My Dog Sighs is a Portsmouth-based acclaimed British street artist, filmmaker, and author. From the humble beginnings of painting on tin cans and the scribbled doodles of his 'Everyman' character, My Dog Sighs has now just completed his sold-out 'Inside' exhibition in Portsmouth, an immersive installation featuring photorealistic paintings, sculptures, and light and sound installations hidden inside and old ballroom, My Dog Sighs has seen a well deserved meteoric rise and acquired an incredible international following.
A stunning limited edition print on archival quality stock.
Produced by ART808 in conjunction with My Dog Sighs.
The incredible depth of colour achieved in this fine reproduction of the original artwork and the attention paid to its finishing touches make this print a must have for any collector of the artists work.
Based in Portsmouth, My Dog Sighs is one of the UK’s top street artists. His work has been exhibited at London venues including the Stolen Space Gallery and the Paradigm Gallery, as well as further afield in Brazil, Australia & the USA.
His most ambitious project to date saw him spend more than a year transforming a derelict ballroom into an immersive world inhabited by his signature Quiet Voices creations and featuring illuminated sculpture, paintings and found object-inspired artworks. Entitled Inside, the exhibition ran for two weeks and attracted more than 10,000 visitors.
Other projects have included founding the global Free Art Friday scheme and producing limited edition Christmas wrapping paper for homeless charity The Big Issue. My Dog Sighs has appeared on BBC News and has been featured in The Guardian, The Evening Standard, Art Reveal Magazine and JUXTAPOZ magazine.
A book documenting the “Inside” exhibition, from concept through to closure, was published in December 2021.
From humble beginnings to international acclaim, sold-out shows, and coveted prints and originals. When you step back and evaluate your journey, how has your mindset evolved, and would you still consider yourself a street artist?
Absolutely! To answer the last bit first, absolutely. I'm a street artist before everything else. Selling work in the gallery, print releases, all of those things are there to enable me to have fun on the street. They provide an income, which is great. Rather than having a day job and trying to fit street art around the outside, they provide me with the freedom to have a studio and to have time and space to explore the stuff on the street. That for me always comes first. I have a number of hats - I am a mural painter, I have my work in a gallery, and I do print releases and installations. But it's the street work that leads all of that. The street work is almost my sketchbook as well. The production of work on the street are the things that give me a chance to play and explore. There are time and space limitations. You're working in an outdoor environment and that's exciting. The gallery work follows the street work. It's been a fascinating journey and the street art thing was for shits and giggles. It was a thing I did on evenings and weekends. But there was a real appetite for street art and excitement for what was going on and people wanting to step into that. That's created this new gallery scene, a fantastic opportunity for me to travel the world and paint, do my street work, and do my gallery shows meeting all the other crazy artists on the same pathway. But there's this thing called ‘imposter syndrome.’ I think we all suffer from it somewhere along the line, doesn't matter what career. Everyone else seems to know what they're doing, and we just bumble along. I'm guilty of feeling that. People make statements about me being an ‘internationally acclaimed artists’ and I suppose if I sit and look at what I've done over this journey, that is what it is. But for me, it's someone saying you want to do this? And I'm like, ‘yeah, damn right I want to do it!’ It’s like being in the band, right? Doing the thing that you want to do, the thing that you love to do, the thing that makes you tick. When someone says that they value this, they value this in their society, their community, and they value this enough to spend their hard-earned cash on buying these pieces to hang in their homes, I'm massively humbled. It's a buzz, I pinch myself every day. Maybe that's part of me wanting to put something back into the education system. Do something for other people because I'm the lucky one. I know loads of incredible artists that haven't had the opportunities that I've had even though they're incredibly talented. I know that I'm in a very lucky position and so, doing what I can to help pull other artists up and inspire people to do the same thing, is the payoff for that.
