Funkin’ Up Fine Art: The Psychedelic Visions of George Clinton
In 2019, George Clinton announced a farewell tour that was supposed to end with his retirement. Then the pandemic happened — and somehow, when everyone reemerged into civilization two years later, the funk legend had not only not retired, he had another profession: as a veritable, gallery-represented painter. He’d always been a fan of visual artists like Overton Loyd and the late Pedro Bell, who helped create the look and mythology of his pioneering bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Now, he says, the pandemic had allowed him to explore his own visual style. “I suddenly had time to work on that seriously,” says Clinton, 81. “It was a blessing. I wasn’t going to be bored.”
Earlier this winter, Clinton showed his work at an exhibition called “The Rhythm of Vision” at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles. (Incidentally, the Santa Monica Boulevard building that houses the gallery used to be a recording studio where he made music decades earlier.) His paintings feature novel motifs as well as some that longtime fans will recognize: Spaceships, aliens, and other themes from the P-Funk universe feel like an extension of the aesthetic that Clinton has cultivated since the 1960s. But painting is new for him, and that means it’s fun. “I feel like a little kid,” Clinton says. “Seven o’clock in the morning and I’m running down to the art room to come up with a new ‘hit record.’ ”
Many of the paintings are testaments to his ongoing fight to reclaim his own work. For many years, Clinton and his collaborators have been working to get back the rights to much of their catalog; when an old song’s ownership is returned, Clinton says, he plays it while he paints. One such work contains the legal phrase “There is no partnership in the ownership of the Mothership.” “I’ve been fighting over these things for the last 30 years,” he says with a tired smile.” So, I’ve been celebrating all of that and doing the art thing at the same time.”
He and Loyd — who also worked on some of the pieces in the exhibition — gave RS a virtual tour of some of Clinton’s artworks, sharing the ideas behind the images and the techniques used to create their final, funkified yet dignified forms.
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“Nuttin’ Butta Fly” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch This collaborative piece began with Clinton’s footsteps, which form the backdrop of the canvas; then he and Loyd explored what beings from other dimensions might look like, using acrylic, spray paint, pastel, and charcoal. The figure on the right was inspired by the imagery of the Dogon people of Mali, while the one on the left is “not nothing but a fly, he’s fly for real.” With “a lot of the paintings, I theorized that that’s going to be what’s happening in outer space,” says Clinton. “Virtual reality to reality to whatever new forms that they come up with once we get out there — this is going to be the backdrop to where we’ll be. What it mean, I don’t know. It just feels good.”
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In the Studio
Image Credit: Lynsey Weatherspoon/Redux Clinton at the Tallahassee, Florida, studio where he does much of his painting. His work is exceptionally colorful, as you’d expect — which makes it that much more surprising to know that he has been colorblind all his life. Clinton explains that he keeps his paints labeled and lets his life experience lead to some useful hacks. “I was a barber, so I know how to fade,” he says. “I can’t do it in color, but I can feel it in texture or tone. I’m looking at tones that fade in or out like a haircut. No matter what color it is.” What he would have expressed previously in lyrics and chords, he is now translating to a visual lexicon. “I do what I feel, what feels good to me,” Clinton adds.
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“K9 Perception” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch For many years, Clinton’s signature was famously a drawing of a dog. The same image persists in his visual work, showing up in several paintings in the recent L.A. exhibition. The dog takes on a slightly different air each time he appears: Maybe he’s in a tux with eyelashes, perhaps he’s in space, or he could be a hidden gem for you to find in the background of a busy canvas. But here, Clinton has him center stage. “That’s my favorite dog,” he says. “Canine perception, that’s a nose. He got a sniff thing going on. They perceive with their sense of smell. So I wrote, ‘On yo trail, sniffing your tail.’ Dogs be tracking and backtracking. That’s where he’s at. That’s my boy there.”
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“That Guy” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch This work showcases some of the unorthodox painting techniques that Clinton and Loyd have developed together, such as spraying varnish over wet paint and chalk. “It gives it texture,” Loyd says. “Wet paint starts looking really rough and cracks in these interesting ways when it dries.” A longtime commercial artist, Loyd has been part of the extended P-Funk family dating back to the Seventies. “What I like about George’s technique is he don’t have no rules,” he says. “This is the first person I saw that would mix watery watercolors or acrylic with pastel or dry chalk right on top of the water. Everything I think would turn to mud, he’s just mixing together like gumbo. I finally learned: If I get nervous about it, then that’s the thing we should be doing. It’s given me freedom.”
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“System Critical” (2021)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch Though he didn’t work on this piece himself, Loyd remarks that it has “chaotic colors and shapes that look like they’re going everywhere, but the composition is so strong that it’s appealing. You’re going to get lost. It’s adventurous.” When I compare the shadowy figures in the image to the characters from the Adult Swim series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Loyd falls on the floor and objects: “Don’t say that! Take that back, please.” Clinton, though, is laughing. “Oh man! I feel good now!” the singer says. “How many times have I said that I am trying to draw those three characters?!” Loyd relents: “If you want to hear someone laugh out loud, get him looking at that show.”
