What I love about Photoshop is the layering of the fragments that make the whole; but the more layers, the more dangerous and unstable the picture becomes.
But it's a great way to make a picture, and I've just uploaded an image to a printer that was giving me vertigo looking at the creaky swaying tower of stuff. In the heat of the moment you can get forgetful and a bit haphazard – I mean, I do – and find you've inverted the colour values of a picture instead of doing something else. Which happened a couple of times here with a couple of images of paintings that I did nearly 20 years ago.
If you can keep your head and not rush at it, you can import brush marks and calligraphy that arrive ready to be coloured up in any pigment you choose. And then you find yourself – I mean, myself – thinking about the art and the artists that made me go to college in the first place. Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg: musical, magical and thrilling exponents of their eternally hip art.
This was done for a New York-themed restaurant (but rejected as not being NY enough) and is a soup of a collage of a lot of sketches and paintings that were produced between 1990 when I had space in a wharf near Shad Thames in Bermondsey till 1999 when I produced a huge art-deco wall piece for a P+O cruise liner. One picture sits here that I lost years ago; inspired by Geoff Dyer's But Beautiful, it's a painting of Duke Ellington and Harry Carney, his baritone player, waiting at a railroad crossing as they drive through the night to the next band stop. Harry at the wheel and Duke listening to something new on the radio, smoking, making notes, talking to the ever attentive and loyal Harry who died not long after Duke of a broken heart, they said. I called it Pacific Union.
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