Dog Sighs
Profile of an Artist - My Dog Sighs - Full interview
Transcript
00:00 [Music]
00:13 You know, right from a nipper, I was the one with the felt tip pens and the, you know,
00:17 I was the kid in the class that everyone said, come and draw Snoopy or come and draw Garfield.
00:20 And then 80s I was painting leather jackets and the 90s I was painting rave backdrops.
00:25 But, you know, my dad was a sensible chap and said, well, you're never going to make a living from this,
00:30 so go and get a proper job.
00:31 So I went into teaching and I was a primary school teacher for nearly 20 years.
00:37 Early 2000s, I kind of stumbled across this thing called street art that was beginning to happen,
00:43 the early Banksy stuff and Deepface and kind of like, ooh, I want in.
00:47 You know, this is really, really exciting.
00:49 Like, you know, my son had been born and I was kind of in that mortgage and pension plan,
00:54 and I was kind of strutting tight at work and thinking, I miss, you know, I don't paint anymore.
00:57 You know, I miss that.
00:59 And I thought, oh, I definitely want in on this.
01:02 But, you know, I wasn't 19 territorial piss around, you know, and I had a good job
01:09 and I didn't want to lose that job.
01:10 So I wanted to step into the street art world, but do it in a way that wasn't going to cause me any trouble.
01:15 That's where the Free Art Friday project came from.
01:17 So it was just like, okay, let's create a completely different persona,
01:21 something that my family don't know about, my friends don't know about, nobody knew about it.
01:25 I would go off in the evenings pretending I was going for a jog or, you know,
01:30 and I would find bits of rubbish on the streets of Portsmouth and bring it back home,
01:36 spend the week working on it.
01:38 And then on my way to my teaching job, I'd catch a train on a Friday to work,
01:42 do my bit for the environment.
01:43 And on the way to the station, I would just take this piece of work, leave it on a window ledge somewhere,
01:48 or take a photograph of it and kind of walk away.
01:51 And that was the start of my Free Art Friday project.
01:53 And I didn't realise it was 20 years until very recently.
01:56 And then I was doing some research trying to find out when the name My Dog Size was first used and registered
02:03 and realised I'd signed up to a couple of early blogs 20 years ago in Flickr and Stencil Revolution.
02:11 In fact, I think there's even a My Space, My Dog Size My Space set up way back in the day.
02:16 And so, yeah, that was my kind of step into the street art world.
02:22 But it was a really personal project for such a long time.
02:25 It's very different.
02:26 I mean, you know, when I did eventually move into using spray paint and painting on walls,
02:30 you know, one in three comment as people walked past would be,
02:34 "Oh, you're a vandal and you're spoiling our area."
02:36 You know, I would paint the front of the old French's bakery
02:39 because it was the route that I would take picking up my kids from school.
02:42 And it looked such a mess.
02:43 I thought, "Well, I'm going to paint something nice on it.
02:45 I'm going to make, you know, brighten it up."
02:47 And, yeah, somebody called the police on me
02:49 and various people were sort of shouting abusive things.
02:52 You know, now I'm getting invited by councillors to come and paint.
02:58 And I think what's happened over the years is people realise that, you know,
03:01 it's not about vandalism.
03:04 It's about artists wanting to enhance the place that they live in.
03:08 You know, art makes a difference in people's lives.
03:10 You know, we realised that in lockdown when we were listening to music,
03:13 we were watching films and we were reading books
03:15 and we were looking at the blank walls in our houses and thinking,
03:18 "Oh, I really should hang a piece of work up on there
03:20 because it looks a bit boring without that."
03:22 You know, I think people understand that value.
03:24 So popping out on the street where you don't have to go into a museum or a gallery,
03:28 you know, those kind of scary white-cubed places,
03:31 you know, you can see it on the street, adds value.
03:33 It brings tourism in.
03:35 You know, the Inside Project, we had 10,000 people coming through the door.
03:39 But that's it. Now you only need to look at the...
03:43 You've got your own personal page. There's a huge fan page as well.
