Sabina Lucia

Husband and wife, Stuckist artists: Edgeworth Johnstone and Shelley Li, are showing a large range of their paintings at Nolias Gallery in Great Suffolk Street, five minutes from Tate Modern (where some of Johnstone’s paintings were recently displayed in the Turbine Hall) and well worth a look if you’re in the area and even if you’re not. Both figurative artists ( key to being a  Stuckist), their work is distinctly different from each other’s.

Edgeworth’s paintings are deep and emotional with an incredibly adept use of colour; often bold and confident, reminiscent of Matisse’s later paintings.

In Nightrider, a man merges with a dog or is it a fox or some other creature of the night? ‘In the flesh’, the colours I found to be slightly more subtle, evoking a spooky atmosphere and a sense of an illicit journey through the dark.

As well as people (including a painting afterh the Mona Lisa), animals feature heavily: a bird with eyelashes, cows, rams, cats, dogs and not forgetting (pun intended), elephants, as above. Never before have I seen such realistic texturisation of an animal skin in a painting; the grey of the large elephant is crackily and coarse just as it should be – a serendipitous outcome of using house-hold paint – rising above a background of contrasting colours.

Shelley Li’s paintings are fun in style, depicting sexy and and slightlydark  scenes. In Black And White (above) we see the duality of one woman’s personality; black expressing her wickedly sexy desires and white, her every-day picture of innocence and lady-like qualities. Shelley’s paintings are beautifully decorative, with a attention to the details: lace work, furniture, floral carpets and hair accessories. The latter of which she also makes and can also be found for sale at the gallery.

Deep in her den of iniquity,a sexily clad woman (‘Woman With Whip’),  resplendent in her stockings and suspenders, checks herself out in a mirror as she prepares herself for her willing ‘victim’. The cat’s ears costume and bows bring lightness and humour to this sexy scene painted in oils on canvas.

This two person show started on the 28th of May and runs for another week or so depending on bookings. Check with the gallery or on the artists’ sites for details. There are hundreds of paintings, many of which you can flick through like records and with small paintings starting at £10 there’s even something for the most budget-conscious recessionistas.

Paintings © Edgeworth Johnstone and Shelley Li 2010.

Text © Sabina Lucia 2010

PJ Crittenden has been a DJ for over 15 years, starting at More Than Vegas in Soho and the legendary Frat Shack club nights. Since 1996 he has been running the Dirty Water club and record label, putting on gigs and releasing records by ’70s punk and ’60s garage bands. I interviewed at his home in North London about punk music and its origins for your delectation…

Sabina Lucia: PJ  I mentioned on my blog last week that Andy Warhol and his Factory scene influenced the punk movement, would you say that’s true?

PJ Crittenden: To an extent, yes; there’s a well-worn phrase that The Velvet Underground (managed by Warhol) themselves didn’t sell many records, but everyone that did buy their album went out and formed a band. That’s probably a slight exageration but there’s a lot of truth in that. People were forming bands with no prior musical experience and that’s quite punk rock. And when the whole Velvet Underground scene started there were already a million bands rehearsing in their garages and playing what, now, if you listen to it, could be termed punk rock. It was a development. Everyone thinks of the punk rock explosion but it wasn’t, it was a development. It then reached a critical point where it went over ground. So it was part of it but not the whole of it, yeah.

SL: When was the term ‘punk’ first used to describe music?

PJ: Most people seem to agree that it was in Creem magazine, an American music publication, most well known for writers like Lester Bangs. He was quite punk himself back in a way, back in the early ’70s and into the ’80s. Whilst he made a few records himself, he was a writer and quite punk rock in his writing. But I think it was Dave Marsh that actually coined the phrase but I think he was writing not about about punk bands because they hadn’t come along at that point, this was the ’60s and he was talking about garage bands like The Count Five and The Groupies ; teen bands of the mid ’60s and they were playing basic rock and roll, that’s what punk was originally.

