Anyone else think his art is very bland?
He just copied some pollock at first and then the celebrity art he did was just very basic and it really seems like he used celebrity names to sell the art.
I know his guitar playing was not totally original but it sounded good up until 2012, when he ran out of ideas.
Bland? Well, there's lfew things more subjective in the creative arts than fine art/painting. Particularly when you start wandering into abstract & conceptual art which Squire did around the time he became fixated on the likes of Cy Twombly.
I think his celebrity series of works was a clever little package with it's easy to get concept of the Islamic/icon juxtaposition, as well as having decorative appeal & celebrity reference points. But it - or him as an artist never really took off, which is the lottery of the contemporary art world for you - manipulated, fickle & cynical. Ironically, his fame as a musician didn't probably help much, despite being in a different league to Ronnie Wood, who's childish shitty painting sells for fuck knows what. Or Dylan & his lightweight offerings & you can chuck Paul Simonon in there too. Squire is far more sophisticated than all of them.
Personally, I prefer his figurative work - specifically the image of the dolphins that adorns this website. It's a nice example of a sort of pointillism & you really have to know what you're doing to pull that off. There's no question that he's a talented painter as well as having great visual ideas - his adaption of Pollock's abstract imagery was a brilliant stroke which fed so well into the homogeneous approach of the band at that time - & had he chosen the path of an artist earlier on, as opposed to a musician, I think he would have had a good a chance as any of succeeding. Luckily for us, he didn't.