Jimmy C on drips, spheres and painting for free
James Cochran, who paints as Jimmy C, had become one of the most familiar hands on London's walls by 2012. Asked about his method and his subjects, he talked about atoms, homelessness and a diamond skull at the Tate.
Anyone walking the East End in 2012 had probably passed a Jimmy C face without knowing the name: a portrait built out of hundreds of separate coloured circles, sharp from across the road and dissolving as you walk up to it. James Cochran grew up in Australia and had by then made London his base, splitting his time fairly evenly between walls and canvases. When the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost spoke to him that June he explained how the look came about, and it turned out to have a longer history than the London walls suggest.
From drips to atoms
Cochran described his subject as people seen against the city. His first way of painting them was a kind of pointillism done with drips: an image made entirely of individual drops of spray paint, which he called his drip paintings. Over time he let the drops grow into circles, then began treating the circles as spheres, and the figure started to break apart into something he compared to atoms. He called this “atomic pointillism”. Plenty of viewers read the spheres as bubbles, and he said he was happy for the work to stay open to that kind of reading.
The people in the pictures are nearly always drawn from real life. For a long stretch he was drawn to people at the edge of city life, the homeless in particular, and he agreed that much of the work carries a social comment, though he prefers to make it quietly. What interests him, he said, is how someone pushed to the margins still finds meaning in a life.
Street first, school second
He did go to art school, but said most of his education came from travelling and from time in museums, when oil painting and figurative realism were what held his attention. The street came earlier. He began as a graffiti writer around 1989, then spent roughly ten years in Australia on mural commissions and running aerosol art workshops, exhibiting in galleries alongside. Moving to London pulled him back towards unofficial walls.
Asked to choose between canvases for shows and work left outside, he declined. Painting in the street feels liberating to him because the piece is given away the moment it is finished, which leaves no room to be precious. The street also changes the work itself, through scale and surface texture, sometimes for the better and sometimes not. Galleries, in his view, reach a different audience and force an artist to pull a body of work together.
Berlin, and a skull near Brick Lane
At the time he had a show on in Paris, was putting new pieces up around London and hoped to exhibit in Australia before the end of the year. He had just come back from Berlin, where he painted several walls, among them a fresh version of The Artist’s Tears, a painting he first made ten years earlier. He called it an important picture for him because it was where figurative realism and graffiti first met in his work.
The newest London wall, near Brick Lane, was his answer to Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern and to For the Love of God, the diamond-covered platinum skull on show there. Cochran painted his own skull in fluorescent dots, a street-pop version made of hundreds of points of colour. He described it as part homage and part critique, and pointed out, with some pleasure, that this one had cost nobody anything.