SL: Interesting. I think you mentioned to me before that the origins of punk go back even further than that…

PJ: If we’re talking musically, I can pick out records from the 1950s that were in essence punk rock, they were punk in attitude and had an aggessive sound. As I said, music develops and these things had an influence on how things were later on. For example The Linn Twins – Rockin’ Out The Blues from 1958. And then in the ’60s there were people like Dean Carter and The Legendary Stardust Cowboy and The Sonics. They didn’t have big hit records because they were just too way out for their time but if you listen to them now, you think, “where did they come from?”. If you listen to The Groupies, they’ve got a slight snarl and snottiness in the way they sing and the attitude, because with punk a lot of it comes down to the attitude.

SL: That’s right, it was all about the attitude wasn’t it. I love that name, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, brilliant.

PJ: Yeah, he was a one-man band who couldn’t get gigs, so he used to go the drive-in movies and play, standing onthe  roof of his car during the intermission, until he got chucked out.

SL: Ha ha, excellent.

SL:So PJ, what in your opinion – including all genres of punk – is the definitive punk album?

PJ: Well in many ways I think you have to choose two: one from England and one from New York because they were different scenes. New York was more arty and London was more sort of street, so I’d have to go, for the New York album, the first one by The Ramones (self-titled) even though they may be the least arty of the New York bands; and for the Bitish album it would have to be The Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks – their one and only proper album – because it’s everything that punk rock should be.

SL: So when you said that the New York scene was more arty, can you explain that?

PJ: They were coming from a different direction, a lot of them were into the art school scene. The New York punks of say 1975/’76 scene were reading poetry and were a lot more intellectual whereas, the British punks were just kids hanging out in the streets with nothing better to do and it was a more visceral thing, they were expressing their anger. There was a lot to be angry about back then. We were both too young to remember it all but I do remember the vibe.

SL: Of course around that time there were also still a lot of hippies going around with bell-bottom flares and long hair too.

PJ: Yes, I remember my mum trying to make me wear bell-bottoms and I refused to go out in them until she got the sewing machine out and made them into straight legs!

SL: Were you ever a punk yourself, did you adopt that image?

PJ: Well I never really considered myself as a punk, I was into all different things, because as far as I’m concerned it’s all just rock and roll. I don’t like to pigeon-hole mysef or differentiate between different types of rock and roll because it’s all good. But when I was a teenager I used to wear ripped jeans and boots and my hair was coloured. We used to walk into Boots and they had canned, coloured  hairspray that washes out, so we just used to walk in on a Saturday and choose the colour we wanted, spray it on and all just walk out again. One weekend we’d all have green hair, the next we’d all have pink hair and my hair style was kind of like ’50s rock and roll goes punk; it was shaved at the back and sides but sticking up on top, kind of like punked up rockabilly. This was in Medway and we dressed kind of rockabilly but with punk mixed in and this was in the ’80s when there were bands playing this mix of rockabilly and punk, called psychobilly which is still going now.

SL: How has the punk era influenced bands of today?

PJ: Well I think it’s influenced them in the same way that ’50s rock and roll and ’60s garage bands influenced punk; there’s people out there that try and put on a punk attitude, even if most of us can see straight through it but there’s lots of bands out there, kids playing, that if you put them in a time-machine and sent them back to 19’76, they wouldn’t sound out of place. Check out The Ten O Sevens from Harrow, perfect 1976 punk band but they’re teenagers. They’re picking up the things they like from the past and doing their own thing with it. I had someone say to me “oh, but it’s all nostalgia isn’t it…” and I said, “Well you know it’s not nostalgia if they weren’t even born at the time”

SL: Good point. And what about bands like Green Day, they’ve popularised the genre haven’t they?

PJ: To give them their due, Green Day did start out on the underground punk scene and they added some pop elements to their sound and they’ve done really well for themselves. Not my sort of thing but I’m not going to knock them for it.

SL: The punk movement of the 1970s in the UK was an anti-establishment protest at the state of the country, do you think that’s still  relevant today?

