Cato

0:05 What's up I'm K hello and this is what I do this is a big painting I think this is actually about the right size it's about this size and it was the first really big painting I did all of the all of the parts of this are individually painted and then cut out from unstretched canvas and then Stu on to Big canvas and this is obviously like a jam like a it's called Jazz this painting and that kind of reflects how one of the other things I do which is that me and my friends are musicians and we all we jam on Sundays and we make music I find all these faces from old photography books and then repaint them and recontextualize them where where the facial expression that would have been in a complet different context when I give him a guitar suddenly he's like in the zone jamming to the guitar you know what I mean and that's really fun I've always been I've always been drawing this is the drawing I did before that painting in preparation. And it's not as big as that yeah I've been drawing since I was a kid just to just for fun in class and then more more seriously when I started after my Art Foundation I decided I wanted to just commit to trying to make as many cool things as I could and then I translated this drawing into a painting by painting all these faces onto canvas stuck on the wall this was in Los Angeles I paint with an acrylic paint brush and then I spray with an airbrush I spray white paint onto these Silhouettes that I've painted and yeah that's the technique I've been I've been learning and working with for the past few years I was living in Mexico a few years ago.

2:16 And it's a big thing the airbrush is a big thing out there for like custom t-shirts and like body paint on cars and like model paint it just sprays out this Vapor of of paint so that you can create really really soft images and I was always looking for a way to do a face to paint a face or in an interesting way. And this was like the quickest and funnest way to create this immediate contrast of light and dark I did these when I did these paintings I felt like I'd cracked something. And I was on the right path I also did these chairs which have like some personality as well and yeah that was that was my way to get into painting I'd been put off for a while and I was working in this new space and I was really excited by this new technique and then when I came back to London I live in South London I started thinking about Roma bden who was one of my favorite artists growing up I had I had books that my dad gave me with his artwork on the cover and I remember I did a commission for a musician did a painting of their face and they never got back to me about whether they liked it or not so I just cut it up in frustration.

3:45 And then I I realized oh I can do Rome bidden thing. And it has this kind of hip-hop energy to it as well which is something that me and my friends were making as well at the time. And this is one of my favorite artworks of all time called the block and he famously said all art is made from other art.

4:08 So I felt like I could rip him off and have his Blessing he I saw what he was doing he was a mixed race guy talking growing up he move his mom his parents moved to New York around the time of the Harlem Renaissance which is a period of time my dad has written about. And I've always been interested in and I felt what he was doing is taking a lot of what Picasso had done with these two-dimensional threedimensional figures which Picasso had been inspired by African art when he came up with cubism and I saw it as a sort of diasporic kind of art form Roma bden took these kind of figures and made an African-American form of story storytelling and it has this musicality in it.

5:01 And I was also looking at krie James Marshall who uses these black figures black paint with no Shadow no contrast so then the character becomes a shadow and it becomes graphic and two-dimensional and then after I'd cut up one of my paintings and realized I could get involved in this way this was the first one I made it was called The Block and I was so excited I had to find a studio to start making them in I made this one literally on my bed like piece it together. And it has this kind of photographic quality and then also this really simple quality like the the window is like a window a kid would draw I like that contrast and then.

5:52 I did this one a bit later of a barber and I loved how they both look really focused on what they're doing even though they weren't doing that in the photo that I painted them from and they look like they're interacting with each other also before I was painting I was I was making lots of animations I've been teaching myself different animation techniques and now I had this painting technique I applied it to my animation.

6:20 So I made this this short film called Black Moon I'll play a clip of it and all these these pieces are painted individually spray painted and then put back together ♪

6:46 [Laughter]

6:48 and thank you.

7:21 So I got invited like a year and a half ago to this residency in LA and that was my first time I got to experiment with really big canvases is this guy called Danny first invited me and by the end of it.

7:34 This is the last painting I made on that residency and I was thinking about storytelling in a sort of family sense and there was some songs that I was listening to that made me want to dive into relationship ideas and then. I started using more color in my work as well.

7:53 And then later I I did a show in New York I had a residency there as well I made these two as well as three other paintings I found like Photo archives in New York where.

8:09 I was able to see photographs from the Harem manance by some of my favorite photographers the figures on the left were taken from archives and then painted and then the figures on the right I'd photographed myself with the Polaroid my sister mayor and her partner Dominic could help me take some photographs and I thought it was fun just to put these characters together who had never met each other potentially and and make them have this sort of theatrical dynamic between them.

8:44 This is one I made in London in my studio thinking about family Dynamics again also thinking about fiture and different parts of design that I love and how how I could include them in the in these worlds I was building and this is one of my most recent paintings I was looking at a lot of Renaissance Art.

9:08 And then I've found photos from the Harlem Renaissance and combine those kind of moments into kind of a normal living room scenario thinking about my own sort of mortality and and faith and stuff like that and yeah that's basically what I've been doing recently I've make I make I like to just make things.

9:33 So this is how where. I found myself and last year I saw the big Philip gtin show in in the tape and they put a quote from him at the start which was saying The Only Thing Worth learning for an artist is the ability to change and that's stuck with me so now.

9:58 Now I'm trying to find new ways to express ideas in different mediums and I got a show on February 13th in calwell at Sim Smith Gallery called all those nickel Wishes cast as spells so if you come there you'll see the next iteration of what I've been doing thank you [Applause]