03:47 And people there, they're not just locals.
03:49 I mean, there are quite a lot of locals, but you look at some of the comments,
03:52 they're not just national, they're international, aren't they?
03:54 People go, "Oh, I wish I was there for this."
03:57 And they're like, God knows where, thinking, "Wow."
03:59 I looked at some statistics this week on my page
04:03 and the third biggest following I've got is from Mexico.
04:08 No, I've never been to Mexico, I've never painted in Mexico.
04:10 I know my artwork is on some of the art syllabuses in South America.
04:14 I have no idea how or why, but it is.
04:18 So I get lots of Mexican teachers contacting me
04:22 with photos of all their kids doing cans and painting eyes in various bits and pieces.
04:26 But, yeah, it's quite incredible how international, you know, my following is.
04:34 But how just street art in general, I get invited to paint around the world.
04:39 Like you've just come back from your first Parisian exhibition.
04:42 Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
04:43 So it's crazy to think 20 years ago when I was running around
04:49 leaving a piece in a suit and tie on my way to work
04:53 that I would be able to do this for a living, right, as my job.
04:58 It's an utter, utter dream.
05:01 Yeah, so to get to 20 years, it's just like, well, I used to get such, you know,
05:05 it's such a buzz leaving that piece out on a Friday for Free Art Friday.
05:09 How long did you do that for?
05:11 It's still going.
05:12 Oh, no, it's still knocking around.
05:13 Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
05:14 Other people have taken up the mantle, haven't they?
05:16 I mean, it's become a, yeah, well, I've never been to a city
05:19 where I haven't been able to connect with a community of people that do Free Art Friday.
05:22 So, yeah, literally I can go to anywhere and there'll be a Free Art Friday Sacramento group
05:27 or a Free Art Friday, you know, Tel Aviv group.
05:30 And I met up with them and they've all got their artwork.
05:32 We all go out and leave it, you know, for people to find.
05:36 I don't, you know, it used to be religiously every week and for about, I don't know, 12, 15 years,
05:41 it was every Friday without fail.
05:44 As, you know, as things have kind of built up and grown for me,
05:48 I haven't always been able to have the time to do a piece every week.
05:51 Yeah, of course.
05:52 But, yeah, I think I'm making up for it at this time.
05:56 Yeah, was there a sort of turning point, a pivotal moment where you realised,
06:02 I'm going to be able to ditch the day job and this is it now.
06:07 I'm going to be able to be my dog's size full time.
06:10 Yeah, the Free Art Friday project was picked up by the BBC.
06:16 The Culture Show.
06:17 The Culture Show, you know, that's the BBC's flagship program.
06:20 In fact, we kind of blagged a place onto there because it was a guy who was doing an intern with the BBC
06:25 and the BBC had offered a kind of a program for interns saying,
06:31 "If you suggest an idea that we could make a film about, the winning one will be made."
06:35 And he messaged me and said, "I'm going to enter Free Art Friday."
06:37 And I thought, "Yeah, right, whatever."
06:39 That's never going to happen.
06:40 But it did and he won.
06:41 And it was an East London street art gallery that I happened to be watching at the time
06:46 and they saw the stuff that was on the Culture Show and said,
06:50 "Oh, have you ever thought about selling these?"
06:52 And I was thinking, "Well, baked beaten? Who's going to want to buy that?"
06:55 I'd never considered the fact that it would be something that would have a value to it.
07:00 So yeah, I sent a few up and then sold those, had a show with him, sold those.
07:05 And then other galleries were like, "Oh, you've had a sellout show with X Gallery. Are you interested?"
07:11 And then the ball kind of rolls from there really.
07:14 And, you know, early stages in your career, you have to say yes to everything.
07:20 And I still haven't quite learned how to say no yet,
07:24 but it is getting to the point where I have to be a little bit more selective about what I can do.
07:29 Yeah. And do you think that's part of your appeal is that you've taken things that people think they can do as well
07:37 and they can have a crack at?
