Was the show specifically designed to lift people’s spirits during the pandemic?Īctually I sort of had a thing with the pandemic where I saw it coming. Y ou’ve said on Twitter that you were hoping to cheer people up a little bit with Painting With John. In a wide-ranging chat, Lurie talked about why he doesn’t really have beef with Bob Ross, the time he hit Painting With John co-producer Adam McKay in the head with a pool cue, what he misses about his late friend Anthony Bourdain, and why he was always a better fisherman than you thought.
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(“Do you mind telling the people at home what a good and fair boss I am?” he asks them at several points they try to roll their eyes, but the three inevitably crack up.) Add in the lush beauty of the undisclosed island where he lives and background music drawn from the back catalogs of bands and his soundtrack work, and you have a dreamlike audiovisual world that somehow only could have sprung from Lurie’s brain. But there’s something like peace in his nighttime painting sessions, soundtracked only by the sound of tree frogs, and his sitcom-like banter with Wolf and another woman who works for him, Ann Mary Gludd James. We see the now-68-year-old downtown artist living a very different life, and looking considerably more grizzled than the last time he hosted his own show, sporting a bushy gray-and-brown goatee. He ended up there, he says in Episode Six, after feeling “boxed in,” but says that the move ended up being beneficial. The show also offers a window into Lurie’s quiet life in the Caribbean. But hidden in between the quips and colorful tales are genuine insights about nurturing creativity and preserving what Lurie calls “that childlike wonderment thing” that’s always driven his art. He also spends plenty of time disparaging his own credentials as a painting authority (“I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing”) and good-naturedly griping about the show’s talking-to-the-camera format. We sit with Lurie as he paints and simultaneously reminisces in his gravelly rumble of a voice about everything from the time he spent hours snorting coke in a broom closet with Rick James and Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell to the time he bartered for a live eel for a Lounge Lizards cover shoot in a Chinatown backroom. As with the bulk of Lurie’s output, it swirls together a mystic’s appreciation for the sublime with the dry wit and healthy skepticism of a New York–bred wiseass. Painting With John tweaks the formula of an instructional art show in much the same way that Fishing With John did the nature program. “We had fun working and then we just sort of started building it, just like you would start putting an old car together in the garage, or something.” Lurie then invited Erik Mockus, who had made videos for his fictional-bluesman alter ego Marvin Pontiac, to shoot and edit the show. “I haven’t really felt comfortable, but this was really funny, and I said, ‘Let’s do this.'” “She’s been wanting to put little things of me painting on Instagram forever,” Lurie told Rolling Stone via phone earlier this week. Season One of Lurie’s new show - the first of six episodes premieres January 22nd on HBO - grew out of casual pre-pandemic phone-camera clips taken by his longtime assistant, Nesrin Wolf. The Best Audiophile Turntables for Your Home Audio System 'Silence of the Lambs': 'It Broke All the Rules' Fans of the polymathic artist know this sensation well from a variety of media, dating back more than 40 years: the otherworldly grooves and trancelike improv of the Lounge Lizards, the No Wave–turned-globalist-jazz band Lurie led and played saxophone in from the late Seventies through the late Nineties his naturalistic turns in classic Eighties films including Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ his lovably droll early-Nineties travel show Fishing With John, featuring famous guests like Dennis Hopper and Willem Dafoe and the surreal, painstaking, and often oddly poignant paintings he’s focused on in the 2000s, since an extended bout of Lyme disease (followed more recently by cancer), has prevented him from playing music. The sequence captures a quintessential Lurie-an mood, in which gruff, deadpan humor mingles with arresting beauty. Then, after a beat, “Why put it all on me? There’s a sunset. So just imagine I’m saying something poetic,” he says, addressing the viewer. “I felt I should I use this beautiful moment to say something poetic, but I don’t have anything. Midway through the first episode of his new show, Painting With John, John Lurie stands on the porch of his home in the Caribbean, gazing at a serene purplish-pink sunset.
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