John Squire, born 14th November 1962, obviously known as the guitarist of a generation with The Stone Roses and to a lesser extent The Seahorses and his own solo career, creating the cover art for all releases but it's clear that he wishes to be considered as an outstanding artist in his lifetime too; when asked by Aesthetica Magazine (in 2005) of his future plans, he simply answered, "To become the World's greatest living painter and musician."
His 2004 concept album Marshall's House saw his art and music truly come together. All eleven album tracks and single b-side were inspired by and named after Edward Hopper pieces after John was given a calendar (of the artist) 
as a present. He started with painting People In The Sun, initially thinking of borrowing the title but drawing more from the painting was an enjoyable process and John soon challenged himself to write songs around the other 11 paintings. Also, it was prior to the launch of the album that John Squire decided to play a warm up date at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), a venue that gave The Stone Roses their first proper London date on their rise to power in 1989, some 15 years beforehand. Not only did he perform an amazing new set, playing a host of new songs but he also arranged his first ever Art Exhibition to be held there the week after. 2004-2006 also saw John's most creative period, art-wise, John finding himself creating for the sake of it, instead of just to release deadlines.
John Squire has been the perfect art tutor too; as he trials new styles and techniques, drawing inspiration from further a field, I find myself looking further with him to see which artists and pieces may have captured his imagination momentarily.Artistic Beginnings
John was always encouraged to be creative and he remembers developing an interest in drawing, painting and model making throughout his school life. He went to college where he used the art department after hours to make screen-printed posters and flyers for gigs for his pre-Stone Roses' bands. John landed a job at Manchester based animation company, Cosgrove Hall where he worked as a model maker. The company was responsible for children's television programmes, such as Wind In The Willows, Danger Mouse, Noddy and later Count Duckula.
When it came to the band's front covers it was obvious that Squire's works should feature and with John's artistic abilities it was clear that they would only help build the band's image.
When asked how he got into doing all The Stone Roses' cover art by (Mancester United magazine)
United We Stand in 2004, John answered, "The Clash and Jesus and Mary Chain used Jackson Pollock a little bit and that was what got me interested. With the first two record sleeves - So Young and Sally Cinnamon - I tried to do my own thing. Then I started painting guitars and drums and did a shirt for Ian and then I went on to covers. 
After that I stopped trying to be original and started doing the Jackson Pollock copies." He also told X-Ray magazine (2004) that Pollock appealed to him because, "When I first saw his stuff I was heavily into The Jesus and Mary Chain and it seemed like the visual equivalent of that feedback and masking."For the artwork for So Young, John "smashed an old radio, glued all the pieces on a board and painted them." Sally Cinnamon featured a photograph taken by Matt Squire (John's brother) but John wasn't
happy with it; "I knew what I wanted. I wasn't satisfied with it. I much prefer the lurid Pollock stuff." It wasn't until they signed to Silvertone and in 1988 released their 3rd single, Elephant Stone that we saw the first of John's most famous artworks.Never Mind The Pollocks
The band did want to put Jackson Pollock originals on the covers but didn't have the £¾Million to buy one and John was sure that they wouldn't be allowed to use them so he decided to copy them to his best abilities, coming up with his own unique and
instantly recognisable designs along the way. "I did as straight a copy as possible of some of my favourite Pollock paintings on calico that I picked up cheap at the local haberdashers next to the rehearsal room. I poured household gloss onto it, using fairy liquid bottles and bits of stick... The first one I did was a shirt for Ian, which he liked the look of, but didn't wear. It was gloss paint on a white shirt; it felt like cardboard and it stunk." (X-Ray 2004). John told Aesthetica magazine that his favourite artwork was, "Number 1a by Jackson Pollock. It's like a window into another world, a revolutionary technique, a painting that seems to have created itself, even the artist's own hand prints are clearly visable. Also, I like Guernica and Rembrandt's self-portrait, 1659."John even talked of one of his pieces being a direct Jackson Pollock copy but never revealed which piece
that was, inviting us to look further into Pollock. Indeed, we did not get to see the piece until it was chosen as the cover art of the 2002 The Very Best Of The Stone Roses compilation (though keen-eyed fans would have spotted the piece appearing on the back cover of the 1995 Japanese/Australian tour guide, if they managed to pick one up).For the album cover (no doubt the most famous John Squire artwork, with Double Dorsal Doppelganger One (Fools Gold) and Waterfall surely coming in 2nd and 3rd, respectively) John used the piece Bye Bye Badman, a green, white and black based piece, inspired by the colour of the water at Ireland's Giant Causeway feature. The final piece was finished with the addition of three lemon slices and the goldy/olive green text that would appear on high street shelves for years to come.
