Paul Fryer

It struck me after posting some screenshots of pieces; artwork from Paul's website. I ought to have clarified a little. The life size Jesus Christ in the Pieta series are made by Madam Tousords makers and have a hyper real craftsmanship quality to them. Right down to each hair follicle. The electric chairs are exact copies to the millimetre. Time We Left This World Today is a full size replica of a V2 rocket as used by the Nazis in World War Two. It is immense. If you zoom in you can see Paul. The piece is in maple and was made by Charles Manners Furniture. In a fluke this is where an old friend of mine works or did. I'm not sure what the relationship is now but I know another friend who works there too. Paul Stevens is without a doubt the finest woodworker I have ever known. He is the reason I got good. I arrived at High Bands, a village about four miles from Shrewsbury college. He had been junior world power lifting champion and was and I'm indeed still is, one of the physically strongest person I have personally known. He applied the dedication of a top athlete to his making and it was through seeing his standard that I got a measure of what accuracy there can be to fine woodworking. Engineers may brag of the numerical accuracy they are able to work to yet think of the gossamer skim a finely tuned plane is able to achieve. We had never met but had independently found accommodation in a farmhouse with a comical character also called Paul. The day we met cockney Paul asked Paul Stevens if he had any hashish. Paul replied, "did you honestly think I'd come without?". And from that day forward the two years I spent studying there I think we were stoned everyday. Further, following my two years here followed by a brief year in my first attempt at running my own business before returning to university where I completed my first class honours degree in furniture design and craftsmanship, a three year course, I think I was pretty much stoned every day. My close, brother like friendship with Paul in Shrewsbury was followed by a truncated, close and brother like friendship with the incredible Berin. Perhaps I'll tell the story of our friendship another time as that deserves a chapter in itself such was the strength of the bond we shared.

So me and Paul would cycle into Shrewsbury each morning arriving an hour before anyone else. Time spent sharpening in a stoned zen state that allowed us to disconnect from the tittle tattle taking place around us. From a technical perspective I learned more from Paul in how to conduct myself as a craftsman than I did from the tutors, great though they were. We were zen monks, committed to making work of a standard way beyond what was going on around us. I still own a cabinet I made there that looking at it now I simply can't grasp how I could have achieved such a standard. There are many misconceptions about craft work. That it is somehow at best a mimic of standards set by machine woodworking. This is far from true. Wood is alive. It is in continual movement and the impossibility of a machine being able to account for the characteristics and personality inherent to each individual cut and each must be approached with with a myriad of conscious and unconscious judgements and adjustments required to accurately sculpt a piece. Unlike with clay or with painting where the work is realised through careful and considered addition of pigment or clay, wood works are realised by the removal of all irrelevant material to reveal the shape within. Further, though much woodworking is created using datum; flat planes from which other facets are created in relationship to an initial flat surface, more advanced forms such as compound curved components in space, each incremental shaving taken to reveal this form within is often judgements made purely by the eye. The sophistication and complexity of, for example a hand rail to a staircase, is a majestic perfection, always on the high wire of taking a step too far. A shaving too much that can never be returned. Our approach was like that of Buddhist monks. For sure this work was very much in the nature of play. Where the footballer or ballerina trains to gain a control of their body in space; a propreoception that is the marvel of the none practitioner, so too the master craftsman must tune their body and senses to a level few will ever do. Not that I can make claim to being a master craftsman, I was around one and lived out a cannabis fuelled observation of what it takes to be one. I cycled with Paul. I cooked healthy food for us. I was his apprentice in many ways and it was this grounding that gave me whatever lesser power I could muster. Ultimately Paul was committed to the purest of craft skill and the pieces he made were exercises to test himself. My goal was different. I had visions of objects I wanted to create to communicate a meaning. The craftsmanship was not the goal in of itself but the vehicle and discipline required to accurately express whatever idea, beyond the reach of words, only communicable through a comprehensive control of the required physical discipline and control of accurately constructing matter. An eloquence that was sufficiently accurate to deliver the idea that was of a quality that required no linguistic assistance. Whether I achieved this is only answerable by the public, sufficiently educated able to confirm or dismiss my attempts.

Ultimately this was to separate us for a while. Where paul was offered an apprenticeship with arguably the finest woodworking studio in the country. Meanwhile I continued and received my advanced City and Guilds certificate in Furniture Design and Craftsmanship, higher level. I added this to my City and Guilds in carpentry and joinery.

