Before we got married, my wife Lindsey told me that, one day, she wanted to fill a house with my art. I was pretty taken aback. I mean, I have loved caricature all my life, but the idea that another person would be eager to festoon a home with it was a revelation.
When we were renting a place, she started quite small with the festooning. I painted a caricature of Edgar Allan Poe to hang over the fireplace, and Lindsey found a suitably ornate, black frame for him. He and his raven have presided melancholically but benignly over our evenings ever since.
Then Lindsey turned her eyes towards the coffee table…
“That thing drives me crazy. The black top shows every speck of dust. Could you paint something on it?” she asked.
I’m good with a brush, but I’m not the handiest fellow on Earth. So, it took me a while to figure out how to slap a piece of my art onto it without having to spend many preparatory hours in the garage with paint stripper and a sander. After a while, I approached a local printer and sign-maker, and together we figured out a solution.
We took a high-resolution scan of my Vincent Price caricature, and then my guy printed it onto hard-wearing adhesive vinyl. (This is the stuff that they used during the pandemic to make big social distancing stickers to be plastered onto the floors of shopping malls.) We bonded the vinyl to a sheet of metal, rested it flat on the piece of furniture, and hey presto: a unique coffee table. The best thing is that the top is very heavy so it doesn’t slide around, but it isn’t attached to the woodwork. So, if we ever grow tired of Price’s face, we can replace him with another caricature.
Now that we own a place, things have escalated. I’m like Lindsey’s dealer, these days. She shot-gunned a host of my work onto the walls of the downstairs loo, and then started looking for gaps elsewhere that she could fill with more faces.
I caricatured Indiana Jones (plus his dad) as one of her birthday gifts; and as presents for a couple of Christmases, I painted the Wizard of Oz cast, and the quartet of main characters from Seinfeld.
I even painted Keith Morrison, the silver-haired host of true-crime show Dateline, because Lindsey is a huge fan. This was done as a surprise while she was out of the country. In the background, I included a body under a sheet and behind police tape, but when I thought the piece was finished I noticed the stiff was much too small. It looked like a dead child, to be honest. This was a step too far, even for my wife, so I enlarged it with a few brushstrokes.
Lindsey’s crowning achievement is the entrance hall of our home. When we moved in, she had a vision of hanging an array of my black and white caricatures of celebrities from yesteryear, to lead the eye up the stairs. This notion is now a reality, and everyone who visits comments upon the results.
If you’re looking to enliven a blank space in your home, I would like to suggest, humbly, that you should consider commissioning a caricature. I love tailoring a painting to a client’s requirements, and they are always talking points.
Wall art is a personal thing. You can acquire impasto nightmares of multi-coloured trees churned out in some remote sweatshop; or ‘inspo quotes’ mass-printed onto distressed wooden panels, if you wish. But there’s a little bit of love in every brushstroke of a fine-art caricature. And it can become addictive.