Dire Straits legend on art, painting and Knopfler magic
Red Stratocaster painting by John Illsley. Image courtesy of John Illsley.
From his humble council flat in Deptford, John Illsley co founded Dire Straits, one of the most successful bands in history. With Mark Knopfler, he would stay with the record-breaking act throughout its entire existence, helping craft some of music’s most iconic tunes.
He played his bass guitar in front of millions the world over, sold countless albums and in 2018 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Here, John Illsley speaks about his lifelong passion for art and the paintings that have graced top galleries in Europe and America. “Painting has always been part of my life” he tells me” but life with The Straits was all encompassing, it was after 1994 when Dire Straits called a stop to touring that I rediscovered painting.” I catch Illsley shortly after his return from a tour in Holland which marked Brothers In Arms’ 40th anniversary.
HG Was Holland all that you expected?
JI Holland was really great, we did four concerts over there and I had the full band, six people including myself in the band. I had two fine guitarists Scott Mckeon and Adam Chetwood, I now have a lovely group of musicians that I can work with.
HG I saw your band live, it is amazing, your singer Hannah, guitarist, Scott, Keyboard player Steve Smith and percussionist Karlos Edwards.
JI Karlos is a new addition to the band, very inventive and creative. Hannah my backing singer is a beauty, she’s actually a songwriter in her own right, has been playing with me now for six-seven years. I’ve spent years on the road with lots of different people, it’s very important that you can travel, have breakfast and lunch together every day, you have to get on as a unit, you have to understand that everybody sometimes needs space.
HG You are used to long tours from Dire Straits of course but a lot has changed since the band called it a day
JI Things have definitely changed, when we were growing up you filtered out the music that you weren’t interested in and that you were not touched by, people do the same today in a sense but with 50-60 000 new tracks released daily on Spotify alone, there’s simply too much to take in
HG You still tour of course but at a slower pace which leaves you time to paint – when did you first discover art?
JI It stems from the influence of my art teacher at school who really opened my eyes to art, I was a teenager when he took several of us to London to see the Pierre Bonnard exhibition, an artist I didn’t know. I just walked around the gallery with my teacher and got a really positive vibe from looking at these pictures, it had the same effect as music – it made me feel something emotionally and why art was so important – this started a long love affair with art, and to this day, when I go into a gallery I love the feelings that come off the paintings. Later on I wanted to see what it would feel like to create my own art, try to be me, it’s a most difficult thing – finding your own voice. It takes awhile to find who you are with a piece of charcoal, oil paint or acrylic, whatever it may be. I found it took me years to finally think, ‘this is me now, what you’re creating is actually you – you’ve begged, borrowed, looked at other artists work, but now you’ve actually done something that you can claim as all you.’
HG When you paint, do you sometimes feel that you are actually re relieving something in a way, like something subconscious?
JI I do – it is a very strange thing to try and put into words
HG When the painting is a genuine expression of yourself it strikes a chord. I think Van Gogh is probably the ultimate in this respect because his art is such a direct expression of his inner psyche.
JI Absolutely. I’ve read quite a bit of what he’s written about his struggles – without his brother he probably wouldn’t have been able to survive. His desire to tackle a landscape or portrait in a way that was utterly unique is so powerful, it took time for people to accept and recognise it
HG Sir Christopher Frayling argues that most of our perception of art is governed by Hollywood’s depiction of famous artists – what most people know of Van Gogh for example comes from the 80 or so films made about him
JI This is unfortunately the influence of certain powers, who control how people think and feel about things, it’s only in a few hands too, you see these enormous streaming channels buying up each other. It reminds me of when the big record companies were getting bigger and bigger, buying up all the smaller ones, now you’ve only got four or five. This directly impacts how people express themselves and their ability to share their music and art with the world
HG In one of your interviews you recommended the relatively unknown Brett Whitley
JI He was an Australian artist who died about 30 years ago, he dabbled in heroin a little too much. He managed the dance between abstraction and illustration not easy- Francis Bacon apparently said unless you’re taking a photograph all art has a degree of abstraction.