"The lemons aren't part of the picture, they're real lemons, nailed on because it was photographed on the wall - the photographer didn't have a rostrum camera. It ties in with the lyrics of Bye Bye Badman, to do with the Paris student uprisings in May '68. Me and Ian saw a documentary on it and liked the clothes: there was a guy chucking stones, with a really nice jacket and desert boots. The students used to suck on lemons to nullify the effects of tear gas. That's why the tricolour's there. The green is inspired by the water at the Giant Causeway in Ireland, where we went before a gig at Coleraine University." (Select 1997)
John's famous artwork for the November 1989 single, Fools Gold's secret laid rest for many years until it was revealed to us 'in the flesh' at the London ICA exhibition in 2004. "Double Dorsal Doppelganger. There's no real connection with Fool's Gold, although at a push I could stretch it to the purity of dolphin life over the avarice of human life. It's a con, that. It's photographed through that dappled glass you get in bedroom windows." (Select 1997)
The artwork for their last single before legal problems, 1990's One Love, sparked controversy as the rest of the band were adamant of its resemblance to a Swastika so it was photographed (slightly out of focus) and then ripped it up and photographed again. The original design has since been released for the 1995 Silvertone compilation The Complete Stone Roses.Second Coming, Third Dimension
When the band disappeared from public view, during their famous 5 year album gap when they were tied up in legal battles and music production had halted so did the artwork. John's first pieces came again in 1993/94, for the imminent release of the Second Coming. 
His art from that period had a much more physical and structural or 3D feel to it, possibly leaning more towards collage (Second Coming) and repeating pattern/tile work (Spike Island - from 1990, Begging You, Help), some pieces reminding me of Jasper Johns' style. 
Love Spreads, was a manipulated photo of a cherub and chevrons that John spotted on the Gwent Bridge in Wales, not far from their recording studio at the time, whereas, David And His 34 Slightly Misshapen Brothers (Ten Storey Love Song) consisted of 
34 'David' statues that he came across in Oxfam, before "shooting them up with an air pistol". Begging You was made from the floppy disks of an abortive lesson in sequencers and samplers, set in plaster and painted and Driving South (possibly considered as a single at some point) was a 24" x 24" toy car crash pile-up with bitumen and sand on plywood.
The artwork for Second Coming itself was a collage of sown together rectangles, but John explains; "It wasn't supposed to be that dark, that was a mistake. I got a little carried away with paint, I got distracted - I put it on, went for a piss and it had dried. I was hoping to wipe off a lot more that I managed to. It was a nightmare, it took ages to make. I made the material by sewing rectangles together, 
I was gonna make a shirt but I got bored, dumped it. Recycled it by dipping it in wood glue and draping it over a board. The band's lawyer, John Kennedy, said that if the album was successful I'd be sued to the hilt by any number of people in the bits cut out of magazines, so we had to go into a Photoshop facility in Manchester and slightly change every image - to the detriment of the piece for me." (Select 1997).In September 1995, the Stone Roses agreed to record a song in a day for Warchild's 1995 compilation, Help. John Squire was also approached to provide the cover artwork. That was to be his last though as he left The Stone Roses in March 1996 and so closed the Stone Roses chapter of John Squire's artwork career. When asked as to what John's favourite Stone Roses' artwork, he said; "It would be the design for Waterfall - that's the strongest one. It's the best translation of the message of the song." (Sunday Mail 2004)
The Seahorses' era art, continued on the same structural feel as the Second Coming art. The first pieces were created in 1996. Love Is The Law, a striking image; I found some similarities to Jasper Johns' Target works. Do It Yourself was a 3D globe of the World, made up of clay jigsaw pieces. Blinded By The Sun was made up of pairs of sunglasses in cement and Love Me And Leave Me's Pink Apache, was a pink helicopter model, spray-painted by John in a hotel room, mid-tour with the band.Welcome To The Valley
The artwork for John's debut solo album, Time Changes Everything, took on two main aspects. The first was the painted skulls (used in pieces, Eternal Recurrence and Joe Louis) and faces (plaster of paris pieces 15 Days and All I Really Want) and the second being photography. A number of photographs featured in the album inserts and made up the main collage piece Theologically Speaking. 
