If you paint a picture, photograph it and then destroy the painting - what do you have? And is it a work of art? And if not, why not? And if the degree of beauty, truth, substance and power in a photograph is greater than that of a painting, then which is the work of art? Back in 1974, in an age that did not consider photography Art, these were the sort of questions I constantly found myself asking.

"Metasphere" is the world's first painted, photo-sculpture. In the years leading up to Metasphere I had been busy expanding the creative parameters of Photography as a medium and already created a lot of original work, but I loved the idea of a photograph, in which every square centimetre would be created by the artist. I wanted to create something amazing and take myself to the very limits of my capabilities. I was after all, only 23, and I had absolutely no idea what they were. I had already created 'In Peace' 1974 which was partly a photo-sculpture and many say, my first major work.



When I took up photography seriously I had no money and couldn't afford a camera. Perfect. I would go to the library and read about the science behind it all . Fascinating facts about the spectrum, optics and how the eye is constructed with millions of nerve fibres leading off to the brain, just for the vision in one eye. All lined up perfectly and functioning impeccably. Rods and cones...... foveas and blind spots.... And how the brain can alter what the eye is seeing in terms of colour and perspective. 'What else?' 'What else does it alter?' I kept asking. 'What other lies does our brain tell our eyes?"

Discovering that colour only exists in the brain. Cats don't have it. Earlier in 1974 I had created 'Nucleus' which was undoubtedly a precursor to 'Metasphere'.



I had been reading quantum mechanics and finding out about atoms with their nuclei made up of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons, first perceived as orbiting particles, later as waves, then as nothing previously known to Man. How can something be a wave, but a particle when you look at it? I also found all this absolutely extraordinary. God, the complexity! It was just unbelievable! So this light in the street, which had just always been there, was caused by electrons making quantum jumps? How can the Uncertainty Principle (not being able to determine the speed and position of an electron simultaneously) be a principle at all? A theory of incomprehensibility to explain what we can't yet explain? As if that weren't enough, scientists had just discovered quarks, even tinier little particles inside the protons and neutrons. I was trying to take this all in. One day I looked at a girl and thought of her being made up of all these atoms, whizzing around like particles, waves, polymorphic incomprehensibles whatever!...... and I thought fucking hell the complexity is just mind-boggling! Then you are reading all this stuff, that if the atoms have 79 electrons instead of 80, the substances are as different as mercury and gold.

Was mathematics just a primitive artificial code invented by humans that Nature in all its fascinating complexity, was now reducing to a joke? And would it be reinvented at every turn to accommodate discoveries of greater complexity? Perhaps the fundamental flaw of learning lies in our attempts to make everything definitive, when in fact, everything in the Cosmos is infinite. From particles to perfection to space. Perfection is just an attempt to make the infinite, definitive. Impossible task. Imperfect concept. Interesting irony.

I was thinking stuff like this: if you travelled to what you thought was the centre of a sphere, with an imaginary point that occupied no space and then magnified your location 20,000 times you would find you were not in the centre at all, so you would then have to continue travelling into the centre. You could repeat this indefinitely and never arrive at the centre. Inner space therefore, must be infinite and infinity must exist in all things, from the tiniest atom to the farthest reaches of the galaxies. I was a confirmed stargazer as an adolescent and loved to identify all the constellations, so I was always aware of the incomprehensible vastness of it all too. Whatever shape we eventually decide atoms are, certainly the most important recurring form in the Cosmos is a sphere. Well more or less, as needless to say, nothing actually is one.

Then with all this storming my mind, one day I suddenly saw it. I saw the world as it actually is, free of conditioning. And God I was just in awe. I mean, I was terrified! I saw in a heartbeat that all knowledge was superficial. The only way I can articulate this is to say that it was as though someone just made me materialise on the planet, fully grown and able to perceive, but nothing in my brain was conditioned. I had never seen anything here on planet Earth. Zero complacency. Zero familiarity. Zero phenomena comprehension. I saw in an instant that it was all a miracle, like the mist on my eyes had suddenly cleared. I would try to explain this to people and they just thought I was mad. "Yes James" they would say fixing me with a 'knowing' stare and a smug smile. Particularly irritating as they actually knew fuck all! It isn't madness, it's just heightened perception. Decades later a collector would say to me "James, only you would try to pass off your madness as heightened perception!" which made me laugh hysterically, because I know I'm not mad. I have of course, also met some people since my twenties, who have experienced the same thing. But not so many.

So anyway the idea behind 'Metasphere' was my attempt to create a masterpiece about this feeling I get when I look at familiar things and see the complexity in them and don't fully understand what they are. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I create an object which obviously is something, but isn't actually anything people have ever seen before, maybe they will get the feeling I get.

And do they? Occasionally yes, often no. But it does fascinate everyone. And of course, they all read meanings into it, from the poetic to the prosaic, depending on their backgrounds and experiences.

It was only really whilst exploring philosophy and psychology in the Nineties that I realised why. We don't see things objectively as they are. Everything perceived with the eyes, is radically reinterpreted according to the knowledge and experiences stored in each individual's brain.

