Home Is Where The Art Is:Grayson's Art Club

Grayson Perry's a nice man. As both a television presenter, a curator, and an artist he's showed he has wells of empathy and time for those less successful or celebrated than himself and he's demonstrated both a kindness and an incisive, yet inclusive, wit that means you just can't help warming to him. I observed in a previous blog that this whole coronavirus business has revealed a lot of kindness in society but that the most generous and altruistic acts of kindness have come from those who, pre-Covid, had already displayed that trait.

Grayson, in his six episode Channel 4 series Grayson's Art Club, fits that billing perfectly. Perry's belief, and one shared by many, is that art can help us through the crisis and each instalment of the show takes a different theme (portraits, animals, fantasy, view from my window, home, and Britain) and asks both celebrity guests and "the great British public" to get involved by creating artworks under lockdown with the aim of, when it's safe to do so, Grayson curating a show of it in IRL. In an actual art gallery. Remember them?

The over-riding sense of kindness, friendship, and love that comes attached with everything Perry does shines through at all times but, filmed in his home with his wife Philippa, his cat Kevin, and his childhood teddy bear Alan Measles, these qualities are amplified. There's lots of hearty laughter between Grayson, Philippa, and the guests they chat to over laptop screens (a portrait of Grayson with his hair made of noodles and soy sauce certainly sets them off), Grayson's Columbo mug features often, as do his socks and tea towel, and by the fifth episode Philippa's even co-presenting. Unsurprisingly, she turns out to be just as likeable as Grayson.

Each week Grayson speaks a bit about the art of the past that he feels best illustrates the theme of the show. We're shown works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Hockney, Vermeer, Botticelli, Hopper, Henri Rousseau, Bonnard, Eric Ravilious, Rachel Whiteread, and Chantal Joffe alongside images of William Frith's The Derby-Day, Elizabethan miniatures, and Banksy's wheel clamped Boudicca statues on London's Victoria Embankment.

These are, often, great pieces of art but the work that Grayson, Philippa, the celebrity guests, and, most of all, that aforementioned "great British public" make often eclipses it. It certainly speaks more to these strange times we're all experiencing at the moment. There are collages, paintings, sculptures (including one of Ena Sharples' head), photographs, and houses made of sweets and, throughout the series (which was made and shown during the early part of lockdown) there are constant artworks made in the image of and referencing Professor Chris Whitty, the UK government's Chief Medical Advisor.

They're respectful and often silly but they're never cruel. Harry Hill makes a ventriloquist's dummy of Whitty and Keith Lemon paints a picture of the Prof (he also, less successfully, dresses up as Pharrell - at least this time he resists the temptation to do it in 'blackface') and Perry includes him in many of his own pieces, including one in which Whitty is reading a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Perry calls his pieces "monuments to domestic imprisonment".

Elsewhere we see Hill carving a dog out of wood, Joe Lycett tells us he likes Edward Hopper's Morning Sun because it reminds him of the time of the day he likes to crack open a beer (!), Noel Fielding parades around as a character called Acid Mouse and hosts a solo comedy club to an audience of faces he's painted himself who still heckle him mercilessly, and Jim Moir, aka Vic Reeves, shows us his paintings of birds and the reggae artists Big Youth and Gregory Isaacs.

There's casual yet enlightening chats with the likes of Jessica Hynes, Lolly Adefope, Anthony Gormley, Kevin McCloud, Martin Parr, Jenny Eclair, David Shrigley, and Liza Tarbuck and Jeremy Deller proves a particularly insightful guest. He explains the genesis of his Acid Brass project (a celebration of the history of various working class cultures) and he talks passionately about how most of the art we've been seeing in recent months is that of children. The rainbows and celebrations of key workers we've all seen in windows of houses near us are, to Deller, wonderful reminders of the awe and creativity of childhood and he even sees the once weekly Clap for Carers event as some kind of national performance.