John also produced two household gloss on glass pieces, Sophia and Welcome To The Valley and two oak-based pieces, Strange Feeling and the more structured (oak blocks and acrylic in drawer) Shine A Little Light.
The main animal skull used in the album piece, Eternal Recurrence, featured a Pollock-style design, very familiar to John's Stone Roses work. "The Goat's skull is a deliberate reference to The Stone Roses's artwork. I live in a remote village, I often see skulls of Farm Animals. Manipulating skulls, I like the images that result." (C4 Planet Sound, September 2002) "I got into spraying them, painting flowers on them and tarting them up as presents." (X-Ray 2004)A press release came in early 2004 for John's (then forthcoming) second album, Marshall's House: "All the tracks on Marshall's House are inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper, the American realist. Best known for his works from depression-era America in the thirties and forties, Hopper's Nighthawks (1942) and Gas (1940)
stand as exemplary glimpses into the starkness and loneliness of America as she strove towards modernisation. "Hopper painted American scenes and American people - usually quite solitary and depressed-looking individuals. The reason I wanted to write about them was that I find them all quite haunting - superficially light, and awkward and ordinary, but there was something disturbing about some of the characters. So each of the songs is an extrapolated story around those images," says Squire."John explained how this concept album came about: "I got an Edward Hopper calendar as a Christmas present in 2002 and pinned it up in the room I use to write in. One artwork, People In The Sun, was so striking I set myself a challenge to see if I could write a song around the image. It went so well I decided to see if I could write another 11 songs based on the painting for each month.
"Some were a really tall order - such as Tables For Ladies and Lighthouse And Buildings. It wasn't easy to see how I could interpret them but I got there in the end. I wasn't an Edward Hopper fan but his paintings grew on me." (Sunday Mail 2004)
edward hopper, gas, 1940
Other Men's Flowers
Prior to the album release, John also announced that he was to exhibit his work to the public for the first time in his career, displaying pieces from
1988-2004. Immediately before this John created two trilogies, one of underwater nudes for the release of the album art Swimming Through The Holes In Dead American Painters (a lyric and one-time considered album title) and single art Marshall's House / Marshall's House (Study) and the other a trilogy made up of the pieces Su4, Su5 and Su6c. Both trilogies were described as "exploring a simplified, form-based series of work" and confessing to "a loose relationship with current day painters such as Gary Hume or Julian Opie, in the vast outlined, figurative canvases." (johnsquireart.com)
Two other major artworks were also created at this time, DDD2a and Gtr, which were reinterpretations of two of his earlier works, Double Dorsal Doppleganger One (Fools Gold artwork) and Waterfall respectively, two of the most recognisable Stone Roses' record covers. John also submitted a self-portrait for an interview with X-ray magazine in 2004 and two 
large, narrow, flowing sequences, one of John's partner Sophie running (Run1) and the other a matador losing a bullfight (The Bull). Another creation was a portrait of Sex Pistol John Lydon/Johnny Rotten (Rotten 2c), inspired, in part by the star's appearance in I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, all of which appeared at his second exhibition in Manchester's Great Northern in May 2004.
As 2004 drew to a close, Squire contributed the bold image that was for the cover image of the Manchester band compilation Ten From Ten (put together by friend/management Steve 'Adj' Atherton), the strong contrast continuing the compilations new (band) against old theme.
2005, Squire's quietest year musically since going solo, saw the birth of twins to John and Sophie and him adjust to family life as would be expected. During this period he was contacted by up and coming art magazine, Aesthetica, who featured John's piece Gtr on their cover, gave his only real interview of the year and commissioned John to create a series of 8 artworks which vary greatly in style. Man With A Bloody Nose 
drew heavily from Picasso while Face has an almost pop-art feel to it. Swastika was an oil painting of a 3D Swastika, stretching towards the viewer and perhaps a nod back to the One Love piece, which was altered for use for the single cover as it was thought, by some, that it resembled a Swastika.Later, in September, we also saw the 10th anniversary of Warchild's successful Help album which the Stone Roses and John Squire contributed a track and the cover artwork.