Another extraordinary thing about 'Metasphere', is that the image is neither abstract nor figurative.

When I created 'Metasphere', the photography of the day concerned itself with photo-journalism, celeb portraits, fashion, landscapes and so on. Much of it in black and white. A generation who spoke highly of truth, whilst having scant acquaintance of it. No deep understanding, anyway. Even on a basic level, how the hell can black and white be 'the truth'? I thought the arguments about photo-journalism were daft. Though not surprising in a nation of writers. I had little doubt photo-journalism would disappear and it did. Everyone at the time was waffling on naively about 'truth', as if it were some kind of objective recording. Utter nonsense. A camera cannot possibly view things objectively, as you need a human brain to operate one.

And the corollary of that, is that from the moment you point a camera in a direction you have introduced subjective thought into the equation.

The fact that my images are partly from objective reality and partly from my mind, simply makes them a higher truth, for that is exactly what reality is. We observe, we think, we sleep, we dream, we analyse, we imagine..... so a synthesis of external and internal realities, simply makes my images more real, as that is fundamentally how life is perceived. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

I had an incredibly colourful and dramatic childhood and teenage life, and consequently was easily bored. For this reason I evolved as a person of extremes. I love life intensely. I love to really LIVE and feel alive! And photo-journalism just looked as dull as ditchwater to me. All this boring old black and white snapshot stuff, all seemed a bit grey. No pun intended. That was the real issue. I always found mono snaps a bit of a snore. I had covered that ground years earlier, become very good at it, but still felt dissatisfied. And art it definitely was not.

I nonchalantly dismissed games as a boy, they all seemed a bit daft to me, but I used to love pinball as you were just challenging the machine, rather than engaging in vulgar one-upmanship with a peer. Decades on I am still the same, I am not competing with anyone - just myself. Even more than playing pinball, I used to love watching the technician repair them. When the machines would malfunction - as complex machines always do - I would gaze in awe at the circuits and solenoids and the sheer complexity. There was a glimpse of the future on the inside of these machines. Primitive computer technology. Almost proto-robotic. These things were a complete mystery to a twelve year old. Later I studied electronics to try and figure out what was going on. Then I would throw down the book and bust open a resistor or transistor to try and figure out what was going on in there. Nothing, apparently. I also remember at that time, dismantling a television set piece by piece, because I wanted to know where the picture was coming from. Nowhere, apparently. I never did get the TV set back together. My mind was always this way - reaching for cognition in a totally empirical way. And that is undoubtedly the road to understanding - not passively reading the theories and creeds of others.

I was also beginning to learn that it is easier to destroy than create. It can take years to build a pink palace with towering pinnacles and secret passageways and beautiful light. It takes only seconds to destroy it. One moment of stupidity. Creativity is the ultimate human glory. Destruction presents not the slightest challenge even to a cretin. This is why cretins are the principal perpetrators of destruction in the world at large. Even in art, the ugly, weird, boring or destructive are just facile ego trips. Any careless imbecile can churn it out. And of course they do. And you would think all those debilitated intellectual advocates would have figured it out by now. But clearly they haven't, somehow. Conversely, to strive for something beautiful, honest, original and brilliant, free of corrupted values, that is the hardest thing on Earth.

Never confuse ugliness with gravitas, nor weirdness with originality. Ugliness and weirdness are easy, but like discordant, cacophonous 'music', quickly tiresome.

On first sight of 'Metasphere' many people are thrown and attempt to compare it with the nearest thing they can associate it with. Psychologically, there is always a tendency to compartmentalise. And it is lazy inexactitude. Many people do the same thing when they see me in my hat. If I listed the comparisons I have had with other famous people, it's hilarious as none of the people I get compared with are even remotely like me, or indeed anything like each other! They just all wear inferior hats, and their vocations and physical appearance are very different to mine. But a remote connection is enough for most people to 'chunk down', when confronted with something they haven't seen before. Ambassadors of approximation can be annoying.

In Hollywood it's an ongoing joke that movies have to be "like other movies." You can imagine the conversations between the film makers and the money. "So we're talking Blue Lagoon meets Robocop, right?" Just hilarious. What people really want is brand new clichés. They want something new, as long as it isn't. They feel thrown and lost if something is absolutely new. Story of my Life.

For my work in general, people often reach for the nearest tenuous connection they can find and use. As I said, this is merely as poetic or prosaic as the observer. No more, no less. Words like "surrealism" or "fantasy" are completely erroneous descriptions. "Fantasy" is a word I absolutely detest. I never fantasise! I do things! My work is not surreal, either. Surreal is ten naked girls standing on motorcycles as they ride over Niagara Falls, whilst simultaneously a thousand blue apples fall from flying trees as pink flamingoes flee from a sky raining stilettos. That is surrealism! Just running the permutations! Sensational and intriguing for a moment but ultimately meaningless.

My work is about the search for higher levels of meaning. Not at all disparate, like surrealism. 'Metasphere' is totally real - think about it. It had to be there. And there is a cohesive synergy between all the elements. It is harmony not discord.

