Paul McCartney Artwork
Paul McCartney artwork is truly fascinating with interesting facts. When he was eleven he used a school prize to buy his first modern art book, including works by Dali and Picasso. Then at fourteen he won an art prize for a drawing of St Aidan's Church on the Speke housing estate where he lived. The church reappears in Paul's 1990 painting 'Home Territory' along with his childhood homes in Western Avenue and Forthlin Road.
"I felt that only people who'd gone to art college were allowed to paint" -revealed Sir Paul later.
In the early years of The Beatles, John Lennon and former member Stuart Sutcliffe attended Art college. Paul consequently felt inhibited by his lack of formal art training - a block he only conquered later in life. The irony is, he didn't have any formal music training either, but this failed to prevent him from becoming one of the most influential and pioneering songwriters of all time! During the sixties he became friendly with art critic, John Dunbar and gallery owner Robert Fraser. Through their circle of influential friends and young artists, Paul became familiar with contemporary art, meeting people like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton who were to later design covers for The Beatles' albums. Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road were both based on ideas that Paul developed with them. Paul would spend lots of time at the Fraser and Indica galleries, helping with the installation of exhibits and feeding his enthusiasm for the medium. He began collecting and bought a number of paintings by the surrealist painter Magritte, whose influence on Paul's own painting is considerable.
Since 1983 he has set up studios in the south of England and in the USA, where he has been intensively exploring the medium of painting.
'' I'd been itching to apply paint to a surface, and I decided life begins at 40, so let's do something'' said Sir Paul.
His works are partly influenced by the American school of Abstract Expressionists, an art form which is powerfully colorful and emotional, and free and impulsive in the application of paint. Further influences to be seen are Pop Art and surrealism. Willem de Kooning (an abstract Expressionist), famous artist, was a personal friend of McCartney's and he was the great influence for Paul. A conversation with US artist Willem de Kooning prompted him to pick up palette and brushes. For 18 years McCartney had kept his secret talent under wraps. It was something he had decided to keep to himself, fearful that outsiders may criticize his work, because there was always that problem of crossing over into other genres of artistic work. In the 15 years that followed he painted more than 500 canvasses.
I decided to add Paul's (and other's) comments/explainations to all his art so you could understand his creative vision.
Ancient Connections
..."And these were the connections between all the ancient civilizations, but as the painting started to develop, the one on the right started to look quite modern, so I think of him more as a modern face, with these ancient connections in the background there. The rod almost goes through his mouth, like a cigar or something; it comes out of his mouth. So that is quite nice, pretty" -- Paul McCartney
Big Mountain Face
"I like theses earth colors. I like what happens when you water them down a bit, the nice earth colors. I know i have said it before, but soil and the earth are very important to me. Living on a farm, a love of nature as a kid, so it should be important. It is all over the whole surface of our planet, which makes it pretty important, really. So these colors attract me" -- Paul McCartney
Egypt Station
"My original inspiration was similar to a picture we were talking about the other day, with Egyptian symbols and shapes I got from looking at a reference book on Egypt. I was interested in the way they drew sunflowers, so two appear on the left and on the right. It was a nice shape, so I took that and then I also love the way they symbolize trees. I like the way they reduce a tree to just some very simple symbols."-- Paul McCartney
Unspoken Words
Wolfgang Suttner: This is 100 percent composition—it isn't in every picture.
Paul McCartney: As you can see, it is very spontaneous and I didn't really have any preconceived ideas when I started it, but I started with blue behind it and then I drew some faces on top of that and then just worked on them, just the three faces, and turned it round a lot when I was working. I turned it lots of ways, upside down often.
Wolfgang Suttner: You turned the canvas upside down?
Paul McCartney: Yes, I turned it on its side and upside down, just to get a look at the composition, to see if it worked. A lot of the drawing, these blue marks, were done from the upside-down position, and then in the end I decided it seemed like a woman. It had a kind of grille across it, stopping it from talking, so it was something to do with forbidden speech. And this guy definitely has a cross, the face on the right: his mouth seemed to pick up the same theme, something forbidden. And then this face on the left has got an S mouth, which is a similar thing, so that became the theme.
Yellow Linda With Piano
"A couple of people who have looked at my
book singled this one out, a couple of women
who said that is the picture they would like, and I
am not sure why but I like it. This is Linda relaxing in my room at home where I have the piano,
and she is sitting on the couch and she was in
yellow. So I made everything yellow. The piano
isn't really yellow, but I just thought it would be
nice. Her hair was yellow, her blouse was yellow,
so I made them all yellow. So it became a very
yellow picture. It didn't need brown or any of
their real colors. This is interesting because this
little stool here, this little piece here, was Rene
Magritte's. That was in a sale of the contents of
his studio, and in this little thing here are his
charcoals and his drawing pens and pencils
exactly as he left them, including his spectacles.
Maybe it was the atmosphere they liked. It's very
peaceful. I enjoyed making it. It is a very typical
pose of Linda's: the legs — this foot is slightly
strange, but I like it — this shoe." -- Paul McCartney
Unfinished Symphony
Paul McCartney: This relates to the couple of other pictures
where I use musical things. There is one called C minor and one called Key of F, and it was an idea I had to take something I knew very well in music, a chord, and try and paint the feeling it gave me. So C minor might be a rather lonely-looking picture because it can be a bit of a sad chord. This came on from those ideas, but this was then to try and paint a whole symphony. The whole thing rather than one chord; a musical explosion; an orchestra playing something.