To mark the occasion Warchild arranged a second album, Help: A Day In The Life and again asked John to design the cover. John's piece was a fairly simple but compelling design, presented on a blood-red background spilling to the edges of the canvas and was met by vibrant colours in the form of print-based dropping bombing and open hands. The piece was auctioned in December 2005 at the Proud Gallery in London and fetched a further £6,000 for the charity.All That We Have Glows More Brightly Still
The art continued to be the focus into 2006, early into the year we were treated to a collection of around 15 pieces, exploring yet another style, colour field painting which gave many of his pieces instant comparisons to the works of Mark Rothko.
A lot used rectangular shapes that Rothko's pieces were famous for, and most were more simplified, colour-wise, sticking to a handful of colours/tones per piece, contrasting to his busier 2004 works. Oppenheimer, a vibrant yellow backdrop with bold red running down the canvas and detailing in to bottom-left, And Some Held Butterflies Between Their Lips was only red in colour but used textures to provide lighter and darker tones.
I believe a number of these early-2006 pieces also continue on the Nazi Germany theme from his Swastika (2005) piece. The Beheading Of Sophie Scholl refers to a young lady who was a member of The White Rose (also a Squire piece from this period) resistance movement in Nazi Germany who was arrested for production and distribution of the movement's information leaflet, found guilty of treason and executed by guillotine at the age of 22, her last words being: "Your heads will fall as well." I believe that First Impressions Of The Magdeburg Sewerage System refers to the death of Adolf Hitler, whose remains were
reportedly buried beneath an army parade ground in Madgeburg in 1970 and then exhumed in the mid-1990's when Russian authorities claim it burned and then flushed into the town's sewage system. Rasputitsa or 'mud season' is the name given to the twice annual flooding of Belarus, western Russia and Ukraine. Russian winters are well known as a great defensive advantage in wartime and during the Second World War, one such rasputitsa halted the progress of the blitzkrieg of Germany, leaving even their most powerful tanks unusable due to the mud. Robert Oppenheimer was a scientist whose name has become almost synonymous with the atomic bomb. On July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer witnessed the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. "We knew the world would not be the same," he said. Within a month, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. Japan surrendered on August 10, 1945.
May 2006 spurred a lot of interest and excitement as fans were treated to the first new John Squire music in over two years. The new tunes came in the form of instrumentals that accompanied John's newly updated website (a merger of his music site and recent addition art site) and yet another series of around 17 brand new pieces. Some seemingly carrying on Squire's continuing line theme (similar to 2004 pieces, DDD2a, Su4, Su5, Su6c, for example), 
Shamus And The U-235 uses this technique, also the filling in of a number of the shapes created by the intersecting lines reminds me of some Pollock pieces, Summertime for example. Forced To Dance To The Sound Of Howling Dogs was another example, this time the black line outline, lost in the busy raspberry-ripple background, reds and whites coming together forming rose-like whirlpools. Others that fit into this category are Johnny Seven Moons And The Golden Gate, Erica and Central Asian Landscape.
A number of these pieces are named after characters from the novel Stone Junction by Jim Dodge. Annalee Faro Pearse, Johnny Seven Moons and Shamus Malloy who is a character obsessed with Uranium (uranium-235) all feature in the book.
The other main style to these new pieces is a more complex looking, spacey, spiralling out repeating theme that appears in the pieces Silence Was His Only Hope, Outlaws, Only Do Wrong When You Feel Its Right, Its Your Best Shot At Sanity Man, Her First Punch, Blue Vase 2 and a personal favourite, Blue Vase.
As to the future of John Squire's art, that will surely depend on two things: wherever his mind takes him and what inspires him in that moment and how his music now progresses. If a new album was to emerge, then you can be sure that John will produce artwork specifically for the covers. Producing so many varying artworks, I'd be reluctant to say that we've seen a true John Squire style yet, though he is a master of every style he has attempted and his new pieces always seem to very quickly fit in with my idea of John Squire artwork. Indeed with John's growing desire to be considered as a great artist (by the art world as well as fans of his music) I would also expect see an exhibition of his latest works, perhaps with his new instrumentals playing in the background as you walk round.
Paul Stevens, John Squire Gallery re-launch, June 2006
All content copyright © Paul Stevens / www.john-squire.com 2006. All rights reserved.
