| Up until recently I had always considered my work in a commercial context—I have been an illustrator for over ten years, gradually working my way up some kind of ladder until I seem to have made enough of a name for myself and produced the kind of work that makes people want to own it and put it on their wall. This is a new idea for me, and one that I have secretly desired (although maybe not consciously) for a good many years. My artwork has a lot to do with my desires. I think I have a big personal struggle between purity and desire in my life, and my work is an expression of the desires I think all of us feel sometime or another. |  |
Jasper Goodall
Up until recently I had always considered my work in a commercial context—I have been an illustrator for over ten years, gradually working my way up some kind of ladder until I seem to have made enough of a name for myself and produced the kind of work that makes people want to own it and put it on their wall. This is a new idea for me, and one that I have secretly desired (although maybe not consciously) for a good many years.
My artwork has a lot to do with my desires. I think I have a big personal struggle between purity and desire in my life, and my work is an expression of the desires I think all of us feel sometime or another.
Sometimes it’s dreamy and romantic, other times it’s more direct and sexual but more often than not it is a searching for a perfection that can never exist in real life.
I’m very conscious of all the fashion/erotica/pornographic images we are surrounded by in our modern, desire-fuelled consumer existence and I often feel my work is a direct response to the desire created by our inspirational marketing media machine. It’s my way of filling the hole that this culture creates by indulging in fantasy, instead of hoping that I can achieve anything like it in reality.
In this respect, I think my work appeals to a lot of other people’s desires, too. I love the idea that in some way art can push people’s “desire button”—the bit of you that decides to feel passionate about anything from cream cakes to Picasso to hardcore porn. I hope that, in some way, my artwork pushes the viewer’s buttons.
My influences are broad and eclectic, ranging from photography—for its attitude, I think (some of my favorites being Helmut Newton, David Lachapelle and Ellen Von Unwerth)—to Japanese kimono design for its sheer beauty, 1960s psychedelia, for its amazing color and composition, to rubber fetishist artwork and photography for its fascination with a sumptuous perfect surface finish.
I hope I bring all kinds of references together in a fresh way, often re-appropriating an old vernacular style or traditional idea/theme in a new context and playing it off against a more contemporary way of working to create something new yet with a familiarity of some kind.
I have recently started selling prints online in partnership with my agency Big Active, we have a website called productofgod.net where you can buy artwork (and hopefully lots of other products in the future) made by the artists represented by Big Active who are well-known in the world of commercial design and art direction, but maybe not so much in fine art circles.
They have represented me and other illustrators and photographers for many years as our commercial agents but now we are moving towards owning our own means of production. A move that started when I asked them to help me manage my Swimwear label JG4B (another strange but exciting thing I have wound up getting into), which I just couldn’t cope with on my own—I think moving towards your own ventures, be they your art or a design business where you call the shots is a natural progression; a move away from a reliance on magazine publishers and advertising agencies, to a position of autonomy where you make the work that you want to make and people enjoy it, and hopefully buy it—well that’s my dream anyhow!