PJ: Oh yeah, definitely, I mean especially now with developments of the last week or so, but the thing is, with ’70s punk, it wasn’t only a reaction in that way, I mean there had been a reaction earlier than that to the bland music that was around and from the late ’60s when the psychadelic music started going prog (progressive rock) with all these bands doing ten minute guitar solos and bringing out primitive (though hugely expensive) forms of synthesisers, making music that kids in their bedrooms couldn’t replicate, putting on huge stage shows. Johnny Rotten didn’t wear a T-shirt saying “I hate Pink Floyd” for no reason. There were bands in the early ’70s that were going against the grain, reacting to all that over blown crap. You had Third World War and then the Hammersmith Gorillas, people like The Hollywood Brats – all in the pre-punk period but sounding as near to punk as you could get. And of course not forgetting that Dr Feelgood was a huge influence on the punk scene of both sides of the Atlantic, with their back-to-basics rock and roll/rhythm ‘n’ blues sound.

SL: Ok, last question: Malcolm McLaren died recently, to what extent do you think did he and Vivienne Westwood shaped the punk movement in the UK?

PJ: I think they shaped it a lot less than they would like to think. I think they shaped it more in terms of image than sound. I mean McLaren had been involved with The New York dolls many years prior to that so he knew what the sound was all about but I think the sound that The Sex Pistols came up with was partly down to him but not entirely. I think the clothing styles were down to McLaren and Westwood but that’s not neccessarily a good thing. If you look at what they were wearing before the fashion came in and they were all dressing the same, all the punks just looked like they did because they had no money; ripped jeans, shirts with holes in and if they didn’t they would rip them so that they looked different, I mean they were going against the mainstream. The ripped T-shirt and mohair jumper that Johnny Rotten wore was just a rip off of Richard Hell, (who had a great record called Blank Generation which was a total rip off of a ’50s record called Beat Generation). All I’m saying is that you wouldn’t have seen a punk with a mohawk during the first wave of punk rock.

Richard Hell was from New York and was one of the first people to play at CBGBs. I think it was his band that were looking for a place to play and they came accross this country and bluegrass bar and told the owner that they were a country band, got the gig and then the owner found that his bar was getting much busier with all these punk kids so he kept it going and you then had bands like Blondie and The Stilletoes and The Ramones and so on and so on.

SL: Thanks PJ so much for your time and insights.

Showcasing Warhol’s distinctive style in a vivid and comprehensive collection, Olyvia Fine Art exhibits Andy Warhol: Portraits which runs untill the 6th of June 2010. Featuring unique paintings and prints that many may have never seen before and test screen films from 1964 -’66, including Eddie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed and Nico.

Unidentified Woman (Lady Rosenthal’s sister)1980, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas 101.6cm x 101.6cm portrays the subject in a doll-like manner with exaggerated features; cherry-red lips and ‘Liza Minelli eyes’ give it – and many others included – a cartoon-like feel which Warhol championed and became an integral part of the pop art movement which Warhol instigated.

Never one to shy away from controversy, Andy Warhol’s work is as popular now as he ever was, with an original print selling recently for 72 million. If you can’t quite stretch to those kind of heady figures, Warhol prints are easily accessible the many greeting cards on sale. Despite dying over 20 years ago, his influence and legend live on. Having held court to many famous fashion designers including Yves Saint Laurent and Diane Von Forstenberg, I’m sure it would’ve pleased Andy to see his prints re-born in sartorial form like this Versace evening gown from 1991, one of his most celebrated,  held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Anyone that saw Alistair Sooke’s Modern Masters on BBC 1 last week will know that in the mid ’60s, Warhol gave up on painting and began managing The Velvet Underground, introducing them to the German singer, Nico, who featured on their first album which Andy famously designed the peelable, banana cover for. It has been said that through his silver Factory he influenced the punk scene of the 1970s and I will explore the routes of this musical genre in depth next week with PJ Crittenden including sound clips.

A precursor to celebrity magazines such as Hello and OK, Warhol started Interview magazine in the late ’60s, concentrating on movie stars, in a bid to be invited to movie premiers and other hot celebrity-filled events. Starting life as ‘inter/VIEW’ the interviews were unedited and often rambled on for pages and pages and it fufilled his need to immerse himself in celebrity but believing everyone would have their 15 minutes of fame, he said, “I tell everyone they can be on the cover of Interview”. This view was immortalised by David Bowie in his song, Andy Warhol with the line: ” I’d like to be a gallery, put you all inside my show…”