7 hours ago
3
One thing is obvious about Ed Sheeran the painter: he doesn’t want to ruin his clothes. He paints in a white protective suit, photos reveal, as if paint was radioactive material or sewage. It’s a telling contrast with a real artist like Jenny Saville, who gets completely covered with paint like a naughty three-year-old, let alone Van Gogh, who ate the stuff.
Sheeran isn’t claiming to be one of those artists – is he? He’s in it for fun and charity. And his paintings have more energy than you’d think from the prissy hazmat suit. He must have moved about a bit, flicking and pouring the fizzy greenish blues, hot orange, lime, mixing them as if making cocktails.
But there’s a problem. While he has successfully defeated plagiarism claims regarding his songs, he would have no defence from the Jackson Pollock estate. His art is, let’s be polite, one big homage to the abstract expressionist painter who turned modern art on its head, showing that the body could see more than the mind with his hurled lines of flowing, tangled colours created in dance-like moves around horizontal canvases.
Sheeran is right to love Pollock. But it’s cocksure and stupid to think you can reproduce his genius on your days off because, you know, it looks pretty easy. It wasn’t. This is where celebrity artists get it wrong: they think art is fun but art is suffering and madness. A Sheeran splash may ape a Pollock splash but there’s no feeling, no truth. Pollock put his inside self on canvas, luring you into a web of mental suffering and triumph.
Abstract art like Sheeran’s gives all abstract art a bad name because it’s based on the dumb idea that doing your own is a breeze. I have more respect for Ronnie Wood and Bob Dylan who attempt figurative paintings: you can mock but at least they take a risk in doing the kind of art people are quick to judge.
Sheeran’s art is a slick con job. In painting his light, meaningless abstract concoctions, he avoids proper scrutiny and dips a toe into art without putting himself on the line. What a pro, even when he is an amateur.
