Brush with fame: Are rock stars any good at art?

For the singer Joni Mitchell it was more enjoyable than the ‘day job’. Jazz virtuoso Miles Davis regarded it as an extension of his wildly inventive musical colourscapes. As Paul McCartney’s photographic show opens to rave reviews, David Lister runs the rule over the musicians who painted their lives away from the crowd

The new Sir Paul McCartney exhibition, Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, is at the National Portrait Gallery in London (PA)

The current exhibition of Beatlemania photographs by Paul McCartney seems to have taken many by surprise. Who knew that the great singer-songwriter was once an accomplished photographer? Even he seems to have partially forgotten the fact, only rediscovering the pictures recently.

The photos capture the excitement of his fellow band members on their first visit to America. Amazingly, when I interviewed Sir Paul 10 years ago, he was still talking about that visit to Miami, which forms the centrepiece of the exhibition, and how George Harrison, in particular, was blown away by it. Indeed, he grew excited just talking about the image, still vivid in his mind, of Harrison being served a cocktail by a bikini-clad waitress – the same image that is now on display in Sir Paul’s exhibition.

McCartney is, of course, not the first musician to diversify into the visual arts. Jazz virtuoso Miles Davis had a huge talent for surreal, brightly coloured geometric shapes on canvas, often influenced by African art. But it was the Sixties generation of rock stars – a number of whom had been to art school – who really branched out. McCartney’s brother Michael, who scored two massive hits with his group The Scaffold (“Thank U Very Much” and “Lily the Pink”) became an accomplished photographer, with a recent show in London. His unique access resulted in memorable behind-the-scenes pictures, including one of John Lennon “goosing” one of his idols, US rocker Gene Vincent.

Here comes the sun: McCartney’s exhibition documents the year the Beatles made their first trip to conquer America, including a memorable visit to Miami (Ed Lyon)

Mixing her passion with ‘the day job’: Joni Mitchell’s self-portrait on her album ‘Clouds’ (Joni Mitchell)

Lennon, himself an art school alumnus, was known for his whimsical and sometimes very funny drawings, which filled two bestselling books during the Beatlemania phase, and he drew constantly for years afterwards.

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell were avid painters, both illustrating their own album covers as well as having exhibitions. Indeed, Mitchell would claim to prefer painting to the day job, and was baffled by the different ways rock stars and painters were treated. As someone who was uncomfortable with repeating her hits in concert, she once complained: “No one ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint another Starry Night again, man.’”

I got to know David Bowie in the 1990s, around the time he mounted an exhibition of his art in London. Bowie had long been both a painter and prolific art collector, and he was on the board of Modern Painters magazine, but he had been reluctant to go public with his own art. While he was planning the exhibition, he asked me to write the catalogue essay. I loved his artworks, and found his figurative paintings sometimes dark, always powerful, his self-portraits seemingly influenced by Francis Bacon, such was their ability to disturb the viewer. Some of the charcoal portraits and etchings explored his interest in madness (his brother was sectioned and taken to a mental health hospital).

Pin-ups: David Bowie with his painting at Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts Gallery in New York City, November 1990 (Ron Galella Collection/Getty)

Bowie once said of his art: “I’ll combine sounds that are kind of unusual, and then I’m not quite sure where the text should fall in the music, or I’m not sure what the sound conjures up for me. So then I’ll go and try and draw or paint the sound of the music. And often a landscape will produce itself, then I’ll identify locations within the landscape.”

Patti Smith, one of the pioneers of punk rock, is also a prolific artist. Her exhibition last year, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, included painting, photography, video and poetry. She is perhaps the most intellectual of the musicians-turned-painters. Her Pompidou exhibition had interpretations of texts by Arthur Rimbaud and other French poets, and a series of Mexican “Red Earth” paintings.

Smith’s eclecticism is well known. Other rock stars are more recent entrants to the art world. Art school graduate Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, who excited Glastonbury last weekend, had her first exhibition in London in 2018. It included portraits of herself and family and friends, and one critic praised the exhibition as “representing a chronological summary of her growing confidence with her brushstrokes leading to hints of cubism”. The Royal Academy’s artistic director Tim Marlow called her art “a life force at play”.

Chrissie Hynde during her book launch of ‘Adding The Blue’, which features 200 original artworks from the rock musician (PA)

Others to explore their psyches – or at least their fame – on canvas include Grace Slick of Sixties California hippy band Jefferson Airplane, whose most memorable hit with the band was a song called “White Rabbit” and whose paintings include numerous rabbits, and Stevie Nicks, the ethereal singer with Fleetwood Mac, who had an exhibition of her own portraits of... Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac.

Yes, it has to be said that the pitfall of rock stars turning to painting is falling into the trap of being too self-referential. Ronnie Wood, a painter since the age of 12, primarily does portraits of fellow celebrities and has had exhibitions in the UK and US, that have often been highly praised. However, it doesn’t always go well. His pastiche of Picasso’s Guernica featuring the Rolling Stones dancing among the ruins, drew this response from Art Review editor Oliver Basciano: “He seems to have taken one of the greatest and most moving works of art, a desolate cry against war, and used it as the basis for terrible fan art to, er, himself. Art is often about having a decent dollop of chutzpah, but this takes the biscuit.”

If in doubt, paint it black... Ronnie Wood stands in front of one of his less controversial pieces (PA)

Chasing rabbits: Grace Slick during her art exhibition at Art One Gallery, Santa Monica, California, in 2011 (Getty)

Others fare much better. Bob Dylan, whose paintings of isolation in US cities bring to mind the subdued but haunting works of early 20th-century painter Edward Hopper, impressed the art critics as much as the music critics. Art Review said Dylan had, “songs that tell stories and paintings that capture frozen fragments of movies, both containing multitudes”.

And, of course, Sir Paul McCartney can at last glow in the approbation his 21-year-old self has finally received for his photography. The mix of four- and five-star reviews love the story of fan adulation shown from the inside, and, as almost an aside, discovered anew the fact that those we still tend to see as culturally one-dimensional, had too much artistic curiosity to be reined in by fans’ expectations.

Or as Grace Slick once put it: “I’m no Picasso, but my art is rock’n’roll.”