Not to blow my own trumpet but I was forced to leave school and home on the same day. By doing this I forfeited my olevel qualifications and left school with nothing to barter with the college on my application. Fortunately the course leader was open minded and perhaps saw something in me. Following my interview he sent me away with a skill test that I completed to his satisfaction thus swerving the conventional route of whatever standard of o'level and a'level qualifications the other students were able to show their merit.

At the time I hadn't seen Paul Fryer in a number of years. I knew that he was a close friend of Damien Hirst. An artist the same age as me, someone who had grown up close to where I did who has gone on to be the richest artist in the world. While this may not necessarily mean his work is great it must be recognised that he revolutionised how the fine art world operates. Rather than following the conventional route to success of exhibiting gradually in the rare hope that a recognised gallery takes you on and that then your gallerist and agent is able to garner sufficient support from the established framework of the art world that your work is exhibited in the right places to the right people and slowly your work gains a status and value establishing you as a serious artist.

Instead Hirst, having been rejected on his initial attempts to make it onto a decent art course in London spent a year working in telesales; a notoriously difficult job where people are seldom given any salary instead receiving payment only as a percentage of sales made. This was no wasted year instead it provided him skills that are rare in artists who often are shy individuals. His foundation year was at Jacob Kramer College in Leeds where he met Paul and they formed a close friendship. Their foundation shows were unremarkable though both went on to create great work.

Damien found a place on the Goldsmiths course at his second year of application. Here Michael Craig Martin, a successful artist in his own right, along with other tutors had removed the divisions between fine art painting, sculpture and print making instead having an open house policy where all artists mixed and a unique and groundbreaking at the time saw all the art students thrown in together creating a creative hothouse without conventional boundaries. Where instead of doing the traditional life drawing at Kramer, Damien had gained access to the nearby mortuary and did dead drawing. Now at Goldsmiths Hirst looked not to the well trodden galleries that showed the popular art of the time he went to the natural history museum. Rather than representations of tigers and other animals Hirst saw the real tiger. And in all cases a real tiger, even a stuffed one was superior in every way to any attempt to draw the likeness of one.

During his second year Hirsts grades were mediocre. He wasn't often there. Impatient for the traditional route he would bypass the galleries. Finding funding for a professional looking catalogue and a list of the collectors who made or broke careers , Hirst approached them directly. Loft space in disused factories was abundant at the time and Damien began to curate his first show. The list of artists he chose to join him in his seminal show Freeze was a list of his friends whose work he loved and also a list of who would go on to become the movement known as the Young British Artists later abbreviated by art journalists as the YBAs. His generosity of spirit was evident. Sarah Lucas, Angus Fairhurst, Gavin Turk, Marcus Harvey, Jenny Savile, and others were to become the most successful artists to come out of Britain in years. Virtually all have gone on to have stellar careers. Damien sent limousines and taxis out to collect the most important and influential collectors. Most notably Charles Saatchi who reportedly commissioned Hirst on little more than a doodle on the back of a fag packet to fund the creation of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. This was to be o tiger shark suspended in a vast vitrine of formaldehyde. How can any painting compare to the sight of such a terrifying yet beautiful creature so out of context; not in a zoo but in a gallery. How can a mere representation stand up to the real thing?

Not all of the artists Hirst selected would go on to be successful but a remarkable number did. There were those left out of these early shows but future stars like Tracy Emin were later included.

Paul was already successful in his music creation producing soundtracks for Karl Lagerfield fashion shows. When Damien commissioned a piece from Paul he wanted a recreation of a piece he had already made a prototype of way back during their days at Kramer. I can remember the tangle of wires and melted plastic that would go on to be arguably Paul's most famous piece. Christ sat on the electric chair. But this time Paul had the budget to commission Tousourds to make the hyper realistic Christ and the accurate, full size replica of the electric chair. Now a recognised high point of art of the noughts Paul began on a fast moving creation of a body of work unique in its hyper realism, quite at odds with the rough and ready work in vogue such as the work of Emin and Lucas.

Now funded by one of the largest hedge fund owners in the country Paul was able to realise a series of pieces that took the advanced woodwork skills of Charles Manners workshop where my old college friend and uber craftsman Paul Stevens to create a series of artworks that trumped all but the very finest woodworking of the day but applied to create strange and confusing yet unique and beautiful objects. A series of perfect replicas. Accurate in the finest detail; Telstar, the early American satellites. Full scale atom bombs. A vast V2 rocket that married the highest achievements in British fine woodwork to the most incongruous of historic, twentieth century icons. A truly unique and impressive collection that remains unsurpassed in its own strange and wonderful logic.

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