The Attendant

I first came across this print of the rapper Rick Ross in April 2016 in The Attendant, a very fine coffee shop built in a converted underground Victorian public convenience in London's Fitzrovia where the original porcelain urinals, designed by Doulton & Co in 1890, have been turned into one long seating table. I would love to give proper attribution to the original but the best I can come across is a reference to a design group called MadeByOthers.

It seemed this would lend itself to my black cutout style so, from a photo I took, I reconstructed the design in a vector graphics package, and cut out the design as usual with a scalpel. This is one of the few cut-out projects where the thin black card cannot possibly be in one contiguous piece. It did mean, however, that the placement of the component pieces (sprayed with a re-positionable spray) was painstaking and fiddly and the longer the glass remains exposed the greater the chance that dust would accumulate on the surface. This required numerous assembly/disassembly&clean steps until the glass sandwich was clear.

I then began a process of experimenting with other layers behind the cutout using paints and different fabrics (cotton, silk and linen) but gave up in frustration and put the piece to one side for a few months. Eventually I came across a combination of acrylic paints that seemed to work and these were painted onto the back of the second piece of glass.

I made glasses out of gold leaf and the beard stubble is backed by a piece heavy-duty tracing paper behind which is a piece of silvered paper. This combination seemed to give the ideal background to the stubble. The finished piece (the foreground is about 36x36cm) is shown in situ and also outside where the shadows are more evident.

June 2017