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“Got Dat Demic” (date unknown)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch Loyd and Clinton differ on when exactly they painted this piece. Loyd says it was during the pandemic, pointing to the gray tones in the background and the title, which he says comes from an imaginary drug-dealer character on the corner doling out his wares, saying, “Got dat ’demic, got dat ’demic.” But Clinton claims it was painted 20 years ago, when he and Loyd were just messing around. He says he was originally painting a character based on Snoop Dogg, and then “Overton came in and did the Basquiat-and-Andy Warhol thing, putting a serious dinosaur into an artsy-fartsy piece. Then you have a real story. Someone wants to know, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
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“Thangularity” (circa 2000)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “I was definitely influenced by the Dogon tribe masks, you can see that here,” Clinton says of this early piece. “But I put some alien eyes on the side. I don’t know how or why I did that. This is back when I first started trying to make sense out of painting.” He remembers a meeting around this time with Bob Abbott, a former art consultant who paints under the name Jerome Gastaldi: “He ‘art bullied’ a lot of our stuff — edited it and told you to get rid of the stuff you liked. It looked good when he finished, but damn. I had to get used to learning how to do that, but this was one of the early ones that worked out.”
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“We R Here” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “‘We Are Here,’” Clinton sings. “That’s one of our things we say when we hit the stage and the Mothership has landed and people be wondering what’s going on. We are here. We are aliens from Planet Sirius. We’re from the Dog Star, and that’s the spaceship that we landed on. The time for change is here, and we are here…Well, at least that’s what it did say before I painted over it.” This painting showcases a technique that Clinton calls the “gravity stroke.” Though it looks haphazard, he is meticulous in how he makes the dripping effect — shaking the canvas, bouncing it, waiting patiently as the paint travels — collaborating with a physical law to break the laws of fine art. “Sometimes I do it with spray paint over wet acrylic. It does its own kind of coagulation while it’s moving. You’re not supposed to, but I don’t know any better, so I get away with it.”
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“Gene Police” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “That’s the gene police,” Clinton says matter-of-factly. “No unnecessary slicing of the genes. I always think of the future laws they’re going to have with genetics — all the regulations that would come along with what you can and can’t design. Because people are going to have some weird designs of biological things if there ain’t no laws. You going to get some weird folks…. You’re going to have to have the gene police to keep you in order. You can mess around and make the wrong thing and this guy is going to show up on your doorstep.”
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“Babblin’ Kabbabie” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “That’s a friend of mine, he was my driver,” Clinton says. “He’s from Syria and his name is Louis Kabbabie. And he wanted to be a rapper, wanted to be a musician so bad from hanging around with us. So we called him Babblin’ Kabbabie. He was already in his fifties when he started rapping. He said to me one day, ‘Hey bro, do you think I could be funky?’” He marvels as he goes on: “He was the most unlikeliest rapper that you would ever see, to hear him talk. But people loved it! I had my son write raps for him, so when people see him rapping these slick rhymes, they were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ Next thing I know, he knew the whole five-minute run of Rakim’s ‘Follow the Leader!’”
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“Monolith” (2021)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “I’ve been into the Easter Island guys, the Moai,” Clinton says. “All kind of statues, and especially the ones that look like they was done before the pyramids and things. So I was trying to make up my own version of monoliths and big expressions.”
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“The Butterfly Effect” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch “I was feeling myself that day,” says Clinton. Along the bottom of the canvas, he developed his own equations and interpretations of binary code that could be “digital readouts from outer space.” He made shapes and put in some gravity strokes, but it all seemed disjointed to him until he added a butterfly in the center. “It all started making sense. It seemed like harmony,” says Clinton. “Just like in music. Once I realized the possibility of harmonies in colors — I can only do it in tones though, ’cause I’m colorblind. I can tell when something is really shiny and then most likely going to be yellow or gold or something. I did that here with shapes and lines until they started becoming pleasing, but there was no theory as to what it was. But then I put the butterfly in there and it kind of resolved it. To me, it seemed like, ‘Oh, here’s the lead singer.’”
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“Echoing the Obvious” (2022)
Image Credit: Joshua White/Courtesy Jeffrey Deitch According to Loyd, Clinton spends a lot of time doodling after music sessions. He’s constantly sketching characters and shapes, otherworldly and earthly beings. Then he makes hundreds of xeroxes of these images, knowing they’ll be used somehow. One day, Loyd started playing around and collaging some of Clinton’s doodles, eventually forming this piece. The names in the top right are a salute to Black artists new and old (3GP means 3rd Generation Parliament), serving as a roster of folks they saw via pandemic Zoom screens. Placed together, these names become a nod to the funk of Afrofuturism. “To me, Afrofuturism represents freedom, in the future and the now. And funk represents freedom,” says Loyd. “Freedom is free of the need to be free,” adds Clinton.