Alastair Smart

Trivial pursuits

Offset by a blood-spattered backdrop, this is just one of many startling images from Grayson’s colourful sketchbooks, dating from the 1980s

issue 16 April 2016

Well, he’s back. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking he’d never been away. Fresh from delivering the Reith lectures, exhibitions nationwide, various television shows for Channel 4, countless broadsheet interviews, building his ‘dream house’ in Essex and much else besides, Grayson Perry is back.

His latest offering is a book of sketches, selected from across his career. He began drawing as a boy in notebooks his grandmother gave him, filling them with images of racing cars and comic-book characters. It was at art school in Portsmouth in the early 1980s, however, that Perry began sketching in earnest, a practice he kept up when he subsequently moved to London, a lack of money for studio space meaning it was his only artistic outlet.

Suburban housewives in tweed coats appear, as well as Barbie dolls, motorbike racers, crying mummy’s boys, toy soldiers and crucified pin-ups.

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