Exploring the Identity of the Painter John Lowery in “Painting with John”

The trees in my paintings are unhappy, the flowers hate life. With these words, the artist John Lowery describes nature in his paintings, some of which he paints before us in his program Painting with John, produced by HBO.
The twelve episodes of the series are divided into two short seasons that extend at the same pace, despite the time difference between them. They were written, directed, and composed by former musician John Laurie, who abandoned the world of music and acting, and moved to the arts of drawing, after he had Lyme disease.
The title of the series suggests that we are on a date with an educational work on drawing, in which Laurie shares his experience as a painter with his peers who are lovers and professionals of drawing, and invites them to draw with him on his small table. The multi-talented artist quickly refutes that initial idea, opening his first episodes by blaming Bob Ross who once said that everyone could paint.
Not everyone can paint, not even live, if we want to sum up the thoughts of Laurie, who does not trust someone whose smile is “imperfect” after hearing real laughter in Thailand and Africa. The painter finds himself in the solitude of his mind and the forests, surrounded by what and who he loves, far from the hustle and bustle of culture and show-stopping worlds. He talks to the camera spontaneously, and sometimes he turns to his two friends, Nezrine and Anne-Marie, as his co-stars in acting, production, and housing. He tells us stories of his new human and reptilian neighbours, conversations about and from his past, conclusions he has made about life and art, and something in between those two too, as the camera catches the delicate strokes of his brush infusing color deep into the texture of paper, or ‘just good stuff’. From the Caribbean island that Laurie has recently moved to.

It is not fair to describe the biography of Painting with John, as it is a mixture between the real, the artistic and the imaginary, similar to his life itself. There are fragments and poignant situations that Laurie carefully selects from his personal life, along with many scenes imbued with a playful style, reaching the extent of riding paper horses in a charade whose heroes are Caribbean cowboys, or dancing for a long time on a platform that Laurie built in the open for the same purpose, or giving lessons about How to make potato guns and roll tires in a lush backyard. Playing with its intersections with artistic practices is a key to understanding the artist’s personality, and an entry point to living as an art form and escaping from all restrictions.
Laurie says his father waited for an important call just as his younger brother Evan decided to play Mighty Mouse. The call came at long last, but Evan refused to pass it on unless the caller acknowledged his new identity. The parents were not angry as expected. Being Evan Mighty Mouse seemed more important to them than the call. Lowry connects that incident with the artist’s and his supporters’ understanding of creativity with what is a permanent childish curiosity, and a validation of illusions that are incompatible with the journey of maturity. No matter our age, Laurie advises us to just have a little fun during the day.
In the first season, Laurie directs the drone camera himself, and it hits a tree and deviates from its target dozens of times until it finally catches up with it in the closing shot, which killed seven cameras that were destroyed before they landed. With this level of competence and seriousness, Laurie runs his series, and it appears as an experimental work in which there is madness in the character of the painter himself, who is the eternal child who finds similar madness in the company of Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch, which the trio translated into many joint independent works, including Coffee and cigarettes and Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Low Set during the golden age of the 1970s and 1980s, when Laurie and his brother Evan created the avant-garde band The Lounge Lizards, he was a pioneer of the American pop movement in New York.
With his voice that cuts through a tropical Caribbean night, and is very reminiscent of the antiqued throats of the ’80s rock days, Lowry recounts his memories as pointless chats, but manages to keep his anecdotes interesting and inquisitive as well. What he will say or do next is unpredictable, and his ability to turn the mundane of everyday life into pure pleasure or a powerful lesson, heightened by the contemplative effect of the plants dancing behind him or the rhythmic croaking of frogs from which Laurie draws most of the musical pieces used throughout the series, surprises us. To the stories of the seventy-year-old hipster are added the legends and poetic tales of the island as well, one of which is about a man who got drunk in a bottomless lake and died, which today is a hotbed for the islanders’ drunks. When the orange sun is swallowed up by the Caribbean Sea, Laurie prompts his viewers to say something poetic in describing the sunset, and then, in season two, begs them to stop sending poems.
Laurie does many things that he does not like, perhaps as an expression of the confusion of contemporary culture in its most turbulent moments, so he shaves the forest of hair in his ear after he sacrificed his handsomeness for the sake of humanity, he said. During the filming, he refers to the strangeness of talking to the camera as if we are talking to a person, stressing that those who are good at doing that must be sociopaths, until he asks his viewers at a strange and confusing moment to do him a favor and stop watching the broadcast of the episode.

Despite his tenacity in these situations, it would be hard to see Laurie’s intentions even in his most serious and measured hours, as he mixes color with water in his conversations. His paintings, whose titles suggest irony of some kind, such as: “They Have No Name for What It Is,” carry a lot of Lowry’s ideas and sense of humor. The same goes for many of the stories he tells throughout the series. As soon as we get used to his funny comments and his stinging sarcasm, he surprises us with emotional talk, infiltrating intimate and harsh spaces, led by Laurie with blows of his fast and turbulent feather, as if he was telling a story about the late Gore Vidal, who ignored Laurie when he helped him in He carried his huge bag at the airport, and another about Anthony Bourdain, who was killed by fame, all the way to his suffering from cancer years ago.

John Laurie lived an interesting life full of art, beauty, fun and many painful moments that Laurie overcomes with laughter and absurdity. His career assures us that creativity does not require superhuman skills or expensive tools. It is enough that his spirit is present in his works and stories, and even in his small dwelling, which resembles it in its chaos and simplicity. At 70, Lowry still has a lot to offer, and we’re waiting.