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Margate Creates
Margate Creates

David Shillinglaw : Interview

Posted on January 6, 2025January 6, 2025

I first met David Shillinglaw in 2018. We were sitting in the sun outside the Tap Room and he mentioned that he was an artist. After a quick flick through Instagram when I was at the bar, I realised that I was in the hallowed presence of The Mattress Guy.  David’s mattress mantras were a regular presence as I traversed Cliftonville in that era. Of course, David is so much more than the man who repurposed sleeping equipment for a while; his work adorns the sides of buildings and gallery spaces throughout the world as well as throughout Margate

I went to see David in his central Margate studio to ask him about his work, his process and the future of art in the AI era. I started by asking David when he first knew he was going to become an artist. 

“I don’t know the exact age, but very young. There’s different elements of it. My parents didn’t have any money, so all my friends had computer games, and I never did. We didn’t have Sky TV. I didn’t have a Game Boy. So as a result, drawing and colours were the thing, and books, encyclopaedias. So for me, for Christmas or my birthday: new sketchbook, new rubber, new pencil case, but also like a book about surrealism. I remember being given a book about Salvador Dalí. I must have been seven or eight years old, and it was like someone opened the top of my head and poured sugar into it. I couldn’t believe it. Weirdly, now, I’m not bothered about Dalí so much—but when you’re seven or eight, Dalí’s just going to blow your mind, isn’t he?”

I have always been fascinated by how people become artists or writers or anything that is not what is usually considered a ‘regular’ job. I ask him if he knew at that age that being an artist was a career option.

“I didn’t think I’d be a professional artist then, right? I remember doing careers at school, careers advice, and they said, “Oh, you could be a graphic designer.” And I remember being like, “What’s graphic design?” They explained to me that, “Oh, well, everything you see is graphic, like a Coca-Cola can, or a sofa pattern, or a road sign. Everything that is visual has been designed by someone.”

“That kind of opened my brain again to the idea or possibility of a career in something. I thought, “Oh, I’d love to design Coca-Cola… like a can of drink.”

“After that, I was very influenced by comics. Going back, when I was a kid, you know, Beano and The Dandy—that turned into Marvel and Tank Girl, and then later into Robert Crumb. I think Robert Crumb is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. And I still think about that in my work—the idea of, like, cells or compartmentalising information. I don’t necessarily look at a painting as a window into a reality, in the way that most painters or drawers do, like, “This is a landscape,” or, “This is a portrait or a still life.” To me, a canvas is a window. I see it as a board game to play, or a hieroglyphic to decipher, or a comic book—as if you were to cut a comic book up and then put it back together with your eyes closed. Because I don’t want my paintings to be read with too much ease. It’s not supposed to go left-to-right. I play with that. I play with things going left-to-right and up-to-down. But I want you to kind of move through it and get lost in it a bit. Like if you were given a game of snakes and ladders but no one told you how to play it.”

We stop for a while as David needs to take in a delivery of canvas that is waiting for him downstairs. I look around the studio, taking in the dozens of pots of paint, books, scraps, splashes of colour adorn most surfaces. It’s a beautiful chaos. When he returns, I ask him how much of his work is intended and how much is based purely on instinct.

“Yeah, I don’t always know. I would say it’s both. It’s a yin and yang.

I don’t want to know what it will look like at the end, right? I can change my mind halfway through frustration. Because the image I see when I’m having a shower—I think, “Oh, I’m going to make a painting like that one,” or even, “Oh, that painting I made four years ago—I’ll paint like that again. I missed that painting.”

And yet you’ll discover something else. I kind of balance between frustration and curiosity, faith in myself and the unknown, and knowing that I can fall back on motifs, colour combinations, certain graphic tricks—the tricks I can do that I know will work.

But the best bits are the bits I don’t know will work. The best bits are the bits that happen almost by accident—almost as if someone else has done it. That’s the best bit for me, because I come back the next day and go, “Holy fuck. Yeah, I don’t remember that bit.”

