Grayson's Art Club, review: this jolly art show has the air of a disjointed Zoom meeting
While trying to entertain yourself in lockdown, have you felt moved to produce a likeness of Chris Whitty? In my case, the answer is no, but perhaps I’m out of step with the general population. Grayson’s Art Club (Channel 4), a new show aiming “to bring the nation together through art”, asked people to create their own works and ended up with both a painting and a clay head of the Chief Medical Officer. We are living in strange times.
The programme has been thrown together at the last minute and has the air of a disjointed Zoom catch-up, but needs must. It has a meandering, makeshift charm, with artist Grayson Perry conducting conversations online and chatting away companionably to his wife, punctuated throughout by his booming laugh. He delighted in the eccentricity of a man who makes portraits out of soy sauce and noodles, and a viral craze for recreating famous artworks using household objects.
The hodgepodge of elements includes a celebrity interview of the week – this time with the comedian Joe Lycett – and visits to the studios of artists, plus a section in which members of the public submit their art – strong memories of Tony Hart here – and the best are selected to appear on screen.
Perry is aware of the limitations of the format – “I am unsatisfied by online communication, I must say” – but his informal style is as good a fit as any for it. His bird’s nest hair is also rather zeitgeisty, as he broadcasts to a nation either desperate for a trip to the salon or deciding to give up on hairbrushing altogether.
The theme of the first episode was portraits – hence those surprise appearances by Prof Whitty. It’s not really a how-to guide to painting, save for Perry’s one tip about never starting with the eyes when doing a portrait: “Don’t start at the important bit. Michelangelo didn’t think, ‘You know what? I’ll start at that bit where the two fingers meet in the middle.” Instead, what it transmitted was the benefits of art: the calm it brings, and also the joy. The programme was all over the place, but at its best it was rather fun.
