Wood still taking it ‘to the max’
Rolling Stones guitarist releases book of artwork
Ronnie Wood: Artist
Ronnie Wood & Keith Richards Thames & Hudson
Ronnie Wood steps into the room with a crackle of wiry, crow-haired warmth. There’s a wild energy to the Rolling Stones guitarist — in live performances, on record, and in person — that energy is in his paintings, too, with their expressive lines and vibrant colours.
“Risk,” says Wood. “I love the element of risk ... all the time.”
It’s caused him some difficulties over the years, especially with alcohol, but most perilously when he got himself into trouble at the end of the 1970s with freebase cocaine, a purer form of crack cocaine. Wood’s illustrated timeline of his life, which is included in a new book of his artwork, notes simply, “took three years to stop.”
But that addiction ultimately led to Wood taking up painting — which he had studied at art college — in a more serious fashion, when he turned to it to help restore his battered finances. “The drug habit and the houses that I was living in were way beyond my means ... and what I was spending on dope was far more than any houses.”
The Stones didn’t tour between 1982 and 1989. “You don’t get a wage, you only get paid when you work,” says Wood.
Music was always part of family life. Wood had played washboard on stage with his brothers at the age of 11, formed his own band, the Birds, at 15 and was touring the U.K. and in the top 50 by 17, before joining the Jeff Beck Group. With Rod Stewart as singer, they toured the States while Wood was still a teenager.
Two years later, he and Rod the Mod would leave the band and form Faces with ex-members of Small Faces, and the pair would co-write hits such as Stay With Me and Cindy, while building up a reputation as a hard-drinking, woman-chasing party band.
Wood has a real talent for capturing likenesses. Some of his sketches, he says, are influenced by his admiration for Matisse. A painting of Mick Jagger, emerging from blackness, he describes as “going back to Renaissance days ... Caravaggio, really ... the light and the dark burnt umber and raw umber.”
Some of his best works are impressionistic landscapes of Ireland, where he has a house and trains racehorses.
Wood is just getting over an operation for lung cancer, discovered by chance at a routine, pre-tour health check in May. Further tests revealed that the lesion hadn’t spread, so, for the time being at least, he has the all clear.
Does he ever visit the dark places in his life when he paints?
“It’s a bit like the blues really, you conjure up those dark places — without them you wouldn’t have enjoyable light moments.”
He says the secret to his still being here is that he has a cutoff valve that lets him know that it’s time to stop or else; that says, “hang on, you don’t want to take one more of them or one more unit, it’s too much.”
That’s not quite how Keith Richards describes it.
In his 2010 autobiography Life, he describes Wood as an “over-thetop man. He had no control whatsoever ... Ronnie was everything to the max.”
Wood laughs. “... These days, his favourite line about me is, ‘Now you’ve straightened out and you’ve cleaned up your act, you’re exactly the same as when you were using. What a waste of 20 million quid’ (about $33 million).”