Behind the Paint...
What terrible secrets lurk!
In March 2019 my friend, the cartoonist Jim Medway, asked me to be part of a mural project he was doing for The Point, Doncaster Community Arts Centre. Jim, Ed Syder and I spent two days there making big paintings for a comics exhibition. I’d never painted a mural before, so was lucky to begin with experienced muralist Jim! We projected our (small) drawings onto the white walls, pencilled them, painted the flat colours and then did the outlines with Posca markers. It was brilliant to see them all come together.
Ben Clowes, who was then the head of The Northern School of Art’s illustration degree, saw my mural on Instagram and asked me to come and do similar for the Northern Festival of Illustration in Hartlepool that year. The loose theme for the exhibition was “monkey” - for anyone not familiar, Hartlepudlians have been sometimes referred to as “monkey hangers” because of a legend dating from the Napoleonic Wars, when a shipwrecked monkey was said to have washed up and been promptly hanged by the citizens who believed it to be a French sailor. Wrong place wrong time, my dear old monkey!
I had an idea for a comic based on Frida Kahlo’s monkey paintings. It was an interview with the monkey, and his experience of being famous through a Kahlo painting, the ups and downs of a rock ‘n’ roll life!
I really liked this comic, and thought about other subjects of famous paintings that could talk about their experiences as artistic muses. The next one was a horse from Stubbs:
I called it Behind the Paint after VH1’s Behind the Music - anyone remember that show? I watched it in my late teens/early 20s, it was a juicy look into the more salacious aspects of famous musicians’ lives.
I drew a new one yesterday, about the dragon from Uccello’s Saint George and the Dragon, which hangs in the National Gallery here in London. This is my third comic about that painting - one was for The Phoenix, one I’m still colouring, and now this guy. It’s just a really fun, weird painting to look at!
I guess there are endless subjects for this series! Surrealism would be good - some interviews with the weird long-legged elephants from Dali’s paintings, or the lobster of lobster-and-phone fame… I did a couple of comics with Leonora Carrington characters, though not for Behind the Paint - but that could be fun too!
Aren’t friends who drag you to parties with them and promptly abandon you the worst!
Loved the Frida Kahlo mural, can’t believe this was nearly 4 years ago! The Behind the Paint series is fantastic, looking forward to seeing more 😊
Such antics. Such great ideas 😁