Abstract rather than specific. So for that I just applied a lot of paint and smudged it around and had a lot of fun with it.
Wolfgang Suttner: This picture has so many different greens and different structure. It is like you had a lot of chaotic
things and then you have parts that are calm, like a little concept.
Paul McCartney: Well, you know, one of my big inspirations is nature. I love nature and I love what it does. If you go down on the seashore and watch the water, see what it does to the sand, it bubbles up and goes back — what you could call chaos. And yet it's so beautiful, it leaves beautiful marks on the sand. I kind of trust to that, and that is a large part of painting abstracts —to try and think of myself as nature itself, without a mind, a sophisticated mind that knows how to play a piano or drive a car...
John's Room
This picture shows how much McCartney's work develops during the painting process. While his original intention was to try painting folds in the clothing on the central figure in yellow, a very painterly tradition, what developed during the course of painting were the features of John Lennon, which he imagined he saw on the face of the figure crouching in the red robe. McCartney describes painting as a sort of new encounter with familiar faces, like in a dream. Another character familiar to him from his musical past is suggested in the profile of the figure on the right, a manager called Brian Brolly. All in all this composition has something medieval and religious about it: the robes, the arched windows; and in the top right-hand corner the suggestion of a line of nine ancestors reinforces this mood, together with the gathering of seven figures in the foreground, numbers with mystical or symbolic connotations. "John's room" is one of McCartney's few interior motifs, a picture with a powerful sense of drama, borne out by the cheerful complementary colours and, in contrast, the formal, ecclesiastical structure.
Andy In The Garden
Painted in typically rhythmic and relaxed fashion, with scratchings and a strongly gestural application of the paint, the picture reflects an autumn evening in the artist's garden in the South of England. As is often the case, the artist blends elements from his stock of unconscious ideas and images into his immediate environment. The Andy Warhol figure which emerges from the brushstrokes is unintentional. McCartney draws a parallel with Warhol: "I heard about the Velvet Underground ... and they said (what) made him the greatest producer ever (was that) anything they did, he allowed them complete freedom and he just enjoyed it, and it is very interesting because it is kind of opposite for me in painting, him coming into music and just allowing it, following what he saw, it is the same journey I am doing into painting, only the opposite direction, you know, the paint makes Andy appear so it is just a magic moment ..."
Yellow Celt
McCartney's preoccupation with his Celtic ancestors is to be seen in a variety of facets of his artistic and musical activities. His symphonic work "Standing Stone", for example, deals with Celtic myths. One example from his series of paintings "Celtics" is "Yellow celt". The whole of the centre of the picture is taken up by an oversized statuesque figure, whose disproportionately long limbs - taken from a Celtic relic, just like the face and the "hat" - suggest an expressionistic use of shapes. This central figure has the same unmistakably Celtic features that McCartney has used in a number of pictures: the mask-like face with only a hint of a mouth, slits for eyes and a square nose-piece. Other primeval features are the dagger stuck in the waistband and the uninhibitedly displayed erection, both symbols of power and fertility. This figure is flanked on the right by the antique symbol of wisdom, a golden owl perched on an orb. It is beating its wings as though trying to impart a little of its wisdom. On the left-hand side facial features appear which also seem to be communicating with the figure in the centre. Perhaps a Celtic barbarian to contrast with the antique symbol of wisdom. The picture shows strong evidence of the painting process: scratches which have the effect of graphic lines, reinforcing the dynamism, and McCartney's fingerprints in the bottom left-hand corner. Here too the Celtic theme is embedded in an imaginary landscape.
Black Singer
A night scene: From beneath the shades of black (dark pictures are rather untypical of McCartney's work) light patches of colour emerge, breaking through the black surface. The levels alternate, however, white being either the unpainted canvas shining through or a thick, paste-like layer on top. The black is almost oppressive, allowing scarcely any other expression of colour than the almost red-hot glow of red. As is often the case in McCartney's work, the painting process and the spontaneity of his experimentation with the materials produce formulations which are strongly gestural. The result is then not a portrait but a facial landscape. Here, a physiognomy is not the starting point for the composition but what emerges during the final stages of the work. The mouth which is scratched in introduces the subject matter: "Black singer". But this too is an experiment, for by scratching out the paint in one final stroke, McCartney draws attention to the material aspect of the painting process.
Shark On Georgica
Painted during the summer on Long Island near New York, McCartney's "Georgica" (the name of a lake near the coast) presents a mixture of idyll and alienation. A wealthy district, a sanctuary for celebrated film directors and fashion designers. The painting shows the suggestion of a sailing boat on "Georgica". Commenting on this idyllic retreat of the rich and famous, the artist makes his point with caustic British humour as the dorsal fin of a shark - an impossible idea! - threateningly breaks the surface to upset the harmony of the scene. "Shark on Georgica" is a painting with a landscape reference and with an ironic touch typical of McCartney. As in some of his other works, McCartney has followed Rothko's example and extended the painting around the edges of the canvas.
Read more about Paul McCartney, his biography, quotes and more here.
Beatles Art & Beatles Artists
Beatles Artifacts
|
