RONNIE Wood sounds weary. He was at the races the day before. Ascot to be precise. He moves rapidly to the business at hand, his first Irish art exhibition, which opens next week. Okay, Ron, what would you say to a Stones fan who might, for example, look at the sketch you did of Keith Richards picking his nails during the Voodoo Lounge rehearsals and say, "Hey, I want images of the real Voodoo stuff, satanic rituals, guitarists selling their soul to the devil, drugs, groupies, the lot"?
"That'll be my next exhibition!" he says. "Yet something like the Beggar's Banquet oil painting does give a hint of all that. But what went for in the work I did during the rehearsals for Voodoo Lounge was a more quiet look at Keith and Mick. It's definitely more intimate than the public usually sees, while keeping the roughness of Keith in there. So I'm not really running away from that aspect of The Stones."
Wood immersed himself in both blues music and the visual arts back when he was at art college in Ealing, as did other rockers such as Pete Townshend. So did he ever buy into Robert Johnson's belief that you have to sell your soul to the devil in order to create your greatest art?
"No. This whole bluesbased Voodoo aspect to it all is just colours to me - makes me use more flamboyant colours," Wood says. "I don't go into that other stuff. The nearest I all got to that was Muddy Waters with all his voodoo charms, but I never got into the black magic, like some guys did.
"When I listened to Robert Johnson it just sounded like an orchestra to me, music made by three or four guitarists at the same time. I didn't hear evil, I got great pleasure from that music."
Ronnie Wood claims many of those rockers who were his college contemporaries in the 1960s, with their diverse artschool influences, "did redefine British rock, to a great degree". To it, he says, they brought new visions which also informed Pop Art.
Also, he sees his own work, such as the two screenprints, John, Buddy and Elvis as linking directly into a line that goes all the way back through the work of Warhol to Peter Blake and even Ray Johnson, who did a decidedly post modern portrait of Elvis as far back as 1955.
"People like that always were interesting to me, though I also studied the Old Masters, Impressionism, Cubism, in college," he explains. "All that influenced me. As well as comicbook art things such as Dudley D. Watkins who did Desperate Dan! All that is art to me, too. And that's why I pick people like Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, as subjects. It's the spirit of these people I identify with."
It was while he was at art college that Ronnie Wood also identified the similarities between art and music. And the differences.
"The art is a personal thing and you control it and drive it, which is a great, nice, selfish attitude, whereas you do music as part of band. That's the fundamental difference," he suggests.
"But one of the similarities is that I've always looked on overdubs in the recording studio as much the same as laying colour over colour. Like, there is a lot of dramatic force in red and black and I love those colours, in art and in music. And coming out of an art school and music background, this mix is something stamped on you from a very young age.
"But it was a bit risky, in the 1960s, trying to make it as a musician, on one hand, yet also pushing your art on people, so I didn't really pick up on the art side of things until the 1980s when things were kinda dry with the Stones."
Where would Ronnie say he has created his best lines, on guitar and in the medium of the visual arts?
"Some of my etching work expresses very bleakly music coming through, as in the Jagger etching, which has very sparse lines, like a great blues tune," he responds. As for music, some of the best stuff I've ever done really is there on the new Stones album we're recording at the moment. Some of the licks on my solo albums also capture the cutting brittleness of my art work. It's like scratching onto metal. So, it's at that key level that I really do see my art work and music as exactly the same.