You don’t need an art degree to paint the great American landscape. Instead, look no further than Bob Ross, the open-shirted, dulcet toned, 1980s TV artist, whose oil on canvas tutorials have seen a dramatic resurgence in popularity in recent years. The late painter’s instructional videos have amassed tens of millions of Youtube views, but also stand as time capsules, harking back to an increasingly remote era of participatory television. Reminders that, in the age of on-demand drama and bingeable documentaries, the “here’s one I made earlier” format seems, sadly, to be fading away.
However, Channel 4’s Monday night TV show, Grayson’s Art Club, is a valiant shot in the arm for the genre – and a refreshing antidote for those suffering the lockdown blues. Over a six-part series, ceramicist Grayson Perry vows to take viewers on a “journey of art discovery”, asking the general public to send in their own paintings, sculptures, and textiles to be considered for an end-of-series exhibition. Peppered throughout are interviews with celebrity guests, other notable artists, and glimpses of Perry’s own creative process, as he makes a new piece each week alongside the audience.
Each week brings a different theme. The most recent, last Monday, was fantasy, and prompted submissions ranging to the exquisite to the baffling, including a painting of a coronavirus molecule as a brooding planet in the night sky, an army of clay figurines which included an evil Rhinoceros called Boris, and a man wearing a bright red curtain as a headpiece. Episodes one and two, themed around portraiture and animal art respectively, yielded an immaculate drawing of a Shiba Inu, a clay sculpture of the UK chief medical officer Chris Whitty’s head, and a portrait of Perry himself painted entirely in soy sauce, with added noodles for hair.
Perry’s own weekly artworks, which are conceived, planned, and put together on camera, are both educational and motivating – a sort of creative voyeurism which galvanises the viewer to have a go. He confesses, somewhat encouragingly, that he is outside of his comfort zone drawing a portrait of his wife, Philippa. Nevertheless, he advises armchair portraitists, do not start with the important bit. “Get into your rhythm, and then you do the eyes,” he says. “You don’t do the eyes in the first half an hour.”
Perhaps even more insightful are the segments with other famous artists. Sir Anthony Gormley, the sculptor behind the Angel of the North, gave the audience a fleeting look at his notebook, from which he says all of his ideas come. Redoubtable chain smoking painter Maggi Hambling relayed what she calls the “most important thing anybody has ever said to me … to make your work your best friend, so that you can go to it whatever you’re feeling – whether that’s bored, happy, randy, whatever.” It feels like the sort of advice from the great and good of contemporary art that primetime television would struggle to offer in normal times.
At first glance then, the inclusion of celebrity guests seems like something of an outlier. A strategy, perhaps, to draw in extra viewers whose artistic curiosity begins and ends with the collective oeuvre of Noel Fielding and Keith Lemon. But that too brings a pleasant surprise in the form of comedian Joe Lycett, whose portrait of the seemingly omnipresent Chris Whitty, though imprecise, is an instant hit. He admits later that his approach, rather than trying to produce a perfect likeness, is “to just sort of go for it”.
And here Lycett hits on an important point: that creativity is as much, if not more, about the process rather than the end product. “We worry so much about the thing being excellent and the finished thing,” he says, “and actually if we just let all of that go… The stuff we’d get done!” In a world where even art has been infiltrated by the on-demand economy – we can now watch any film, read any book, and even hire a faceless freelancer in practically any discipline at the tap of a screen – this is more radical than it might initially seem.
Indeed it does, after all, go against everything that has been drilled into us since school: that if you are no good at something, give up. As life subsequently speeds up, it is easy to forget that to make something we must not fear failure, and Perry seeks to remind us of this. “Any kind of creative activity, we have to be open and be prepared to fail, and put our heart on our sleeve,” he says. “These are difficult things for us to do sometimes.”
Of course, Grayson, whose own artworks made on the show never seem to fail, might very well say that, and with submissions competing for a place in an eventual exhibition the ostensibly humble message could be construed as disingenuous. For many – especially those who have found lockdown to be even busier than normal life – it may be more of a quixotic ambition than a realistic goal.
That does not make it any less true, especially during times of hardship. “A real relationship with making art can be an awfully good thing in times when we’re struggling,” Perry continues. “Creativity, it’s a way of dealing with what’s going on in your life, and it operates on a level that we don’t always access easily in our day to day relationships.”
In this capacity, the show becomes about more than the artists it showcases. More even, than just a call for the public to join in and have a go: it is a meditation on creativity itself. Where there was once Bob Ross, whose TV show was aptly named The Joy Of Painting, there is now Grayson Perry, stepping in as the nation’s lockdown art teacher – and the homework is clear. “Get painting, get portraiting,” he surmises at the end of the first episode. “It’s good for you.”
