INT: Obviously you\u2019re a comedian-cum-artist, so a lot of your work has humour and joy in it. But this exhibition focuses on some quite serious topics: nostalgia, grief, and loss. How do you approach more weighty topics? Do you let the humour go, or does it remain central to everything you do?<\/p>\n
JL: I try to make everything as funny as I can because ultimately my job is being daft. But with some of the pieces, like the Ozzy piece, I didn\u2019t want to be droll in a way that would be disrespectful, so I just had a go at the best I could do of a portrait of Ozzy Osbourne, basically. I went as earnest as I could stomach, because I try not to be too earnest, and that was a good challenge. But \u2018taking it seriously or not\u2019 is hard to define for me, because I take comedy seriously, but that sort of doesn\u2019t make sense as a sentence \u2013 I take it all seriously, because I wouldn\u2019t do it otherwise. I take the silliness very seriously, if you know what I mean?<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s a couple of my friends who I\u2019ve painted, and I\u2019ve added silly things that they said to me or that they said in their lives, because the reason I liked them as people was that they were funny, so I don\u2019t want to be like \u201cthey\u2019re dead and that\u2019s very sad\u201d \u2013 I want things that they did to continue making me laugh, even in their death. I don\u2019t want anyone to be going around crying. The thing that I\u2019ve loved is when people go round, you just hear giggling, that\u2019s great.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a bit of anger in the exhibition too. It\u2019s not melancholy, it\u2019s \u201chow dare we get rid of this?\u201d One of the pieces I think will inspire some sadness and anger is of the Electric Cinema, which was, until it closed, the oldest working cinema in the UK. I don\u2019t know the full details, but basically the position of the guy running it was made untenable by the people that own it, because they want to knock it down and build something else. I think it would be a travesty if that was allowed to happen. So there\u2019s things like that where it\u2019s not funny and it\u2019s not trying to make people sad, but I just want us to kind of pause in that moment and go, \u201cAre we glad this has gone? \u2019Cause we probably could save it if we put enough into it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yeah. So, that\u2019s about as serious as it gets, but then, like, I painted Margaret Thatcher in 45 minutes!<\/p>\n
INT: She doesn\u2019t deserve any longer!<\/p>\n
JL: Well, exactly! I\u2019d given myself an hour and I polished it off in 45, so, done!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INT: Obviously you\u2019re a comedian-cum-artist, so a lot of your work has humour and joy in it. But…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":575817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-575816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/575817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}