AS A CHILD GROWING UP, WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL ARTS AND WHAT ARTISTS’ WORKS PARTICULARLY CAUGHT YOUR EYE AND/OR FIRED YOUR IMAGINATION? WAS THERE SOMEONE IN YOUR FAMILY OR AT SCHOOL WHO INSPIRED YOU?
Okay, I grew up round the corner from the gallery/studio, in Worship Street, mum and dad had a café there. So, I went to school in Spitalfields, a small Catholic school run by nuns when Spitalfields was still a fruit and veg. market. There were two big influences.
One Saturday we went on a trip to Tate Britain, and I saw a sculpture – I didn’t know it was a sculpture – it was Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. And my mum and dad used Brillo pads in the café, they would buy them in exactly the same type boxes I saw at the Tate. It was my first time in a big museum, the other kids were moving on and I was stood there staring at it. And the teacher said, why are you looking at this, do you like it? And I said, this is just a box! My mum and dad use the same Brillo pads in the café. She said, it’s not a box because you can’t open it, you can’t get into it. I stared and stared, walked around it, and then I had this moment, and I said, it’s a sculpture! And she looked at me and she said, yes, it’s a sculpture. And that was a moment, I still get goosebumps thinking about it, that really opened my eyes.
Another time, we went to The National Gallery. Again, it was a Saturday with the school, they showed us around, stopping and talking about the paintings. And they spoke about this Canaletto, a view of Venice, regattas and all the people in masks. She explained what the masks meant, that it was Mardi Gras, the carnival before Lent, and these masked figures, this anonymity, the fact that you didn’t know who these people were, upset a usually rigidly fixed class system. And Canaletto’s father, his surname was Canale – which funnily enough is the Italian word for canal – now his father was a set designer. Canaletto would help him out with the sets, and sets for the theatre had these extreme perspectives, that’s why his perspectives are so captivating. And I know people say, oh Canaletto, he’s not cool. But that’s just stupid. Warhol and Canaletto, they’re the two influences that really shaped my interest in art.
YOU MAKE ART YOURSELF AS WELL AS BEING JEALOUS GALLERY CO-FOUNDER/DIRECTOR. DID YOU STUDY ART, IF SO, WHAT AND WHERE? WHAT INSPIRES YOUR OWN PRACTICE? HOW WOULD YOU SAY IT HAS EVOLVED OVER THE YEARS?
Yes, I do make my own art. I didn’t go to art school. I didn’t go to university. The truth is I loved art but having Italian immigrant parents, they came over here and they want better for their children. I worked in the café but they wanted me to have an office job. For them, being a doctor, working in a bank, being a solicitor, having those kind of jobs – not even to show off to the family – they wanted to see their children had achieved ‘status’. I was never going to do that. But because of [their attitude] I couldn’t carry on studying art.
So, I left and went to live in Italy. I went to the States for a bit and worked in Philadelphia with Urban Outfitters when they first started, doing some design for them. I fell into these things, in the 80s it seemed you were freer to experiment. Then I came back and worked with Benetton, doing window designs for them. I did many odd jobs but I was always drawing, making art because that’s what I loved. And then we had a small film company, before digital, we started a company called Badly Made Films. Short films we’d screen at The Portobello Film Festival. Art, be it sculpture, film, painting, drawing, etc., I ‘played’ a lot, all of it intrigued me.
HOW DID YOU JOURNEY FROM TRAINING TO BE PART OF THE ITALIAN PARACHUTE REGIMENT’S CONTRIBUTION TO US NATO PEACE KEEPING MISSIONS TO GO ON TO CO-FOUNDING JEALOUS IN 2008?
I went to Italy because it wasn’t great here. I had my A-Levels. And I had a place at university in the UK which was to do Social Anthropology and Social Administration. I wanted to make the world a better place! But as I said, with my dad, you were hit a bit too much, so I went over to Italy. I lost contact with my family for two years and I did National Service over there, I had dual nationality, I still do. I went to the police to register because that’s what you had to do. They said, where would you like to go? I said, what pays the most? They said, the Carabinieri, the national gendarmerie. I said, okay, I’ll do that for a year. But they said I couldn’t as I hadn’t been schooled in Italy. I said, what’s the next best paid? They went, parachute regiment! I ended up training in Livorno, Tuscany, part of the base was NATO. We did all the training to serve with NATO as a peacekeeping force in Lebanon. I was nineteen! In retrospect I can’t even remember who I was as a person. But we were being paid three thousand dollars a month so, after a year, you were coming out and you’d made good money. You didn’t think about the implications of serving in the military, everyone was just expected to do their National Service. Even now you get so many very young people joining the army, so they’re shaped, influenced and made to do things without questioning…
THAT’S WHERE THE WORD INFANTRY COMES FROM. A FIGHTING FORCE OF INFANTS, YOUTHS WHO COULD BE MANIPULATED!
Yes, I don’t think it had a lasting impact on me, but yeah, I did that.
AND WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO SET UP A GALLERY AND PRINT STUDIO? WAS THERE A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, GALLERY OR EXHIBITION THAT MADE YOU THINK, ‘I CAN DO THIS!’?
Right, okay, well I’ve always loved where art meets craft. The first company I started, I’d drive to Italy and all Roman countries have these money pots. Little, terracotta, amphora shaped clay pots where you saved up your money ‘til they were full, you smashed them open, made a wish and spent the money on good things. So, I used to get them from Italy, they’re all handmade, dried in the sun, I’d come back, paint them and sell them in Camden Market in the summer. Bring back a hundred, I paid twenty or thirty pence each and I’d sell them for four or five pounds, they’d pay for my holiday.
INTERWEAVING OF AN INTEREST IN ART AND CRAFT BUT ALSO ENTREPRENEURIALISM…?
Absolutely. And the latter I did take from my parents. And then I met Jacquie [who went on to become JEALOUS co-founder] and she said, these do really well, where do you sell them? I said, Camden Market. And she goes, what, all the time? And I said, no, just the summer, then I go back to my ordinary job. She said, I think this could work [on a much larger scale], she had a business degree. So, at one point we all bought over a thousand, painted them and sold them at all the markets: Spitalfields, Covent Garden, Camden, Greenwich, Saturday and Sunday. My brother was running one stall, Jacquie was running another, her sister was running one, I was running one and we did really, really well. We rented a lock up, eventually we had enough money to buy a building in Tottenham, which we still have. We called the company Terra Mundi, we employed local people I’d grown up with. And we started selling four or five thousand a week, wholesale as well as retail. They went to all the big garden centres. Then we started to sell in America, Canada, Japan, France… It was a great time, teaching people how to make up designs, all hand painted, it was a really nice, innocent times.
Then there was the global financial crisis, the collapse of subprime mortgage lending, the whole gift world changed! So, I kind of thought, what could I do? I used to go the Working Men’s College in Camden, and I learnt how to do screen-printing. Obviously that links back to an interest in Andy Warhol. Then I started a small studio in Crouch End where I’d moved to. I was also in a shit band called Mario’s Café, because it was the Britpop scene and everything and that’s where we’d all hang out. So, I opened up the studio and it was tough because all the money that was coming in from Terra Mundi I put into the studio, and it grew, and it grew, until we got this big job and didn’t have enough space to operate effectively. But then, this building that we’re in here now, it’s got four floors, it belonged to my mum and dad. When they passed away, they left it to my brother and myself, I eventually ended up renting my brother’s two floors and that’s how we get to where we are today.