Deller, like Grayson Perry, is as much a communicator, a teacher, as he is an artist and both of them agree, as do I, that when this is all over "we can't carry on as normal". We can't go back to the levels of poverty, wealth inequality, and homelessness we had before Covid. We must change society and make it better and fairer for all. This, Perry observes as so many of us have also, is a once in a lifetime opportunity to fix what's wrong.

Maggi Hambling is a far thornier guest than Deller, Lycett, or Tarbuck. She demands her interview is not conducted over Zoom, she demands there is no music playing over her parts, she demands to be allowed to smoke, and she boasts her hobbies are watching tennis and drinking Special Brew on a bench before stating that bench is most definitely not a park bench. FFS!

She's incredibly irritating but I did come (slightly) round to her eventually and put her rude and surly manner down not to her artistic temperament and self-importance but to the fact she was stressed out. It was the peak of lockdown so I cut her some slack. But it wasn't the interview with Hambling, and or even the rest of the far more amenable celebrities, that made Grayson's Art Club the delight it was. The real joy, the real emotion, came from him gently eking out the stories behind the art that the public were making and the joyful looks on their faces when he informed them they'd been selected for his exhibition.

Vinny Montag and Kim Li's art fridge was a lovely idea, The Singh Twins' Covid spore flecked dragon being fought by a nurse on horseback while Boris Johnson tries to stop her is a powerful piece, and the moving and kind interview, more of a conversation really, with frontline nurse Hannah Grace Deller and the photo of her dog were all genuine highlights that showed the very best of Grayson Perry and the very best of British. A modest and gentle creativity so different to the bellicose exceptionalism that often rallies round the flag.

The two sweetest parts of the series, and the two that got me - inevitably, crying, were the interviews with Alex Robinson and his mum Rachel and a later one with Mandish Khebbal and her young son Simran. Alex, a grown man who still needs the care of his mother, struggles with the real world at the best times. During lockdown, even more so. He finds, and loves, the normality and order in the play figures he makes and the fantasy world he's created for himself. Perry's empathy and humanity while chatting with the taciturn Alex is later rewarded when Alex sends Perry models he's made of Alan Measles and Kevin the cat through the post.

Mandish and Simran have made a lovely, cute, family portrait. It shows Simran practising kung fu, a grumpy older brother sat on a wicker chair, and the elder Khebbals posing in fancy clothes. There's a portrait in the background of Simran's twin brother Sorian who died when he was just four years old and, wrapped in his mum's arms, Simran talks directly to Grayson and to the country:-

"He died when he was four and also when I was four. Home is where the heart is and my heart is with my family"

As Simran cuddles his mum ever tighter, Mandish takes up the story by telling Grayson how the anniversary of Sorian's death is approaching and quarantine means they may not be able to carry out their yearly ritual of leaving toy dinosaurs on nearby park benches with little signs attached saying "take me home and play with me" so that on an unbearably sad day they can at least put joy into other children's hearts.

Sorian cried, Grayson cried, and I cried. If you watched it and somehow remained unmoved I don't envy you. I pity you for your lack of compassion. Grayson's Art Club wasn't just a show in which Perry could tell us of his love for the fantasy art of Hieronymus Bosch and Henry Darger, it wasn't just a show in which pregnant Laura showed us her fantastical painted belly, and it wasn't just a show in which Grayson Perry could return, time and again, to his Alan Measles statue (all rusty aerials, corroded sheets of brass, and rotten teeth) even though it was all those things.

It was also a lot more than that. Grayson Perry used art, and creativity, as a prism to view not just the extraordinary times we've been, and still are, living through but to explore far more permanent concerns. Those of anxiety, society, family, friendship, and love. He chose not to do it by hectoring us but, instead, by being the change in the world he wanted to see. I can't be the only one who's glad that Grayson Perry's kindness, humility, curiosity, and empathy, even more so than any of the art on his show, continued, and continues, to shine like a beacon and bring light to the darkest of times.