{"id":90601,"date":"2014-03-28T08:27:55","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T12:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=90601"},"modified":"2014-04-30T10:57:44","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T14:57:44","slug":"art-of-stones-ronnie-wood-rolls-into-benton-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/03\/art-of-stones-ronnie-wood-rolls-into-benton-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Art of Stones’ Ronnie Wood Rolls into Benton Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Ronnie<\/a>
Ronnie Wood painting in his studio. (Photo courtesy of Pratt Contemporary, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Twenty-five years ago this month, one of the first exhibitions of rock \u2019n\u2019 roll art displayed in a museum opened in Bridgeport, Conn. Among the concert photographs, tee-shirts, album covers, and electric guitars displayed on the walls of what is now The Discovery Museum were the works of musicians known to be accomplished artists, such as John Lennon and Joni Mitchell.<\/p>\n

The exhibition also featured line drawings and broad-stroked, colorful paintings by a musician-artist then less widely known for his art, guitarist Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/a>
Painting on canvas – Blue Smoke Suite – self-portrait of Ronnie Wood. (Courtesy of Washington Green Fine Art, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today Wood\u2019s paintings, drawings, and prints are regularly exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, and Liberty & Co., the London-based luxury clothier, has produced a line of clothing based on his art. On Friday, March 28, \u201cRonnie Wood: Art and Music,\u201d an exhibition of paintings, lithographs, and pen and ink drawings by the guitarist, opens at The William Benton Museum of Art at UConn.<\/p>\n

Wood grew up in a house filled with music played by his family, particularly his father and two older brothers, whom he followed to Ealing Art College in London after earning prizes for his drawing and other artwork.<\/p>\n

\u201cEaling was the right school for me because, after music, I was always drawing while I was growing up,\u201d Wood writes in his 2007 autobiography, Ronnie <\/i>(St. Martin\u2019s Press 2007), which contains his original drawings and portrait sketches. \u201cArt was the most fun I ever had in school. We studied technique, colour, texture, and line, and that got me started reading books about artists, which is how I discovered Picasso and Braque. It was a very exciting time, but then these were the early 1960s and things were changing rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood also writes that as a youngster he would send his drawings to the BBC art show \u201cSketch Club,\u201d which showed some of the art submitted during the program. He won a prize for one of his submissions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI won the show\u2019s main prize for a picture of an audience in the cinema, shocked and scared, looking at them from the screen out, as they reacted to a horror film,\u201d he recalls in the book. \u201cWinning that prize got my drawings into an exhibition and that was my awakening to art. I sometimes look back to this picture as the seed to both the worlds I ended up in. Depicting an audience in shock and awe meant my two worlds of art and performance came together in this little picture and preceded my night and day jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/a>
Painting on canvas by Ronnie Wood – Electric Horses (Photo courtesy of Washington Green Fine Art, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The number of other prominent musicians who also became known as artists \u2013 such as Miles Davis, David Bowie, Grace Slick, Freddie Mercury, and Jerry Garcia \u2013 raises the question of whether there may be a link between musical and artistic creativity.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnderstanding how music and art as different forms of expression originate within the same individual is an unexplored frontier\u201d in neuroscience, according to Ed Large, professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who studies how humans process music.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/a>
Painting on canvas by Ronnie Wood – Blue Smoke Suite – Mick Jagger (Photo courtesy of Washington Green Fine Art, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cCreativity is one of the hardest things to study,\u201d Large says. \u201cWhen you want to understand the brain, you have to replicate the same stimulus over and over; that\u2019s just the opposite of what creativity is. It\u2019s going to be a while before we understand anything about the creative process from that standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Large says music stimulates the brain in a way very different from vision: \u201cThe sound of music stimulates the brain at frequencies in which the brain normally works. Light stimulation is very different. However, I know a lot of musicians who also do other forms of art like painting or drawing. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s uncommon. There is a creative sensibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood\u2019s musical rise to prominence began in 1969 when he and vocalist Rod Stewart performed with the Jeff Beck Group. The guitarist and vocalist later formed a band that would be called Faces, which had a chart hit in both the United States and England with the song \u201cStay With Me.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1975, Wood had become close to his longtime friend, Stones\u2019 guitarist Keith Richards, and he was invited to tour as the second guitar with The Rolling Stones when Faces were not performing. Early in 1976, Wood was invited to join the Stones permanently after Faces broke up.<\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/a>
Painting on canvas by Ronnie Wood – Blue Smoke Suite – Keith Richards (Photo courtesy of Washington Green Fine Art, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a member of what has been called \u201cThe World\u2019s Greatest Rock \u2019n\u2019 Roll Band,\u201d Wood\u2019s public profile grew, and in 1987 the San Francisco Art Exchange, known for its exhibitions of rock art and photography, featured the first gallery exhibition of his art. Since that time, his work has been exhibited in New York and London, among other major cities, and at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio.<\/p>\n

In 2003, theater producer and composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber (\u201cJesus Christ Superstar,\u201d Phantom of the Opera,\u201d and \u201cCats\u201d) commissioned Woods to create a group portrait of notable contemporary British personalities set in a popular London restaurant, the Ivy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe arranged for 30 of the Ivy\u2019s regulars to tell him who they\u2019d like to sit next to for lunch, and that formed the basis of the painting,\u201d Woods says in his book.<\/p>\n

The painting, \u201cThe Ivy,\u201d is hung in the Grand Saloon Bar of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and includes Wood\u2019s portraits of the models Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, musicians Mick Jagger and Elton John, and author Salman Rushdie, among others.<\/p>\n

\u201cRonnie Wood: Art and Music\u201d will be on display from March 28 through Aug. 10 at The William Benton Museum of Art at UConn, 245 Glenbrook Road, Storrs. For more information, go to www.thebenton.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An exhibition of art by guitarist Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones is on display at the Benton Museum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":90080,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[55],"class_list":["post-90601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 13:19:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90601"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92257,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90601\/revisions\/92257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/90080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90601"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=90601"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=90601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}