You don't just jump into bed with Terry Tibbs

Though I clearly spend a lot of my time with my music, I lead a secret undercover life where I obsess about street art, and have spent the last few years amassing quite a collection of prints, paintings, drawings & the like.

My most prized possession by far is a painting by Matt Small, a guy who lives in Camden & produces quite stunning & utterly unique portraits (excuse the wallpaper).

'Paul' is like my guardian angel. Wise and tranquil. We spend a lot of time together.




So last night there was a unique opportunity to see Matt painting live at Cargo, alongside graffiti artist SheOne. The guy's a fucking genius as far as i'm concerned, so it was quite something to see him at work... and I also got a chance to have quite a long chat with him. It was quite a special night really so I thought i'd share some of the photos with y'all.

Matt usually works on pieces of metal he finds in skips & on the street. But on this occasion the portrait was on a piece of wood he'd found. I was quite stunned by how good the portrait was even before he'd started working his magic on it...




Here's SheOne working on his piece:


A couple of Banksys from the Cargo courtyard. Now covered in perspex now they're worth a fortune!






Here's the source picture Matt was working from. He usually works from video of disaffected yoof he shoots out & about... but on this instance he'd invited some local kids into his studio to be photographed.






Here's where the magic starts happening. The paint gets slapped on, mixed & generally fucked about with. Most of his paintings tend to have colour radiating from the centre of the piece, which sucks you in like you're drifting round a black hole:


SheOne's finished piece:


Matt's painting as I left it... there's obviously a fair bit more work to go, but you can see that when the masking is removed from round the head you're gonna be left with a kick ass portrait. I'm loving the colours. And the paint spattered laptop! I think it's shaping up to be one of his best pieces.


What's remarkable about his work is how little detail seems to be defined in the finished painting.. yet when you step back a little you see so much expression in the face. You can check out some more of his paintings here and here. And if you happen to be in Shoreditch, the Leonard Street gallery has a couple of his paintings on show right now as part of the excellent 'Found' show.

I should really talk about this kind of stuff more often, as i'm probably more into my art than music these days. I could go on forever about Adam Neate, Antony Micallef, Eine, Sweet Toof, Cyclops, Faile, Space Invader and so on. And Banksy of course. Maybe I will do a bit more from now on. I should certainly endeavour to share a few more photographs.

This is a recent purchase of mine, from New York's Judith Supine (who was apparently mute until the age of 17).



I had a bit of a shock today as it's still in the gallery, so I wandered over at lunchtime to have a look at him. I got there & found it looking a bit crooked in the frame, so I told the girl in the gallery that it was looking a bit wonky. At that precise moment it leapt out of the frame & jumped onto the floor! No harm was done, but I found the timing a bit freaky. The one time i'd been in there in the two weeks since I bought it, and out of 100 or so pieces mine was the one that chose that moment to crash to the floor! I like to think he was just trying to jump over to me so that I could take him home... but he'll have to wait a couple of weeks longer.