DAVID OXTOBY: CELEBRATION OF AN ERA

Marco Livingstone



For nearly 50 years David Oxtoby's paintings and drawings have been as married to their rock'n'roll subject matter as Cézanne's were to the Mont Sainte-Victoire or Toulouse-Lautrec's were to the Moulin Rouge dance hall. While the art world has no problem with such a singleminded pursuit when it concerns a high-minded motif such as the grandeur of Cézanne's Provençal landscape, or the impeccable historical pedigree of the still-life subjects returned so insistently by Morandi in his exquisite arrangements of bottles, the same latitude has not always been accorded to artists like Oxtoby who have immersed themselves in areas of popular culture. As Oxtoby remarks of his work, 'It has always been walking the tightrope between the two areas. Back in the sixties, if you listened to rock'n'roll you were considered a bit of an idiot, and if you painted it, that was even worse.' But like all art, Oxtoby's work demands to be appreciated on its visual merits, not just as an adjunct to its subject matter.

The discomfort caused in certain quarters by Oxtoby's pictures has been compounded by his refusal to indicate any distance between himself and the musicians who have served as a lifelong inspiration: there is plenty of humour in his art, but not a trace of irony or condescension that would indicate that he is operating on a loftier plane than the people he is portraying. Even by comparision with other paintings of rock musicians produced within the Pop Art movement, of which Oxtoby can be counted a somewhat reluctant member, the overriding sincerity of his identification with his sources produces a completely different frisson. Warhol's screen-printed pictures of a gunslinging Elvis against a silvered background insist on the unattainability and glamour of Presley's image; the paintings of The Beatles, Bo Diddley, The Everly Brothers and many other pop groups by Peter Blake, based on photographs or incorporating photographic material as collage elements, are self-evidently motivated by affection, but neverthless maintain the perspective of the fan and consumer.

The great originality of Oxtoby's approach has been to use his art as a way of creating a visual equivalent to the music he loves, to immerse himself in its spirit and allow it to fuel his imagination, his sense of colour and form. Although he has repeatedly demonstrated a great knack for capturing likeness, he is less concerned with the accuracy of a rock star's features than he is with conveying a characteristic stance or mood that brings to life the essence of that person: the intensity of Chuck Berry's slouching, bow-legged duck-walk in Roll Over, the energy causing him to burst from the confines of the framed rectangle; not just the brashness, but also the subtlety, gravitas and inwardness of his friend Jimi Hendrix as a god or primitive idol in Voodoo Chile (Slight Return), compared to the buoyant, relaxed, dreamlike quality of a mid-sixties Bob Dylan in a painting titled Tom Thumb's Blues. The variety of moods exhibited by these pictures is remarkable. The portrait of Bill Haley called Birth of the Boogie contains one of the most outrageously corny, but still funny, visual jokes in the panel representing the film, Blackboard Jungle, that brought him to international attention in the mid-1950s; it also has one of the most sophisticated visual puns in the decision to bolt together separate canvases with short metal bars that look like the pick-ups of an electric guitar. A similar literal-mindedness is evident in Wall of Sound, a portrait of Phil Spector: his impassiveness as a producer of booming pop 'symphonies for the kids' is demonstrated by the violent contrast between his shadowy, still figure in a range of browns (his rallying cry was 'back to mono') and the flying shapes in brilliant primary colours that describe with an amusing directness the 'River Deep, Mountain High' of his Ike and Tina Turner hit.

Having bought a house in Clapham in 1979, Oxtoby made a conscious decision to withdraw from the gallery system and to retreat into near total reclusiveness so that he could concentrate on producing an extended series of pictures that pay homage to the music he grew up with during the 1950s and 1960s: 'an era', as he points out, 'when you could be eminently successful without making money.' Since then he has considerably loosened his technique out of an ambition to recreate the emotion, dynamic movement and raw power that characterise the best and most vital of that music. This is not as easy a task as it may sound, for it has involved unlearning or setting aside many of the devices on which he had previously relied. A project that he thought would take him two years has now occupied him for almost thirty with many of the pictures abandoned, destroyed or remade until he arrived at a version that captured the freshness and vigour he wanted. From all this production he has arrived at 17 completed paintings and 83 works on paper. A single finished painting might be the result of as many as ten previous experiments.

Where Oxtoby's pictures were once meticulous in their fidelity to appearances, they are now much more reliant on abstract shapes, different keys of pure colour at high volume and even a wilful crudeness from which a dynamic charge explodes. They now have in them a stronger element of Expressionism than Pop Art, but Oxtoby makes use of the heritage of 20th-century art - including such unlikely, not to say contradictory, bedfellows as Cubism and Abstract Expressionism with a strong element of primitivism - with the same freedom that he admired in the synthesis of musical styles from which rock'n'roll and later rock were forged. 'It's right at the beginning of rock'n'roll,' observes the artist, 'where everything was a cobbling together of different styles and forms.' Even as a student, Oxtoby had sought to play with dissociated styles within a single picture, all somehow working together through the mere fact of coexisting on the same canvas. But where he once tended to juxtapose different styles rather carefully and selfconsciously, in the recent work he has been prepared to risk all by embodying those styles, really throwing himself into them, rather than simply making reference to them. This very rawness and sense of uncontainable energy, which results often in a deliberate clash of idioms and in the fragmentation of the rectangle of the single canvas, paradoxically becomes the basis for a new and unexpected sophistication.

Oxtoby has always made use of photographic source material, but even in the work of the late 1960s and 1970s documented in the book Oxtoby's Rockers he went beyond straightforward illustration by taking great liberties with the promotional material and action shots of musicians on stage, often combining several different sources within a single picture and letting his visual fantasy take him to a promised land of his own. He has always worked on the premise that if a single photograph said everything, there would be no point in copying it; he prefers the idea of 'working through them, not accepting things as they are.' Now such methods, cranked up to a decibel level that would be outlawed in certain venues, have come to dominate to such an extent that the period photographs still referred to by Oxtoby are nothing more than a starting-point for his own journey back into the music, and back into the art.

Marco Livingstone

Bradford Regional College of Art, Rag Ball. Back row (left to right): Peter Kaye, Tony Gill, Unknown, David Oxtoby, Roderick Taylor; Middle row: (left to right): Brian Garforth, Andrew Rose, effigy of David Hockney by David Oxtoby, David Hockney, Bernard Woodward, Sybil Front row: Jane Fawcett, 1954

David Oxtoby in his studio © Mary McCartney