Over the last year, John Good Group have been working with an incredible artist called James Owen Thomas on some artwork pieces for our brand-new headquarters, Quarry House.
Let’s have a look at what his journey looked like creating the brand-new piece, ‘The Humber Bridge’.
Let’s Start at the Beginning
John Good Group have supported James over the last few months, buying a few of his pieces for their brand-new head office. After getting to know James, Adam Walsh, the CEO of John Good Group, asked James to create an artwork piece just for them on The Humber Bridge, as standing in Quarry House gives you the perfect view of the water and bridge.
Even better, John Good Group puts a key importance on the environment and creating a sustainable future, perfectly aligning with James’s artwork of using recycled materials, some even supplied from John Good Group.
James took a few photos at Quarry House to help with the setting of the art and so he could remember the little details, once he was home, he sat with a wide range of materials and got to work.
The First Steps
After taking various photographs from the viewing point of the Humber Bridge, James set about scaling up the size of the Bridge to fit the canvas proportions. Looking at these photographs, he was able to see tiny details such as how many trees were produced from the point of view of the Bridge from the boardroom. He decided to produce the trees from torn magazines, as well as a variety of green card packaging and even recycled Christmas cards.
Looking at the Sky
James wanted to create a sense of movement in the sky and use a mix of so many colours to help represent all different weather conditions and times of day. The sky comprises many torn pieces of greeting cards, as well as some grey areas being small sections of magazines that John Good Group supplied him with. If you look closely at the real piece of artwork, some papers also look as if there are tiny drops of water.
How he uses National Lottery Scratch Cards
Since the age of 14, James has started collecting National Lottery Scratch Cards to incorporate into his art. When he was in Hull, he asked a supermarket if he could take away their used scratch cards that customers had thrown away in the dispenser. James kept them aside, then cut thin black strips for the Humber Bridge, as well as hole-punching some light greens for grass and gold and grey for the path.
The materials he used
The fence took on a more rustic appearance as James was trying to find a way to use some of the supplies for land alongside the River Humber. The moss samples from John Good Group were perfect for making patches of green in the foreground. For those intrigued, James separated strands of blue, grey, pink and beige fabrics from the John Good Group, and he twisted them together to form another area of land alongside the river.
How he re-created the Humber
Finally, the river was more difficult than usual as the water could not be shown as looking slightly blue, as unfortunately we were in Yorkshire. The materials James had available in a beige or brown colour were making it appear like land. Therefore, for a more “wet” look, he used silver and gold foil together, but the result looked rather too shiny.
The solution seemed to be cutting some of the brown text from the back cover of a John Good Group book placing words discreetly along the riverside and then adding a layer of transparent plastic, also combined with some thin silk transparent fabric over the foil and words. This not only reduces the shine but still allows the colours from beneath to show through.
The Humber Bridge artwork for John Good Group took James well over 100 hours, but oh how it was worth it! Looking at the different materials supplied and focusing on images and testing what works, it’s all that makes art so powerful and creative.
We are proud to have given James the opportunity to create this artwork for John Good Group, where we will treasure the piece for years to come. So, a big thank you to James Owen Thomas!