«Basquiat Dreams»

Before he was famous, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a name sprayed on walls. In the late 1970s he and his friend Al Diaz wrote cryptic lines on Lower Manhattan buildings and signed them SAMO. A few years later the same hand was painting crowns, skulls and masks on canvas, and in 2017 one of his untitled skull paintings from 1982 sold at Sotheby's for 110.5 million dollars. Street scribble became museum art. That is the starting point of this basquiat style art painting.

A woman crouches against a black background, wearing a wide straw hat and orange aviator glasses, with long pale braids threaded with gold. Her clothes are not fabric. Her sleeves and legs are covered in my own Basquiat-style faces, masks, crowns and scrawled words, in blue, red, yellow and orange. Thick gold chains hang across her chest, and her boots are covered in a luxury-brand monogram.

Her face is cut into strips that slide sideways, with small black bars across her forehead and jaw, like a picture that has stopped loading. Everything she wears stays sharp. She is the part that glitches.

The black ground is not flat. I built it up with raised, scratchy lines that catch the light, a wall to write on. Small blocks of blue, orange, green and red sit in the corners as a nod to Mondrian.

Basquiat painted crowns in the early 1980s as a way to crown his heroes, and in 1984 and 1985 he made a series of joint paintings with Warhol. I wanted to wear that energy, not copy it. As an original pop art painting it asks for a big wall, the kind of statement wall art that makes a room argue with itself.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. There is also a hand-finished lithograph of this work.