Thomas Marks on TV chefs
Thomas Marks savours a series of paintings that intensify the vintage charms of the TV chef Keith Floyd
An article on TV chefs and art could quite easily fasten on to Nigella Lawson, who was married to the art collector Charles Saatchi for a while. It could make for Nigel Slater, a ceramics enthusiast whose collection includes pots by Lucie Rie and Jennifer Lee. Or it could home in on Ken Hom, who studied history of art at UC Berkeley in the 1970s; was it mere chance that the set for his broadcasting debut, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery (1984), evoked art in California with its conspicuous display of a David Hockney poster behind the chef at his worktop?
A less promising focus would be Keith Floyd (1943–2009), the raconteur and roué whose topsy-turvy cookery tours of Britain and Ireland, France and beyond made him a primetime fixture from the mid 1980s onwards. So far as I know, Floyd never expressed much interested in art. Yes, there was a spell in the ’70s when he made a bit of cash selling ‘English bric-à-brac’ that he had bought in Bristol at a flea market in Provence (for the return journeys, he filled the lorry with wine). But his autobiographies – there are two of them – don’t dwell on whether he developed an eye for antiques while he had this hustle going, and these aren’t books that shy away from his enthusiasms. They have plenty of love for rugby and expensive tailoring, and plenty more for alcohol.
All the same, it is Floyd who hogs the airtime in ‘Classics’, an exhibition of work by Lydia Blakeley at Niru Ratnam’s gallery in London (until 6 March). Hung alongside paintings that depict the legs of young men clad in Kappa tracksuits and Reebok Classic trainers are small portraits of both Floyd and his apple-pie antithesis, Delia Smith, as well as larger works that blow up food photographs from Floyd’s books and transform them into Pop-like still lifes: Mackerel with Gooseberry Sauce, Light Stew of Dublin Bay Prawns and Asparagus in a Saffron Soup (Fig. 1). Le Pigeon aux Petit Pois, with its two nicely roasted birds kicking back in a ball pit of green peas, is a far cry from Picasso’s cubist carve up of the same dish from 1911.
Blakeley isn’t much of a cook, she tells me via video link, and hasn’t tried to recreate