INT: Obviously you’re a comedian-cum-artist, so a lot of your work has humour and joy in it. But this exhibition focuses on some quite serious topics: nostalgia, grief, and loss. How do you approach more weighty topics? Do you let the humour go, or does it remain central to everything you do?
JL: I try to make everything as funny as I can because ultimately my job is being daft. But with some of the pieces, like the Ozzy piece, I didn’t want to be droll in a way that would be disrespectful, so I just had a go at the best I could do of a portrait of Ozzy Osbourne, basically. I went as earnest as I could stomach, because I try not to be too earnest, and that was a good challenge. But ‘taking it seriously or not’ is hard to define for me, because I take comedy seriously, but that sort of doesn’t make sense as a sentence – I take it all seriously, because I wouldn’t do it otherwise. I take the silliness very seriously, if you know what I mean?
Then there’s a couple of my friends who I’ve painted, and I’ve added silly things that they said to me or that they said in their lives, because the reason I liked them as people was that they were funny, so I don’t want to be like “they’re dead and that’s very sad” – I want things that they did to continue making me laugh, even in their death. I don’t want anyone to be going around crying. The thing that I’ve loved is when people go round, you just hear giggling, that’s great.
There’s a bit of anger in the exhibition too. It’s not melancholy, it’s “how dare we get rid of this?” One of the pieces I think will inspire some sadness and anger is of the Electric Cinema, which was, until it closed, the oldest working cinema in the UK. I don’t know the full details, but basically the position of the guy running it was made untenable by the people that own it, because they want to knock it down and build something else. I think it would be a travesty if that was allowed to happen. So there’s things like that where it’s not funny and it’s not trying to make people sad, but I just want us to kind of pause in that moment and go, “Are we glad this has gone? ’Cause we probably could save it if we put enough into it.”
Yeah. So, that’s about as serious as it gets, but then, like, I painted Margaret Thatcher in 45 minutes!
INT: She doesn’t deserve any longer!
JL: Well, exactly! I’d given myself an hour and I polished it off in 45, so, done!