John Pollex: The Hendrix Series
My latest series of ceramic screens are inspired by the song titles of the late great rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix. So many of Jimi’s song titles take me back to my days in London and the swinging sixties. I saw Jimi live at Earl’s Court and stood about ten feet away from him as he straddled his guitar on the floor and then set it on fire with lighter fuel. Prior to this he had played his guitar with his teeth and also behind his head. I seem to remember the event was billed as a ‘Love in.’ It was a very psychedelic event, much of it lost to me now in the purple haze of light shows, incense smoke and flower power. I listened mainly to the double album ‘Voodoo Child’ as I worked on the pieces for this show, often stopping to wrap a head - band around my hairless head before picking up my broom handle guitar and imitating Jimi’s rendition of the tune being played on my Hi Fi.
During the making I also started to think about how the guitar had been depicted artistically. I recalled a lovely book I have entitled “The Blue Guitar” which illustrates a poem called “The man with the blue guitar” by Wallace Stevens. David Hockney illustrated the book with a series of etchings; the following extract is David Hockney’s explanation of his approach to illustrating the book. It also conveys in some sense how I approached the making of this exhibition.
Hockney was a great admirer of Pablo Picasso; the book includes an image of Picasso’s painting ‘The old guitarist’ from 1903. It left me wondering what sort of music Jimi Hendrix would have been playing had he lived to the age of the old guitarist.
John Pollex – December 2005 |
It didn’t take long for me to notice how similar the guitar shape is to the female form, so I started to add features of the female form to some of abstracted guitar shapes I was making. I was also attracted by the erotic content of Jimi’s music and the way he performed it. Songs like, ‘Foxey Lady,’ ‘Wild Thing’ and ‘Are you experienced’ spring to mind. Jimi must have been inspired by his relationships with many of the female fans that adored him – nothing unusual there!!
“The etchings themselves were not conceived as literal illustrations of the poem but as an interpretation of its themes in visual terms. Like the poem, they are about transformations within art as well as the relation between reality and the imagination, so these are pictures within pictures and different styles of representation juxtaposed and reflected and dissolved within the same frame”
My piece in this show entitled ‘Jimi’s blue guitar’ is in homage to Jimi for his music and Picasso and Hockney for their colours.