"The thing is with inspiration, is that you never get any warning before it hits you…”
A career defining ten year commissioned project for McLaren, that I never even dreamt of let alone saw coming, it would have been unrealistic to target. McLarens eight world driver champions celebrating next to their cars on the iconic MTC Boulevard, with founder Bruce watching over them, like a proud father with his high achieving children…. is my concept. And I still struggle to compute the enormity of this today, seven years into the project. That something so permanent, that I have created for arguably the worlds greatest F1 museum, and revered by so many so close to the actual subjects of the sculpture, is ridiculous. McLaren’s Monuments is a project driven by celebration, history, remembrance, story telling, by fans and for fans. I worked for a year of my own volition to create Senna ‘Eau Rouge’, simply because Ayrton was the reason I first grew to love F1 back in the mid to late 80s, as a British teen I was inherently a fan of McLaren and of Senna. Eau Rouge was unveiled in early 2019, immediately went viral, and although McLaren were in the loop all through it’s creation, I never expected them to buy the sculpture to show alongside Ayrton’s car on their famous boulevard. It may as well be the artwork that I introduce myself by ‘Ahhhh that was you!?’ I hear almost weekly. A few months later, the indomitable Niki Lauda passed away, who besides his two world titles for Ferrari and later connection with Mercedes, was McLaren’s world drivers champion in 1984, and I was immediately called in to their Monaco motorhome to discuss creating a bronze statue for him also. That 10 minute meeting with Zak Brown escalated fast ‘Why don’t we do all the champions, and Bruce as well?’ Zak being one of the biggest fans of motorsport history I’ve ever met, we had most of the statue’s poses nailed down immediately too in that same 10 minutes. I distinctly remember Zak banging the table as he stood to leave ‘You can do this, right?” as I’m sat there shell shocked nodding yes, yet in reality having no place to be so sure. Yet here we are, 2/3rds of the way through the project, each and every sculpture created referencing raced assets from McLaren’s extensive archives, each one bringing new challenges to the fore, before they begin creating their own story that is out of my hands, after they’re installed at MTC Woking.
JPS Senna
A concept that I envisaged whilst still working on 'Eau Rouge', and using the combination of my favoured bare bronze 'gold' finish, and black paint. And based on a famous photo that I had always intended to commit to oil paint; Ayrton sitting on the tarmac behind his broken car during Friday practice at Estoril, 1985... two days before his maiden win in F1. I was intending to release 'JPS Senna' to mark 30 years in 2024... but with many other projects paused through 2020, it gave me far more time than expected to work on this, and so I unveiled early, with the help of Sky F1, when F1 surprisingly re-visited Portugal again because of covid.
Senna in JPS livery was my earliest memories of F1, the black and gold Lotus with yellow helmet looked just so cool to my 10-year-old self... I think because everything awesome in the 80's was black; Knightrider, the Cannonball Countach, Airwolf, and Streethawk. Little did I know at the time of the iconic driver that Senna already was, taken way too early, and revered to the level of saintliness ever since, the world over.
Limited editions are available in bronze:
Life-size on approval
60% scale - 35kg
20% scale - 7kg
I've always thought in 3D, I guess my painting style is testament to that, but it's obvious to me far further back than that. My entire childhood spent playing (learning...) with Lego is where I attribute much of my foundation as an artist, and I still have a felt tip collage I won a prize for aged 5, which is multi layered. At school it was pottery and woodwork that I most revelled in, then at University studying aerospace engineering, again it was the practical side. And to be honest, right now, sculpture is where my mind spends most of its time. The challenges and the costs with sculpture are exponentially greater... but also the scope of possibilities and power of the result with a much greater physical presence, should I get it right. Everything I create sculpturally, I can see in my mind’s eye from the outset, I wait for that vivid 'Eureka moment' of realisation before embarking on anything, have to be totally clear what I'm working towards, then the 'only' challenge is to bring that vision to reality. Based on three-dimensional motion capture and using the rarest of assets for hyper realism and dynamic, and a new improved take on what is fundamentally a very traditional output – 3D capture and augmented-reality modelling translated into the age-old tradition of lost wax bronze casting. And where sculpture has led me to, in a relatively short space of time, is mind blowing. Creating sculpture just feels like a legacy that is so much more permanent than paint, created from near indestructible materials that will be around for much much longer than I will be, and celebrating subjects often so revered and indeed worshipped, often by those who are so close to them... is a difficult thing to get your head around, to be responsible for creating something of that magnitude. I may well have already created my most renowned work – indeed although I will never rest from furthering what I do, I think that's fairly likely actually. But then I never saw that career defining epiphany coming either, that led me to create Senna 'Eau Rouge'. Inadvertently at first, I appear to have carved my own niche and a renewed self-styled role to celebrate the history of F1, in life-size bronze. Each statue is around 12 months from concept to realisation, and is created in three limited edition scales: Life-size, 60% (F1 wind tunnel development scale) and 20%.