An Exhibition of George Clinton’s Paintings Finds the Atomic Dog Up to His Same Old Funky Tricks
Written by Joe Nolan
Funkadelic planted its freak flag in the American music landscape with its eponymous debut album, which touched down on the dividing line between 1960s soul and 1970s funk. Funkadelic, released in 1970, married soul music arrangements with fuzzed-out electric guitars, nodding to Jimi Hendrix and Vanilla Fudge as well as the Motown Sound. Funkadelic founder George Clinton cut his teeth as a staff songwriter at the Detroit label in the 1960s, but his musical destiny drew him away from the Motor City — ultimately, very, very far out. Clinton’s music evolved into the Parliament-Funkadelic collective: a band of rotating musicians playing in two distinct styles and enmeshed in the cosmic mythology that’s folded into the band’s liner notes, album art, insider lingo, lyrical content, and fried-kaleidoscope costume and stage designs.
Clinton’s latest proclamations of funkology take the form of the painted canvases he’s been exhibiting since the late 1990s. Lots of Clinton’s boomer musical peers also make paintings, but where Paul McCartney and Ron Wood’s visual art habits feel ancillary to their musical artistry, Clinton’s gallery displays are anchored in a larger multimedia universe that he’s been expanding for six decades. The artist’s exhibition at Cëcret by Cë Gallery in Wedgewood Houston is by turns familiar, fresh and very funky.
Cë Gallery’s Wedgewood Houston outpost Cëcret has taken over one of the May Hosiery Mill building’s event spaces to accommodate the expansive Grooves From the Deep and the Space Math of George Clinton. The work in Grooves From the Deep was made during the worst of the pandemic, and a smaller version of the exhibition was displayed at the George Washington Carver Museum in Miami in March. This version of Grooves From the Deep includes 31 stretched canvases that vary in size and mix figurative, representational and abstract elements with the same kind of stank and sexy gumbo recipe that informs P-Funk’s best arrangements and studio productions.