Paul McCartney Paintings

Paul McCartneys is not only a great recording artist, but he is a GREAT painter as well. He is a true artist. I enjoy his art very much, and I was extremely impressed that he can paint the way he can. I would place right up there among Picasso and Chagall. He's that good.

It's a joy to flip through this book of wildly inventive faces and colorful dreamscapes. There is a freedom and a vibrance to McCartney's paintings, that, like his music, can't help but draw you in and infect you with a buoyant kind of wonder.These paintings tear at the boundaries of what you think can and can't be done. They're appealing and yet completely unpredictable. In short, they are paintings from the same imagination that came up with both "I Will" and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" and then had the not-so-common-sense to put them back-to-back on the same record.McCartney is obviously setting the artist inside free with these bold, bright canvases. Whether this is great art, that is really a question that each pair of eyes must answer in its own way, in its own unique language.I for one am glad that McCartney has chosen to make his paintings public. I find these colorful canvases, and the artisitic courage that propelled them into being, quite inspiring.

Regardless of the high brow reviews of this book, I chose to purchase this book to see if this was another celebrity who found art and realized their celebrity could sell their art. Bottom line I had hoped that McCartney's personality would triuumph and his down to earth philoposphy would come through. Indeed it did and this is the first Unpretentious book on Art I have ever read. If anyone has the desire to paint, draw or create but is held back through social conditioninig this book is for you. McCartney albeit through interviews and ghost writers tells how he himself freed himself from his own perfectionist procrastination mode and at the age of 40 painted. What resulted I found to be liberating in the way that in his celebrity circle of friedns he learned from William De Kooning how to "kill the canvas" and get over the fear of standing in front of a blank canvas. Additionaly McCartney goes onto explain his creative process for his paintings again influenced by De Kooning. He discussed how he would write a friends name on a canvas or a sketch or just a smudge of paint and see what stimulated his creative enery to produce and be led by creativity instead of coming to the easle prepared with a pre-conceived idea. McCartney never pretends to be a De Kooning or indeed a high brow artist. He comes across as someone who enjoys the process and output that art offers. Through his own conditioning he is also seeking the feedback for his efforts, regardless of the technicalities I for one see his work as inspirational and has encouraged me to go and "kill the canvas" myself.

I finally got over my block about not understanding modern painting by deciding that if it said something to me, attracted me in some way, then it didn't matter if I had read the explanatory treatise or not. At least two thirds of these paintings speak to me. The paintings will take you immediately out of the territory of the realistic, and sometimes beyond the land of representation. There are a number of pictures of faces, although they should probably not be called portraits (except the one of Linda McCartney)--they are pictures of types of people, or studies of emotion in color and line. Boxer lips, Scratch man, and several other face pictures are powerful, even disturbing to some people. There are three near-abstractions of beach landscapes that communicate the heat, the lassitude, and the mesmerizing colors of being at the beach wonderfully. There are two pure abstract paintings here, Red abstract, white moon, and Mr. Magritte's ruler, that are as good as any abstract I have seen or hope to see--the artist has temporarily *become* a color, found its root, and celebrated its awful purity. There is, as you would expect, a lot of humor in some of the paintings, and a lot of pure play: with the paint, with chance strokes that become people (David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Lennon), and with stylistic tricks recovered from the ancient Celts. It is a large visual world, and an intense one, that McCartney gives us. If all you know about the artist is "Yesterday", you will probably be surprised; if you know Standing Stone, you won't be surprised at all. If you like serious painting by serious painters, you will thank Willem deKooning for befriending this artist when he was a nervous beginner. He's a confident painter now, and a very interesting one.