Art- Roy Oxlade

Traditionalists don’t like Roy Oxlade’s work, branding it ‘naïve’ and ‘primitive’. Roy doesn’t care much for traditionalists, either. “Imagine being Caravaggio”, he writes in a published correspondence with contemporary Marcus Reichert. “Enough to make you scream; like peeling potatoes in jail”. Oxlade also eschews the hypocrisy of naturalism, the shallowness of abstraction, and the pseudo-realism of conceptual art, as well as the blandness of realist painting. “What a treadmill to be Lucien Freud”, he continues. “I can think of few things more boring than the painter’s craft”. He’s exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Show every year: he’s good, in other words, at being ‘bad’ at painting.
Oxlade finds inspiration far from the conventional world of art. He states, in the same correspondence, a preference for any other imagery: “children’s drawings, the Yellow Pages, cartoons, Mickey Mouse”. He believes that draughtsmanship is the ruin of drawing, adopting Coleridge’s formula for good poetry: “likeness in unlikeness”. He feels that the individual style of the untrained hand is much more able to capture the metaphorical possibilities of an object than somebody whose style has been straitjacketed by the acquisition of ‘technique’. He wants more people to follow his example. It’s a liberating philosophy for people who believe they ‘can’t draw’. “It is time for fresh thinking about the vast expressive potential waiting to be released through drawing…” he has written recently, “…which could emerge from the general public: drawing - by and for everybody”.