James McQueen
Non-Fiction | Summer 2022

Featured art (left to right): 'You Snooze You Lose' and ' Give Me Solutions Not Fucking Problems' by James McQueen, £1,750 each.

The man behind the mystery

McQueen operates behind a pseudonym, preferring his work to take centre stage. “Keeping behind the mask enables me to enjoy the creative process without being concerned about praise or recognition. I enjoy what I do and don’t want that to change or to be changed through judgement. I want my art to speak for itself,” he says.

He’s allowed a monkey in a top hat to be the star of his work because he wanted a mischievous character that he could identify with, and which would ally with his witty, provocative slogans. ‘’I can see a lot of the monkey in myself. I wear hats all the time; I’ve got about 10 in the studio and probably 20 at home. I always wear a hat, even when I paint, so of course the monkey naturally had to be wearing a hat. I am very vintage and like to surround myself with eclectic artefacts and collections. My house is like a sort of circus. For me, the monkey just adds a contemporary edge to something classic”.

A student of the human condition James takes inspiration from the people around him. Creating sardonic and subversive titles and epigrams with a take on contemporary life, James takes inspiration from his life experience, people he has spent time with and the way that people look at life. “When people see my work, I want to create a reaction. What’s art all about if it doesn’t create an emotion of some kind?”.

Making the work

With a creative background in photography and woodwork and living in both London and New York for the past three decades, James McQueen is also a book collector, fascinated by the patina of age on vintage paperbacks, so is interested in creating the perfect look and condition of the finished piece – a book that looks like it has been loved.

“It’s too easy to do something clean. It’s too easy to do something with straight lines. It’s much harder to make something look old and tired”. He uses several layers of paint, which are then sanded down and finished with lacquer. “I wanted it to feel like you could literally take it off a shelf and it could be a book from 1974 or even 1945,” explains James. ‘’When you can take something that's so amazingly small and transform it into a large-scale piece of art is just amazing".