HG Some of your paintings show this dance, the guitars for example
JI The guitar is an aesthetically appealing object, it’s quite sexy really – the shape of it, the curves. One day in the studio I was getting a bit frustrated and just couldn’t pull this painting round, so I left it. In my art studio I keep a piano and a couple of guitars just in case I feel like playing. I was looking around for inspiration, my Red Stratocaster was on a stand and I thought, ‘I’ll just paint that.’ I did the red one, then a blue one, of course Fender never made a blue Stratocaster, and then I thought, ‘I’ll get a couple of other guitars out of the cupboard – that’s how I ended up doing the series of guitar paintings.
HG Some of your guitars are highly realistic and clearly defined, others are a touch abstract – it’s the dance you mentioned earlier.
JI I suppose that’s true, what I wait for in any painting is for the painting to say to you, ‘you’re finished here, please don’t put any more paint on, leave me alone’ It’s a difficult thing to put into words but you know when a piece is complete. I’ve only got a couple of the guitar paintings left, most have been sold or given away.
For my paintings, I use fine linen canvases, as it seems to deal with the paint better, I’m not keen on the coarse ones, which Francis Bacon used, he used the back of the canvas I believe as opposed to the front.
HG What about Two Young Lovers?
JI That’s me trying to show the deep intimacy of a couple making love. So, they are intertwined – they’re almost one in a sense, which is what happens when you’re in that kind of situation.
HG Tell us about Grace
JI I was listening to Jeff Buckley, Tim Buckley’s son, who did an album called Grace. I just played it over and over and over again while I was painting in the studio. So I thought, well, I have to call the painting Grace because that’s what was in my head with all the music swirling around in it. Music is an important part of the painting process. I don’t paint in silence. I always have some music playing. ZZ top, Vaughn Williams, Strauss’s four songs with Jesse Norman singing.. It depends what’s playing and the music can influence what you’re trying to create. Sometimes it’s a good combination, sometimes it’s irritating, but I would say that when you’ve got ZZ loud in the studio, you tend to get more rough with the canvas. The whole process is about letting yourself go – don’t think, just let things just drift through you,I am exploring in a way to see what happens.
HG Did you manage to paint at all during the hectic Dire Straits years?
JI I had some moments in the odd hotel room but it was all pretty elementary stuff and I didn’t really have the time to immerse myself until we called it a day in 93-94. I’d always wanted to go back to art, so I thought ‘I’ve been a musician for many years and probably will be a musician for the rest of my life, but now I want to paint. It took about eight years before I was offered an exhibition. A friend of mine who was married to a private dealer in London came down to visit me and asked to see the studio. I told him that I have a few things on the go, and that the painting he was looking at was not quite finished. He looked at it and said, ‘that is finished and I’d like to buy it.’ And I said, ‘you’re a mate, you can have it’, he insisted on paying for it explaining that ‘it’s very important when you sell your first piece of work that there’s some money being put down on the table.’
About three weeks later, I’m walking down the street in St. James’s in London, and I saw his wife who was the private dealer, and she told me that the painting is hanging above the fireplace in the living room in their London flat. She visited me in the studio and she offered me a show. I did three or four London shows, also one in New York and Sydney.
HG Seems like painting is a major part of your life
JI I love it, come the new year I shall go back into the art studio I’m really looking forward to it go in there and get the fire going, take the dogs for walk, come back in and get working and I’ll be in there for four or five hours, I’ll do three or four days on the trot, come out pretty exhausted and then go back in again next week. I’m very fortunate to be able to do these things.
HG You said that Mark Knopfler’s songs are like great paintings that you don’t mind seeing/listening to time after time – which master painters still captivate you?
JI There are too many to mention here but some of the abstract expressionists De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Kline, Jackson Pollock and of course Brett Whiteley have influenced me a lot. In a way I see Picasso as the Bob Dylan of art and Matisse as the Leonard Cohen of art. The sheer nerve of Picasso to just cut through and do what he wanted anytime he felt like it, he just didn’t give a monkeys.
That’s what art is – an exploration, a journey that can take you anywhere. You don’t go into the studio thinking this is what I’m aiming to achieve over the next few sessions – you don’t mind if the manner in which you paint goes on a different track altogether, just as long as it feels natural and it flows. Its an uncertain journey in which one very easily arrives at the opposite of which was intended – you might start with thinking about Puglia in Italy and then you end up thinking about a street in London – it’s an uncertain journey and it will remain an uncertain journey till the day you die, that’s what true art is.