Paul Whitehead (www.paulwhitehead.com), an artist and musician, discusses his career and experiences with progressive rock band Genesis. He talks about the range of ages of fans at progressive rock concerts and how younger fans may not be familiar with the band's earlier work. He also mentions his current projects, including promoting a new documentary about his life and work, and his dual identity as an artist. He explains his different artistic styles and the response they receive from viewers. Additionally, he share his experiences at film and rock festivals where he auctions off his paintings. He explain how he became involved with creating album covers for Genesis, with the albums "Trespass, Foxtrot and Nursery Crime"
ZOLiD Radio Podcast: From Genesis to Apocalypses
G: So, who are you?
P: Paul Whitehead
G: But who are you?
P: Artist, musician, transgender artist
G: You made a movie, right?
P: Primarily known for lots of record covers I've done since the 70s Genesis is part of a... Yeah, lots of progressive rock bands and they all made Genesis then, you know. What do you want to talk about?
G: What is in the top of your head?
P: On the top of my head? Yeah That's a good question Yeah, we were talking before about the thing and what's interesting about
G: what was the people's range?
P: The people what?
G: The range of age
P: Yes Yeah, progressive rock, I mean really it started in like the late 60s made its peak in like the early 70s I guess that was like the real peak of it and of course there was the people that discovered it when it happened but now they've got children or they've got kids now that are in their 20s, you know so I see a big range of people go to progressive rock concerts from like 70, almost 80 years old to 20 so like a 50 year span and I had a very interesting conversation with one girl she was about 22 years old from Mexico and she was talking about Genesis how great she thought Genesis was and I said something about Peter Gabriel and she went, Peter Gabriel was in Genesis? So I said yeah, you didn't know that? She only knew Genesis from the late Phil Collins years, you know I said, oh man if you think Genesis was great in the 80s and 90s, go back go back and discover what they started out as so then I saw her a year later at the same festival and she was blown away she said, she was amazed as she went back through the history they got better and better and better and then she said when she discovered the Peter Gabriel years it was like, wow so they were like two different bands really three different bands in a way there was the Peter Gabriel Genesis then there was the transition with Phil Collins and Steve Hackett in the band. Steve Hackett left and then they turned into this sort of pop band really very very different band more known for their young people when they were young folks yeah, you see that's very strange for me as well because when people say oh he's the guy that did the Genesis record covers they don't know which phase of that history it was it could have been the whole 30 years or whatever yeah, it's funny I find that very strange that people don't know that and in a way if you think about it the band started off at its best yeah, and then we did like this I don't want to say de-gradating but it was kind of well it's a symptom of the times as well it's kind of what people wanted I watched a documentary last night about Wham. Wham were huge they were massive, right and the music was, you know wasn't something I particularly listened to I mean George Michael morphs into what he was, right but it was the same thing that period it seemed like people didn't want thought provoking songs. It's funny, it's something you can dance to, yeah, yeah, it was different. The Police was going yeah yeah, it was after after punk, right like punk to be what rock was not to be anymore and then was this live music that we were in progressive rock like Genesis, Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, that were like baroque. Baroque concept to something simple like Beatles but in the 90s something like that Tears for Fears stuff, like that
G: interesting. What are you doing now?
P: what am I doing now? Well, primarily, I'm promoting this documentary. I made a documentary about my life, my work, my transgender activities and it turned out really good so we're doing the film festival right now and the idea is to sell it we may have a good contact with PBS which I'm hoping is going to turn out it's very interesting going out there and showing the film and then doing the Q&A and hearing what people's minds are thinking about these days it's relatively new for me to expose that side of myself as well because for those who don't know I make art as two people I make art as Paul Whitehead and there's a female artist called Tricia Van Cleef and it's very very different art: Paul is very realistic and primarily about ideas expressing ideas and Tricia is totally spontaneous in the moment it's like two very different sides of my creativity in a way I felt kind of bound by making complicated very very visual images and I wanted to break out and it's it's kind of funny because if you think about it I really created another career a career that was ok people knew me and then I created this other character and said ok, I'm going to do something different now but they co-exist yes, some people they get aliases, right? they write books but this also is a different kind of different person you go into the physicality of the character yes and there are good examples of it in the art world there's an artist called Marcel Duchamp he was very active in the twenties and the thirties in the Dada movement and he had a female alter ego called Rose Saladin and he said his reason for creating her he was a complete character, cross-dressed wigs and clothes and everything he said he created her so she could do stuff that he wasn't responsible for so he was like a very serious kind of almost like the philosopher of art you know like a bad door, a real back door of his personality he can do whatever he wanted it was not politically correct for people like him and he could be playful and do stuff that was silly but as it turned out she's very collectible you know so once I read that it was like ok, that's an interesting idea then I decided I'm going to do that, why not and I've always kind of had a secret sort of admiration of abstract art when I first discovered it I thought it was a scam I thought, anyone could do that but then you realize you watch some of these guys working particularly Jackson Pollock you watch them working and it's not accidental it's a very very serious mind the way they work it's very graceful so I tuned in to that it's a state of mind I guess you put yourself into a yeah, the art is very unique for each person to value and appreciate in different ways because normally there are so many components that resonate in different ways to different persons right but for me it was the frame of mind when Paul works it's already like he's figured out what he wants to achieve he has an idea and he works out how to get that idea onto canvas by drawing it, by working it all out and then by painting it to a level of reality that's acceptable to