McCartney Paintings
Christine
for art premiere
BONN, Germany - Former Beatle Paul
McCartney has shunned the art
meccas of London and New York and
chosen an obscure town in Germany
for the first exhibition of his
paintings.
McCartney visited Siegen, an industrial town 60
miles east of Bonn, Tuesday to put finishing
touches
to the exhibition of 70 oil and acrylic paintings
ahead
of Friday's opening.
Just over a year after the death of his wife
Linda,
McCartney will unveil his work at Siegen's Lyz Art
Forum away from the intrusive eyes of the
London/New York art-pack.
"At this stage it is not planned to take the
exhibition
on tour, this is a kind of test run," Wolfgang
Suttner,
the head of Siegen-Wittgenstein's cultural events
office, told Reuters Wednesday.
"McCartney said he wanted to come to Germany, as
he thinks the public here understand art, and he
didn't want to go straight to London as he could
have done."
Getting to this point alone has taken five years
of
persistence by Suttner, as McCartney has always
been very coy about his talent as a painter.
"It's embarrassing really. If there is something
I've
always wanted to be, it's a really good painter,"
McCartney said in a rare interview last year with
British newspaper The Guardian.
Siegen is also the birthplace of Flemish artist
Peter
Paul Rubens, although the official exhibition
website
(http://www.siegen-wittgenstein.de/kultur/)
says McCartney's style is influenced by the
American school of Abstract Expressionists, Pop
Art.
An official leaflet gives a taster, with paintings
called
"Big mountain face," "The Queen after her first
cigarette" (very sickly gray, green); "The Queen
getting a joke" (blue and smiling) and "A greener
Queen" (self-evidently green).
"Paul McCartney brings to painting the same humor,
enthusiasm and enjoyment that is present in his
music," McCartney biographer Barry Miles says in
the leaflet.
McCartney said of his work in the Guardian
interview: "I do funny little faces, landscapes,
seascapes and that. I'm not really qualified to
comment on what they're like, but my friends like
them."
Reuters
WEDNESDAY, APR. 28