‘For quite a while I was “an artist’s artist”, ie poor’, said Grayson Perry in Playing to the Gallery, the book of his wonderfully entertaining 2013 Reith Lectures. Both in his art and his writing, Perry has long been critical of the extent to which contemporary art is driven by money and celebrity. Pottery is his medium of choice, he has said, because of its lack of pretensions. His 2011 exhibition at the British Museum – The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman – championed the work of the nameless potters and metalworkers who made so many of the museum’s treasures. Perry compares such thoughtful craft with the craziness of a world in which Cézanne’s Card Players is deemed to be “worth” up to $300m (£211m) largely based on brand recognition.
Perry himself is now neither poor nor obscure. He still casts himself as an outsider: “an Essex transvestite potter” who has somehow been let in by the “artworld mafia”. But he knows better than anyone that ever since he won the Turner prize in 2003 for his subversive ceramics, he has been part of the British art establishment, too. Much as he seems to relish turning up at events dressed as “Claire”, in outlandish babydoll frocks and smocks and a Louise Brooks bob, his fame has inevitably changed the atmosphere in which he works, as he explains in Sketchbooks:
As I have become more successful and my prices have risen, drawings have become like currency, sometimes worth thousands of pounds. If I put a pen to paper it can feel like I have a version of the Midas touch – each mark becomes a pound sign. This makes me feel self-conscious, and I find it difficult to truly let go. I call this feeling “Picasso Napkin Syndrome”. This refers to the fact that Picasso could pay for a meal in a restaurant with a sketch on the table linen.
This is one of the reasons why Perry holds his sketchbooks so dear. Because they are done for his own private consumption, the drawings in them are “financially worthless” and so he is free to doodle and play as freely as he could when he was still an “artist’s artist”.
Some artists’ etchings – those of Dürer spring to mind – reveal virtuoso draftsmanship and raw brilliance. Perry’s are nothing like that. Many of the pages are scruffy, quite ugly and daubed with brownish stains that could be tea or clay. His default handwriting is that of a shopping list rather than a calligrapher’s studio and, out of context, the stream-of consciousness can seem banal. “West London is SHIT”; or “some pie or tart from Jamie book” (underlined).
For Perry fans, however, the great joy of this beautifully produced book is the feeling it gives of an artist exploring things on paper, as innocently as a child with felt tips (albeit a child with a fondness for scribbling men with breasts and women with penises). Perry sees his sketchbooks as a place where “I can discuss ideas with myself”. Many of the sketches feature Alan Measles, Perry’s beloved childhood teddy bear with a heart-shaped head. Here is Alan as a Buddhist monk and Alan as a fertility goddess and Alan hung up from the ears by flaming crosses. Here is Alan on a horse and a plinth, like Nelson. In one sketch, the bear has a serious expression and a tie: “VOTE ALAN”. In another, he is piloting a fighter jet next to the slogan (in bubble writing) “WAR IS BAD But Fun”. On a colourful postage stamp, Alan shoots a lightning rod from his mouth to defeat a Nazi. These are the sorts of repetitious squiggles of toys and superheroes a teenager might do at the back of the class when bored, except that, with Perry, each different version of Alan ties into the overall scheme of his art. In one scruffy pink sketch, the bear is drawn on the side of a pot with Perry’s female alter ego and the logo “Alan and Claire defeat the forces of cultural crassness”.
This book is a charming reminder of how much visual creativity comes out of mess and muddle and mistakes. The early sketches and notes for Perry’s ceramics often look like nothing much. There might be some roughing out in pencil of a vase’s basic shape, along with some seemingly random scrawls: “Big Black Shapes”, “Bonkers Fly Posters? Religious?” Yet from these basic notes, Perry is able to plan out the series of deeply meticulous processes that go into each of his pots: the multiple layers of paint, the “stamping, scraping, sprigging, trailing, carving”. It is almost shocking to turn from the sketches to the photographs of finished work at the end of the book and be reminded of what a careful craftsman he is: the highly finished shine on the yellow glaze of Good and Bad Taste, a pot from 2007 depicting people in bondage gear interspersed with daisies.
These sketchbooks confirm how consistently Perry has pursued the theme of sexuality. The first chapter is a collection of sketches from the 1980s when he was an art student in Portsmouth and London, often living in squats. Working with collage, watercolour and pen, he produced a series of images that he describes as “part diary, part pornography, part graphic novel”. They feature women who look like Princess Diana drawn in comic book style, with eery dark skylines, interspersed with torn out photographs, some obscene and some catalogue shots of tea sets or women on sofas. Perry notes that “technically” it took him “the best part of twenty years to perfect the ceramic equivalent of these sketchbook images”.
Perhaps his most interesting sketches in their own right in the book are the ones he did for his recent project A House for Essex, co-designed with architect Charles Holland. This house, created for an imaginary Essex woman called Julie, is like a nest of Russian dolls, four church-like houses of decreasing size. Perry wanted it to be a “monument to thwarted female intelligence”, which celebrates Julie’s mundane life: her pregnancies, a dream holiday in India, her pet cat. Perry’s sketches for the house – which he started doing “in front of the telly” – have a Gaudí-ish exuberance. The original ideas look less rectangular, more like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones: a crazy kinetic dwelling on stilts with steam coming out of the top.
Much of Perry’s completed work looks so anarchic – his recent textiles and tapestries of modern life are a case in point, featuring images of McDonald’s and Carphone Warehouse and Hello! magazine – that it is easy to miss just how considered they are. Only by seeing the real sketches do we appreciate how unsketchy the final work is. It is a long way from all those scruffy outlines of Alan Measles to Hold Your Beliefs Lightly, a 2011 embroidery in which the humble teddy has become a glossy yellow idol, his arms outstretched to cover a series of people of different faiths. There is something thrilling about being granted access to an artist’s first thoughts in this way: to see the stages he rejected before he came up with the finished article.
Perry says he sees his sketchbooks as “an archive of daft notions that later become art”. He regards these volumes of failed attempts and squiggles as something sacred, more so than his proper public art. “I know I could never sell them,” he insists. Except that in publishing them – and the irony is surely not lost on him – that is just what he has done.
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