This week news broke that Eric Clapton shelled out $120,000 to buy twelve paintings by legendary graffiti artist Lee Quinones; each work depicts a shoplifter grabbing an album from the Seventies, including James Brown’s Sex Machine and the Isley Brothers’ Get Into Something. The guitarist’s apparent love of graffiti art dates back at least a decade, when he attended a London show that featured Quinones and fellow train-to-canvas artists Stash and Futura. Clapton bought a few pieces and commissioned the artists to paint guitars for his concerts. So when Quinones was looking to sell his collection, he sent e-mails to Clapton and other famous fans of his work, like Debbie Harry, the Beastie Boys and ?uestlove. But before he could fire off the next round to Jay-Z and Russell Simmons, Clapton responded. “He was the first. Like within ten minutes. He must have been online,” Quinones laughs. “He never even saw them in person and was like, ‘Lee, they’re mine.’”

This dirty dozen of paintings, as Quinones likes to call them, was inspired by his life in New York City in the Seventies. “I was painting all the time and to make money on the side, I was lifting records,” he says. “It fit into my agenda of lifting everything from coffee to paint. All I needed was paint and music to survive. I could live on water after that.”
Each painting depicts Quinones’ hands slipping one album into his jacket. “The paintings are a celebration of the times, musicians and those songs,” he said. “The album covers are meticulously reproduced because they were also beautiful pieces of art. These paintings are exploding with color and then have a ghostly image of my hand — a kind of skimpy drawing of my hand to symbolize that I had to be invisible in that store ’cause you knew you had to go back in and do it again.”

The series is currently on exhibit at New York’s PS1 until September 7th, when one of the cover subjects — Quinones won’t say who — will perform at the closing. After that, the paintings will do a tour of London, Paris and Japan before making their way to Clapton’s home.

“A short tour,” Quinones says. “I know he’s wanting for them. And I want him to have them. There’s only one or two paintings that I’ve created over the years that I knew would go to their rightful owners, people who will love them from the heart and soul like I did. I go to sleep at night thinking this series is in its rightful place with Eric.”

Here’s a list of the twelve albums in the collection:

Herman Kelly, Dance to the Drummer’s Beat
James Brown, Sex Machine
The Jimmy Castor Bunch, It’s Just Begun
Isley Brothers, Get Into Something
Baby Huey, Listen to Me
Yellow Sunshine, Yellow Sunshine
Babe Ruth, The Mexican
Lonnie Liston Smith, Expansions
The Futures, Castles in the Sky
Johnny Pate, Shaft in Africa
Dennis Coffey, Scorpio
The Incredible Bongo Band, Apache