They include an audacious riff on Picasso’s The Three Dancers with a naked Mick Jagger in full look-at-me strut as well as more gentle and calming pastoral scenes of the English countryside.
The question is: can Ronnie Wood finally give up the day job? He is a great guitarist, but how good a visual artist is he?
The public can decide for themselves from Friday when more than 100 works of art by Wood go on public display for one week only at Ashridge House in Hertfordshire. The early reviews from professional critics are, it’s fair to say, mixed.
“Yikes,” Paul Carter Robinson, the founder of Artlyst, told the Guardian. “These are frightening pastiches. Perhaps Mr Wood should stick to making music and not cross disciplines.”
Also off the Ronnie Christmas card list is Oliver Basciano, editor-at-large for ArtReview. He was particularly unimpressed with Wood’s take on Picasso’s Guernica.
“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.”
He said Woods had been paying “homage” to other artists for many years, “presumably in the assumption that the only reason he thinks people might be interested in Picasso or El Greco is that they’ve been anointed by a Rolling Stone. Rest assured, you can see the real thing in the National Gallery”.
Perhaps the Art Newspaper’s Louisa Buck would look more favourably on the work, old and new, of 73-year-old Wood who, with the house, has promised all ticket proceeds to the NHS?
“Ronnie is infinitely better at playing the guitar than playing with a paintbrush,” she said. “Only a rockstar ego would think that it’s OK to put himself and his band boogieing on down amongst the devastation of Guernica. And Mick as a Picasso dancer? Please, no. If he wanted to raise funds for the NHS why didn’t he do a gig?”
The Guardian’s Adrian Searle is slightly cheerier, calling Wood a fully paid-up member of rock music aristocracy. “The best one can say,” he continues, “is that Ronnie Wood’s paintings are livelier than Prince Charles’s watercolours, and he draws better than Margrethe, Queen of Denmark.”
Some of the works are “cheery, cheesy pastiches” but the Guernica is “misjudged and horrible” alas. “The citizens of Guernica were bombed and killed from the air. The Stones were only ever bombed on drugs.”
If Wood’s people do end up reading this out to their boss perhaps they should start at this point: the views of the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, who finds Wood’s nature scenes positively “Hockney-esque”.
“It’s impossible to separate a rock star’s art from their music,” he added. “If Bono painted the Mona Lisa it would seem suddenly hollow but even the most banal picture of a midwest diner by Bob Dylan is interesting, somehow.
“The Rolling Stones are the sexiest and most demonic rock band in history and Ronnie Wood seems as entranced and appalled by their devilish antics as any bystander.”
Jones approves of Wood’s take on Three Dancers, a star of Tate Modern, but finds injecting the Stones into Guernica “a bit more random”.
He added: “Wood does not even need these personal references to make his art interesting. I wish I had his talent. The range and variety of these paintings reveals a fresh eye and bags of accomplishment. His nature scenes have a Hockney-esque pastoral calm. He might make a landscapist if he wasn’t haunted by those dark satanic riffs.”
Ronnie Wood x Ashridge House runs 21 to 27 August
