"Top of the Pops" - Artists & Makers

“Top of the Pops”

Music has always influenced in my life. Whether sitting in the basement and listening to 45s or creating mix tapes from the radio, popular music captured my naïve perspective on life, love and the world. As a teenager, frequent trips to Kemp Mill and Waxie Maxie’s introduced me to new genres of music, and I began to buy records based on the album covers. By the 80s, it was my dream job to create oversized paintings of album covers for Tower Records. New Wave, Punk and Alternative Rock were my favorites and eventually inspired me to join a band. I discovered that being in a band was exciting at times, but it was mostly like being married to five people you would not marry.

Album art developed my aesthetic, highly shaping the way I photographed people and eventually painted them. I loved the way that musicians were captured in photos and art. As a photographer and painter, it has always been my desire to create images that look iconic and make everyone look like rock stars – even those who have never picked up an instrument and should avoid karaoke!

“Top of the Pops” is a series of paintings featuring music icons that found success, despite their troubled lives and the obstacles they faced. Are they my favorite musicians of all time? Not necessarily, but each of them was omnipresent at some point in my life and impacted the world around me in a significant way.

“Top of the Pops” was the world's longest-running weekly music show, and it featured performances of the week's best-selling popular music records, cruelly excluding any tracks moving down the chart.