Kilford: The Music Painter

How should a ‘painter of music’ look?

Kilford has painted on-stage with acts from The Black Eyed Peas to Iggy & The Stooges, so there was a fair chance, I thought, he’d be rocking a rock-star look.

Big shades? Check. Swagger? Oh yes.

This man is cocky – I ask if he can sum himself up in three words; he goes for ‘World’s Greatest Painter’.

But he’s open, hospitable and he lends me his coat while the gas heater warms his Bedfordshire studio (Kilford has a base in London and returns to the capital for good next year).

He tells me how it all started.

‘I was in a club and saw these colours jumping around people. I thought, “that’s fucking beautiful”, and I went home and painted it.’

I mention synaesthesia – seeing sounds; he shrugs.

‘It’s more about getting into a zone… allowing yourself to share your being with the music.’

The morning after the club before, armed with a B in A-level art and every art material he could buy (soon binning the brushes – he prefers to daub with his fingers), Kilford put on ‘loungey’ music and painted “loads and loads of really shitty, fucking horrible pictures, and thought they were the best.”

After blagging his way into a soundcheck, in 2005 he persuaded The Feeling that he should paint on stage with them.

Since then he has painted with some of music’s biggest names in venues from The Royal Albert Hall to Brixton Academy. Damon Albarn, Paul Weller, Baaba Maal, I Blame Coco and Pendulum have had the Kilford treatment, and in August he became the first artist to paint live at Knebworth, at the Sonisphere Festival, where he shared the stage with aforementioned Iggy.

He appears to be the first to do what he does on this scale, and you may be wondering why he does it.

‘I was in a band, a singer, and I love the performance aspect of that’, he tells me, ‘and I thought, you know, I need to do something live so people can see this thing’.

The more cynical might assume that Kilford is a rock star manqué.

‘I’m totally happy being the music painter,’ he answers, ‘not the music painter that wants to be in a band.’

What else drives him? Is it also about the canvases that result? ‘No’, insists Kilford: when the music stops, so does he.

‘I have absolutely total disregard for what the painting actually looks like.’

So it’s not for his legacy, he reckons, and it’s not about the approval of punters and critics…

‘There’s a couple of blogs out there that says it looks like a fucking elephant’s done it, and blah, blah, blah. People have their view and stuff, but I don’t give a fuck if any art critic from any newspaper or any art journal or whatever, if they knock or disrespect my work or say it’s a pile of shit. I don’t give a fuck. I really don’t. I actually would enjoy it.’

…or to hang out with the art establishment:

‘Me and Banksy are probably the most exciting fucking people that are doing anything in art these days. Everything else is fucking boring.’

What about the money? While his paintings can go for thousands of pounds (the most a canvas has fetched is £47k), Kilford also allows people to download his art for free from his website, and in September started using a unique payment model called Sharing is Caring, which pays fans 15 per cent of his online sales in return for sharing the artwork with friends. While he flogs single song sketches commissioned by his fans for £1000, prints are a relatively inexpensive £23.

That leaves art itself. I ask: would you be able to create without the tunes?

‘But why would the Music Painter paint without the music?’ he responds, deadpan.

For all the attitude, Kilford is most animated when talking about his gratitude to fans, and a very old-fashioned motivation: making art accessible, especially to younger people.

Kilford highlights the affordability of much of his art, and his One Love ‘movement’ (‘art and music coming together’), which has spawned a monthly installation at The Social at which musicians play and their work is painted – all part of his mission:

‘Fucking right, babe. That’s a key thing for me. One of my principles is that art’s for everyone. Art doesn’t discriminate; creation doesn’t discriminate. I disregard any form of elitism. I don’t just disregard it. I fucking kick the fuck out of it.’

PS: Later, Kilford emailed me to tell me about another of his projects: commissions from people’s wedding ‘first songs’.

‘The reason I’m bringing it up now is I reckon Prince William would choose some proper cool tunes at his wedding, and a painting of that would be very special…. I reckon the finished music painting would be fit for a King eh.’

If anyone has the chutzpah to pull this off, it’s Kilford.

Kilford – The Music Painter will be painting live at King’s Cross St Pancras for Station Sessions on Thursday 9 December, and at his next One Love installation on January 17, 2011, at:

The Social
5 Little Portland Sreet,
Fitzrovia
W1W 7JD

All proceeds from One Love are donated to The Sam Buxton Healing Trust, which provides complementary therapy to cancer patients at UCLH