Do you want to smash it up and start again sometimes?

“I’ve destroyed things. And what’s interesting is sometimes I’ll tear it all up—not literally sometimes, but in my head—and try and start again, go back to the drawing board.

And before I know it, old ideas start to seep in, and they become familiar. They’re like old friends. So it’s a bit like hanging out with people and getting bored of their company. And then after a few months, you’re like, “I kind of miss that guy.” So it’s interesting to me. I have—and I think it’s healthy—that battle I have with my own work. I’ve realised, after doing this for 20 years quite seriously, that I’ve got to know myself. It comes and it goes; it ebbs and flows. I find meaning in some things some days, and other days it doesn’t make sense. So it’s a precarious balancing act between what I want to be doing, what I’m actually doing, what I’ve done before, and trying to find some peace in that.”

AI rendering

I want to talk about AI. It’s something that fascinates me and scares me. I tell myself that each iteration of AI will benefit the world but I also wonder if it will send us frightfully quickly to an as yet undetermined hellscape. That morning, I asked ChatGPT to make a mural inspired by David Shillinglaw. I show it to David (pictured here)

“Fuck,” laughing, “I’m in trouble!” We laugh but I get the sense that he is taken aback by the image. It’s crude, it’s a caricature of his work, I don’t think anyone would buy it. It lacks the rhythmic beauty of his work, the motifs are jumbled. The AI even put his name on it, which seems a bit much.

“I’m not scared. I don’t think AI will ever take my job. What’s more likely to happen is that people won’t have the money to buy art. That’s the biggest fear—that actually, I will have to change. Either lower my prices, which, to be honest, is not always up to me. A gallery often sets the price. But AI will take people’s jobs, and then people won’t be able to afford to—not just buy art—but be interested in art. Because who cares? I mean, that’s a weird thing, isn’t it? Because art doesn’t really serve a function. The function of art is to maybe make people consider things differently or see their own reflection differently. I don’t know. But I do know the culture’s changing around that, and what once upon a time people used art for—which was to maybe, as far as I understand it, show their wealth and sophistication during the Industrial Revolution—people do that now differently.”

I ask David if there are any other projects that he is interested in that have not come happened yet. Straight away, he says, “a children’s book”.

“I’m reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my daughter at the moment. There’s something about Roald Dahl—his creativity in books like The Twits and The BFG. I grew up with those stories, and they’re so nostalgic and magical. They’re full of creativity. Roald Dahl is like the most famous writer to children. But it’s not about him being on TV or being interviewed—he’s famous to children. He was to me. He taught us what a snozzcumber or a whizzpopper was. That kind of impact would be amazing to explore—to develop something like a series of books.

At the moment, I’m thinking they shouldn’t be so much about storytelling as about information—science, or pseudoscience. Diagrams of the body and mind, playing with the idea of teaching about anxiety, hyperactivity, meditation—things I’m genuinely interested in and wish I’d known about when I was six years old. I’d use my art to play games around those ideas.

Another thing I’d love to do, which is in the same world, is a board game. I’ve thought about combining the two—a board game that comes with a book. Something like Snakes and Ladders, but it also teaches life lessons. You roll the dice, land on a square, and it says, “You just fell in love, move forward three spaces.” Or, “You had an anxiety attack, miss a turn.”

It would talk about universal themes—love, grief, anxiety, sadness, happiness. It could help kids understand themselves. It could be like a self-help tool for kids.

I really believe in creating things that aren’t tied to the internet. Drawing, for example, doesn’t run out of batteries. It’s a direct line from my brain to the page. That kind of magic—tangible, real creativity—is what I want to focus on.”

We have talked a lot and it has been a pleasure to rattle around near David’s amazing brain. In the street, we go our separate ways into the dark Margate night. I look out for mattresses on the way home in case I feel inspired.

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