Ian Dury artwork goes on display in first solo show Jul 22nd 2013, 15:04
Late musician studied at Royal College of Art and designed album covers for Vera Lynn and Frank Sinatra
He was one of the most brilliantly original and confrontational musicians of his generation, so seeing the Vera Lynn and Frank Sinatra album covers that Ian Dury designed and painted is something of an eye-opener. As is a decade's worth of his art from the 1960s, most of which is little known and going on display for the first time.
"I think the public will be quite surprised," said Dury's daughter Jemima. "His art was enormously important to him, it informed everything – from the way he put words on the page to the way he created a persona."
Jemima, along with the former Clash manager Kosmo Vinyl and the graphic designer Jules Balme, have curated what is the first solo show for Dury, 13 years after his death from cancer aged 57.
It is being staged at the Royal College of Art (RCA) and funded from a variety of sources including members of The Blockheads, the band that Dury formed and fronted; the actor Andy Serkis, who played Dury in the 2010 biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll; and Robbie Williams.
There is also money from Demon Records, and around £10,000 came through a Kickstarter campaign that was backed by more than 200 fans – including £2 pocket money from one of the Blockhead's sons. "The response has been so amazing and so positive," Jemima said.
Dury spent three years between 1963 and 1966 studying painting at the RCA, of which he once said: "Getting in to the RCA was the only thing I've aspired to in my life." He tried to make his living through art but it was only friends and teachers who truly recognised his talents.
"In the time I knew him, he completely downplayed it," said Vinyl. "'Good enough to know I wasn't good enough' was one of his quotes – but [looking at his art] I kind of beg to differ."
He also got work as an illustrator and designed albums by Lynn and Sinatra, but he left visual art behind in 1971 and threw himself into music. "He had moved into a different headspace," said Jemima.
Vinyl said even if Dury had wanted to keep up with art, there was never the time. Dury had an incredible work ethic and achieved huge success quite late in life with his biggest hit, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, selling a million copies and knocking The Village People's YMCA off the number one slot in early 1979.
All this was achieved despite being disabled by polio when he was seven – something he said had toughened him up.
The show has paintings of some of Dury's pop cultural heroes, including Lee Marvin, Stan Laurel and the 1930s gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, on whom Dury wrote his RCA dissertation.
There will be much in the show to entertain diehard Dury fans, not least a work with the words "Honk Honk It's the Bonk" on it, which Dury re-used as a Blockheads refrain more than a decade later for the song Superman's Big Sister.
Then there is a painting Dury did to hang on the piano when the first band he formed, Kilburn and the High Roads, played gigs in the early 1970s. It was stolen, only to be found years later by a friend – in a junk shop on, appropriately, Kilburn High Road – who then took it into the Stiff Records offices, to Dury's astonishment.
Getting hold of the works has been one of the challenges. The family owns some examples of Dury's work and there have been loans from dealers and Christie's auction house. Many other pieces have emerged from friends, with four drawings coming to light only last Thursday when an ex-girlfriend got in contact to say she had bought them when Dury had no money, which was not an unknown experience.
"When I first knew Ian in 1977, him and Denise [his partner] were the first people I'd ever met that were broke and didn't seem to care," said Vinyl. "They were living off Marlboro cigarettes and doughnuts."
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