Catalogue Essay
David L. Shirey
I
t would require some cosmopoietic creator to upstage the Rolling Stones. For decades they have occupied the musical empyrean, shaking the world with their sonorous supremacy and their refulgent theatrical spectacularity. Essaying to best them at what they do best would be a fatuous exercise in toplofty otherworldliness. And yet in his own idiosyncratic way, one of their own, a Rolling Stone, has done just that. The guitarist Ron Wood has managed to upstage Mick, Keith, Charlie and even himself without intentionally setting out to accomplish such a Sisyphean aim. Yet what could he do to relegate to downstage a group that has endowed with another dimension and meaning a proverbial expression we employ to describe those who lead unsettled, vagabond lives? He has painted and penned, chronicled and configured his fellow musicians and demonstrated with the unassailable authority of his art that his pictorial vision triumphs over the incandescent celebrity and the venerable fame of the group. No one can deny that the rocker-adulators, the gawkers of glamorati and the other diverse votaries of this Parnassian musical group will experience a frisson of recognition in the pigmental presence of their idols. Yet, if these same people possess an appreciation for the pulse and passion of art, its nonpareil magic and mystery, and its ability to thrust us into another sphere of experience, they will find themselves more transported by the ascendancy of the work than by the identity of those the art represents. From this restricted point of view, one could say that Mr. Wood is a visual artist who plays a brilliant guitar rather than a guitarist who makes remarkable art. Known to himself and only to
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