David Oxtoby Catalogue extracts from British Pop, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain, 2005/06
by Marco Livingstone:
Although Oxtoby came to Pop a little later than most of his fellow artists, and initially approached it through the rather oblique angle of his passion for jazz, he eventually embraced the terms of an art rooted in popular culture more tenaciously than any other artist. Little survives of his work of the 1960s, or even early 1970s, a situation not helped by the loss of four years’ work in a warehouse fire in 1979. Yet for nearly four decades now he has devoted himself almost exclusively to portraying popular musicians, from the originators of rock ‘n’ roll who were his first great passion through to the rock stars of the heavy metal era and beyond. The expressive, at times almost Expressionist, handling of paint and colour, and his passionate identification with his heroes, perhaps takes his work beyond the normal limits of Pop, with its generally cool or detached presentation. Oxtoby’s status within the history of the movement is therefore problematic: he either was never really a Pop artist in the sense that it applies to others, or he has been one of its most stubbornly loyal devotees. If someone were to organize an exhibition of Pop Art of the early 21st century, he would be one of the few artists who could legitimately claim a place.
At art school in Bradford, Oxtoby was an exact contemporary of David Hockney, who remains a lifelong friend, but before furthering his studies as a painter in London he worked for three years at various other jobs. These included not only manual labour but also work as a freelance commercial artist, involvement with the celebrated ‘Blackpool illuminations’ (displays of light at the most popular, and resolutely working-class, resort in the north of England), and spells as a scene-painter in the theatre. Oxtoby was in his teens when rock-and-roll music made its first appearance, and the fervour with which he embraced this new art form, and the teenage culture that came with it, was to affect him and mould his art for the rest of his life. By the mid-1960s when he made portraits of the jazz musician Charles Mingus, he was focusing on a wide range of current popular music as his preferred subject matter.
Peter Blake, six years his senior, had by this time already made paintings of such rock ‘n’ roll and pop musicians as Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, The Lettermen and The Beatles in a spirit of fan worship. Blake had dreamed of the possibility of creating a Pop Art for the masses that would be the equivalent of this favourite pop music, but only as one of many strands of his work. Oxtoby, by contrast, decided to devote his art almost exclusively to a celebration of the music he loved, and to continue doing so even into his sixties. He once listed his first music-inspired work as a Christmas card executed in 1947, at the age of nine, of a black Santa Claus playing the trumpet. With the fervour of the most avid record collector, he set about making a comprehensive visual document of the great popular musicians of the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. His subjects eventually included all the American rock’n’rollers (from Bill Haley, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis through to more obscure figures such as the Big Bopper), R’n’B and soul singers (such as Ray Charles, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett), the first megastars of hard rock (including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who and Led Zeppelin), great singer/songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, and even such glam rock stars of the 1970s as David Bowie. Although he included individual portraits of Lennon and McCartney, or of Elton John and Rod Stewart for that matter, in this encyclopaedic sweep, his overriding passion was for the Americans who redefined the terms of popular music in the 1950s. His complete dedication to this theme, at a time when popular music was still defined as a substratum of youth counterculture rather than as a subject worthy of examination in the context of high culture, earned him a curious position: befriended and collected by some of the rock stars he portrayed, he was largely neglected by the mainstream art world, which perhaps found his celebratory pictures too sincere and too boisterous for the hallowed spaces of art galleries and museums. Oxtoby nevertheless demonstrated great originality, in photographically-derived paintings, drawings, collages and etchings, in capturing the energy, violence and colourful style of the music that formed the soundtrack to his life.
A personal biographical statement by David Oxtoby
as published in the catalogue of British Pop, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Spain, 2005/06
Oxtoby describes his two paintings of Ray Charles and Charles Mingus
(both done in 1963)
which were included in the exhibition:
These two paintings were part of a series concentrated entirely on Ray Charles and Charlie Mingus, completed towards the end of my time as a student at the Royal Academy Schools. The whole series was displayed at my one-man Redfern Gallery exhibition, spring 1964, the first exhibition to play taped rock music throughout its extent, much to the consternation of the gallery staff. Some of the Ray Charles images were on view concurrently at the Nordness Gallery, Madison Avenue, New York (my first US solo exhibition). Mingus was introduced as a weighty contrast to the more flamboyant pictures of Ray. My Mingus works were easily the best paintings I produced at the Academy, succeeding on various levels, with a completeness unsurpassed until recent years. After my Redfern exhibition, Blues and Roots and Mingus Deep Blues were hung in the main Royal Academy Galleries as part of my diploma show summer 1964.
I started working on musical subject matter while studying graphics at Bradford College of Art during the fifties, completing three or more self-imposed record covers a day. These were actually small paintings (a fact I didn’t realize for many years) with lettering typeset in the Print Department and shoved on as an afterthought.
In 1957 I left Bradford and worked at various things until 1960, when I gained admission as a painting student to the Royal Academy Schools. After completing my three months’ life drawing stint (a compulsory probationary period), I started experimenting with all sorts of colour and different mediums, anything that I could get my hands on. They were not paintings as such, more expressions of pleasure, a sort of celebration at being there. But these creations formed the basis of my first one-man exhibition in 1963 at Gallery One, London. The works displayed included fairground scenes, movie-based images, anything and everything really.
At one point around 1962 I did a set of seven interlinked Presley paintings which were exchanged for records. These included a batch of Ray Charles albums. Although aware of his music through cover versions, I had never heard of Ray. Totally enamoured, I decided to produce a specifically Ray-based series worked around a misconceived theory of mine. I believed that during the late fifties and early sixties black American musicians on gaining popularity almost became white. (Of course I knew nothing about American ghettos where one could be enormously popular in black America while unknown in white America.) And I just assumed that these black musicians lived in a sort of limbo, a kind of negative area, which I endeavoured to express along with an appreciation for the music. I was changing black to white and white to black without ever referring to a photographic negative; I just made it up as I went along. (Visual information was a real problem anyway, because there were very few photographic references of rock musicians in those days.) So while the black part of my picture would become white, in the white (now transposed) I would introduce colour to represent sound. My most successful images were the deceptively simpler ones. Strangely enough, although it is perfectly obvious now, in the sixties we were as a nation visually impaired, uneducated, and people would look at my paintings asking what they were.
David Oxtoby, 2005
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