everybody it's like a picture everyone can see it and everyone can understand it it's then a question of do they like it do they agree with it you know, do they like the way it's painted all those questions that people ask with Tricia it's you begin working with nothing in mind it's like a blank canvas on the floor and in your mind and you just pick colors that resonate with you at that moment and just go for it and I find that as soon as I start to see the hand of the artist like brush strokes or actually the work of a human, I stop so it's got to look very very natural not painted so it's the anti-painting interesting people love them people buy them and I notice also because I do shows together with Paul on one side of the gallery and Tricia on the other side of the gallery and it's true the people they look at Paul's work and they study it because there's usually a lot to look at there's usually a lot of detail in each picture they stand in front of it and they look at it then they go to the other side of the gallery and it's like an emotional response every person that's bought a Tricia painting has gone I've just got to have it it's just hit me somehow I guess it's very honest there's no no artifice in there at all it's no head no head, right and it's just as I work things start to happen because I work with acrylics and water so as you blend when you blend water with paint it starts to fuse and you blend oh that's nice and you sort of I say I give it a helping hand sort of encourage it to go a bit more that way maybe the red mix a bit more with the blue, whatever but as soon as it starts to look like I'm manipulating, I stop and then one of the things that obviously you want it to be frozen as you like it I discovered if I add sand to it that kind of frees it and these really wonderful kind of textures start to happen which you can never paint you can never paint oh yeah so I've been doing a lot of that I've been going to film festivals I do a piece at the film festival and I've been doing rock festivals, progressive rock festivals and usually what I do we auction the pieces for the festival so maybe I met this last festival I did which broke stock in New Jersey I made four paintings in the course of three days and we auctioned them and the festival made the money which was great I always wanted to ask you going back to the Genesis painting what was first? You have the paint and Genesis approached you who approached you with the idea or was the opposite?
G: How do you connect the paint like Trespass, Nursery Crime and Foxtrot, what was first, the album or the paint?
P: Trespass, that was the first one. Peter Gabriel and the producer John Anthony saw an exhibition of my work in London which was primarily watercolors, pen and ink drawings and they said, oh you're the guy to do our record cover because you were doing all these folksy English folk song type very romantic and stuff like that so then we established a pattern where I worked with Peter primarily. The band wasn't really interested. They were more into developing the music, he was into developing the music the lyrics and the cover so we collaborated and it was kind of funny.
I don't know if people know the story of the Trespass cover: we got together and we came up with this idea using my style. I was already working in to a very romantic picture: the idea was a king and a queen were looking out in their kingdom and coming up behind them was Cupid and he was about to ambush them and make them fall in love with each other and do foolish things, that was the basic idea, so great. So I started painting a bit of work and three or four weeks later, Peter called me and said: you know, we've written a new song and the idea we had isn't going to work. So I said well what's the song? It's a song called The Knife and it's kind of a violent song so we should come up with another cover and I was like: oh well, I've done all this work I'm not going to trash it. I was kind of pleased with the result, it was perfect for what we talked about so then my mind started working about: well, maybe I should violate this really pretty image some way so it works with the picture, I thought maybe spill some ink on it or burn it or set fire to the edge of it. No, of course it's the knife, the knife, I'll use the knife and I'll slash this beautiful image and that'll be it and they didn't believe I was going to do it so I took it in the studio and slash it with a knife. And it's very interesting when you used to see that in the record stores, in the bins, all you'd see would be the front, and you'd go what's this all about, this nice kind of pastoral image with this black slash on the side so it wasn't until he took it out of the under the bin and looked at it. A lot of people bought it sight unseen because it was intriguing, and then when they bought it, the music lived up to the image so that was the first one, then the next one was Nursery Crime. Same thing: a song. You know, what's the song called, a musical...? Isn't it called nursery crime. I forgot. Now, The Musical Box! Sorry I'm losing my memory, so they write a song called the musical box and that's got violent elements in it, so Peter and I talked and I said: well, you know the Victorian era, they were very violent towards their children, they used to punish their children. If you listen to, like English nursery rhymes it's all about cutting off noses and you know, punishing children so I said: why don't we take the Alice in Wonderland thing and have her nurse. The nurse was always the villain, the nurse would always lock the child up and punish them: is no breakfast for you today, you're being punished! right? so yeah, so then that evolved into that, and yeah that works once again it was kind of mysterious because on the front of the cover the image of the girl with the croquet stick and playing with heads, she is playing with heads! and so that that was kind of croquet in England is kind of a an upper class aristocratic sport, I mean the ordinary people in England don't play croquet and it's a very kind of violent game in a way, the idea is to screw up your opponent to get your ball so he can't score and it's sort of like very English, you know: I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I screwed you up! rather than slapping the person you just screwed them up and that was also an interesting thing. After the paint was finished I took it in to show them, they liked it but they said it didn't look old enough. It's supposed to be 1851. I said ok, I can make it look older if I varnish it with this old, marine varnish you know, it's kind of like the color of honey and it adds like this brownish glaze to the painting. Great! ok, so I took it home, I painted it, I put it outside to dry and all these flies decided to land on the wet varnish and basically commit suicide, and when I saw that I was like oh no then I realized it was a good thing, because sometimes when you take a painting out of a frame after a long time, there'd be dead flies in there spiders that have gone in there and got trapped and died, so that became part of that image.
If you look at it closely, you'll see there's dead flies, earwigs, spiders I don't know yeah yeah.
End Part One.