07:38 Like you say, and I've seen them, kids in schools, they all have a go at doing the eyes, of making their own cans.
07:44 But you've still got that very distinctive style that they can't quite match.
07:49 But it's something that people think, "Oh, I could have a crack at that." And it's a bit of fun.
07:54 Yeah. I mean, and that was never designed. I don't know if maybe being a primary school teacher,
08:01 I remember when I was a teacher, I did the cans with the kids in school.
08:05 So it was, I had this little side hustle of a street project.
08:09 Then I would come into school as the art manager and go, "Okay, we're all going to stamp on baby paintings
08:13 and paint them all, cut out faces and stick them on for the little tiny kids and stuff from that."
08:18 So that might have had a play in it. I mean, it didn't consciously.
08:22 It was just, it was at the time, because I was giving everything away and I didn't have the funds
08:28 to spend money on expensive canvases and stuff. It was a free canvas, right?
08:33 And now you understand that art has a purpose and that purpose is to get people to think about their life.
08:40 There are really strong messages with these cans related to our use of materials, recycling,
08:46 how we waste so much. But equally, they were initially inspired by the homeless guys on Albert Road
08:53 whose eyes were down and asking for change. And so the cans for me mimics that.
08:59 The idea that the can was once useful. We have them in our home and as soon as we use them up,
09:04 we chuck them away. And there's a real mirroring to the people that we see on the street.
09:10 They're someone's sons and brothers and daughters and aunts and uncles or whatever relationship they have.
09:15 They lived a normal life like all of us at some point, but something happened.
09:20 Often a couple of paychecks, right?
09:23 That's it. They have it by the grace of God, isn't it?
09:26 Yeah. But with a little bit of love and effort, I can bring those cans into something that people covet
09:31 and want and will hang in a museum or a gallery. It's still a baked bean tin, but if you put a bit of love
09:37 and effort in, it can become something really valuable. That, for me, mimics what's happening with these guys
09:43 on the street. What's really nice is you go to... I've had the opportunity to travel to so many incredible countries
09:50 and cities and places around the world, places that you wouldn't go to as a tourist.
09:55 And what's really exciting is that if you're invited to go and you work on a project,
09:59 you immerse yourself with the real community in that place.
10:04 So one of my favorites was a project in Rome, and I did a nearly 900-year-old wall in Rome.
10:10 And it was crumbled. Nothing is younger than a thousand years old in Rome, right?
10:16 It's really, really old. But it was in this residential district, and I wanted to engage with the community
10:24 that live in that place. This idea of flying in, painting something, and flying out again
10:28 when you haven't got a connection with the people doesn't work with me.
10:31 So I painted 540 eyes, and in the reflection of each eye, I painted somebody who was either born
10:39 or who had died in the hospital, because it was the wall of a hospital.
10:42 And so when the community came out and we launched the wall, everyone was scrabbling around
10:48 trying to find their... "My grandma!" And so that idea of connecting with places is really lovely.
10:56 And you don't get to do that as a tourist. You do the tourist things, and you read the guidebooks,
11:00 and you tick off all the things that you're supposed to do on that place.
11:03 But to spend time in a city or a town and actually properly connect with the community is such an amazing thing.
11:13 That's what I take away when I go to these places, and really try and do, try and spend time with people.
11:19 Eat the local food, eat in the local places. Just chat to the other artists, meet up with them, share skills,
11:25 get introduced to what they're doing. Because you're always inspired when you chat to other artists and other people.
11:32 We do a regular creative social now down the pub every couple of months.
11:36 And it's just like, "Anybody's welcome to come along. Tell us your project, what you're doing.
11:40 Do you need any help with..." I've made all the mistakes.
11:44 I know who not to work with, where to get things printed, if you want badges made or coins printed, or whatever.
11:50 And it's about sharing that experience, sharing those skills, because it can only make the city stronger.
11:57 We are an incredibly creative city, and I had that opportunity with that gallery that saw my work.
12:04 My canvas to start with.
12:05 That's amazing.
12:06 [silence]