Even when photographing a girl, what the hell is it that I see in the viewfinder, that suddenly gels and gets me all agitated, frenetic and inspired?! What is it? It wasn't there half a second ago. What is getting me all excited? What apparently insignificant change suddenly made it all mean so much? I have no idea, but I know it when I see it and always search for it. Even with an image like Metasphere there is a point at which that still occurs, but the time scale is just more protracted.

The sculpture itself was a nightmare from hell to create. Just endless sanding, filing, honing, modelling, shaping and smoothing, so as to render everything seamless and flawless. Anything less would have been a recognisable object and ruin the illusion. I wore smog masks for health reasons, but the excessive dust caused by perfecting the piece made me ill twice, as the dust inevitably got in to my throat. Never again.

There were times when I really felt as if I had bitten off an awful lot more than I had chewed before. I lost faith for a bit. I was about 200 hours into it and almost gave up, but I just couldn't bring myself to throw away two months of my life. After all, life is just too precious.

There were even more things going on in my mind, at the time I created Metasphere. I had become fascinated by the concept of a super modern, almost futuristic, space age aesthetic. This is very much still with me. A world where everything is clean, slick, timeless and geometric.

And of course, I was thinking about order and chaos, space and matter, dynamism and inertia. Pure geometric simplicity and the complexity of form. Spatial relationships.

Many think the work is aerosprayed, which I guess is a testimony to the perfection of the finish, but it's not. I used brushes, with a special stippling technique I evolved to eliminate even a hint of brush strokes, unevenness or gloss.

Much of my work takes years to be fully understood. When I created 'Metasphere' no-one would publish it. They just could not see it as a photograph. Although it was first exhibited in 1977 at my 'Debut Show' in Mayfair, London, it took six years to get 'Metasphere' published. It first appeared in Photography magazine in 1981. They ran an article on me called "If It's Not Original - It's Not Mine". The editor introduced me to his friends as "a man of the future". People always said my work was "ahead of its time". You could look at it that way and say 'Metasphere' is like prototype Cyber Art long before there was any. I know that. That is one way of looking at it. But I think my work reflects the time I live in with absolute veracity, but without the social preconditioning of thought and praxis which makes so much Art old before it is even created.

Most 'contemporary' art created today, even the garbage that gets described as 'cutting edge', is not contemporary at all. It is based on clapped out concepts which are 50 years old. I'm not concerned with all that. That which went before me is of marginal interest. This is my time here and now and my influences are taken from life, not historical concepts of art. And of course, I also work in the media of my time. Photography was a natural choice for me. And so was Cyber Art when it arrived in the early Nineties. I may well be perceived as 'ahead of my time' but by definition, nothing can be. A lot of people are just stuck in the past, it's more comfortable there. Greyer too, alas. I prefer adventure and that is why I have been an innovator all my life. To discover the fresh and the new, there inspiration lies. It is nowhere to be found in borrowed ideas. Or trotting out the same formulaic motifs. I'm too easily bored.

The actual word 'Metasphere', I coined by using the prefix 'meta', meaning 'above or beyond'. It was important that even the title was new and gave nothing away. It also, of course, implied that there was more to the image than meets the eye. I have of course, since, invented a vast number of words for my titles. A great title can add much to a work of art, as surely an inept one can destroy it. I love to innovate at every level, including with titles.



My first ever art picture back in the Sixties, featured flowers on a grave, dying under the weight of heavy snow. The picture was inspired by Francoise Hardy's gorgeous allegorical dirge, 'Mon Amie La Rose'. It was entitled 'Under Grave Snow' which gave it a sense of irony with each of the words playing off against each other and 'grave' working as both an adjective and a noun. It was also a vague allusion to Dylan Thomas' play 'Under Milk Wood'. Many a good work of art, though, has been ruined by a thoughtless and inept title. 'Dull Obvious Description' 1976 or worse yet, 'Untitled 46'.... (read: 'For the 46th time I couldn't be arsed to make one up') ....'Mary With A Mirror'...... 'The Mist On The Mountains'....... Zzzzzzzzz......

Actually, snoring and joking apart, 'Zzzzzzzzz......' would make an excellent title.... now all I need is the idea....... cue gorgeous girl with eyes closed...... floating through the clouds..... surrounded by explosions!!!

Olé! Another masterpiece!

To find the timeless in the new, to express something you hold close to your heart and to search for that which speaks to you without consciously attempting to say anything - that is the essence of all great art. And ironically, exactly how I wrote that sentence. As I wrote it, I had no idea what it meant. I had to go back over it to get the meaning. I create my art in precisely this way, barely conscious of my actions, intuitively making the right moves. So any post rationale outlined here, is just my own attempt to comprehend what I did. Had you asked me at the time, I wouldn't have known. And in the deepest possible sense, I'll never know.

The question of 'why?' goes on forever.

JAMES ELLIOTT

Abbey Road, St John's Wood, London

Started 12th April 2002, 11.54 p.m.

Finished 9th Jan 2008 4.10 a.m.

(Well, I had a lot of other things to do)

© JAMES ELLIOTT 2008