Meet Claude Decrepney; a tattooed, globe trotting, moustache bearing, hat wearing sailor boy who sits centre frame in Gary Ray Smith’s paintings. Full of secrets and insights to Gary’s personal life, there is a lot more than meets the eye with this handsome fellow.
Claude has been with Gary since the painter studied fashion and textiles in 1981 because ‘I just needed someone to model’ knitwear. Born as part of the artist’s early process, Gary once painted Claude to model his knitted vests.
Although Gary may be most known for his paintings, his artistic career has been thoroughly intertwined with wool. Taught by ‘my mum and my nan’, Gary picked up the craft at an early age and continued to develop his skills in his teenage years before studying at Chelsea College of Art. Now he is known as The Knitting Man on Youtube and can proudly ‘knit whatever I like’. However, he is quick to acknowledge how he wasn’t always so skilled.
His beautiful surface design work flourished over the course of his studies, partly thanks to knitwear designer, Martin Kidman. Lacking the budget to afford Kidman’s work, he decided to get ‘some graph paper and try’. For those of us who can’t see what purls and frogs have to do with knitting, the idea of fabricating a swallow without guidance sounds a tinsy insy bit quite terrifying. I am sure those who possess the ability to bind off and cast on can fully appreciate the challenge Gary had in between his hands. ‘I was terrible’ Gary recalls, ‘really terrible. But I persevered.’ and needles to say we are glad he did.
During his studies, The Knitting Man needed a quick way to test various jumpers and vest patterns prior to the lengthy process of creating a woollen garment. So Claude was born. A model to flaunt and test out designs, he started his modern life out of utility. With ease, Gary would whip up five or six colourways of a jumper displayed on Claude in no time at all, which meant five or six individual paintings. Pointing to a half completed purple vest, the artist outlines ‘I have been doing that for about a year’ and had spent around 250 hours working at it. Simply, Claude was part of the time consuming process to reach what was once the final destination, his impressive knitwear.
Despite the difference between painting and knitting, the golden thread pulling the two together is Gary’s lifelong passion for surface design. This comes as no surprise. The painter spent 35 years in the sign industry, designing and installing graphics for establishments such as the National Gallery, Debenhams and even our local Flambards. Gary’s graphic storytelling abilities are evident in his work. Knitwear and painting simply offer him means to do this.
By focussing on painting Claude, he gains a level of freedom, feeling like ‘he can do everything on Claude’ and ‘he can drop things in there’ onto the painting. He treats each visual element of the painting ‘as a separate canvas for me to use and paint in a different way.’ There is the background element, where Gary gets to decide what imaginary world Claude will find himself. The vest, to allow for pattern and colour exploration, and of course the tattoos, which are often the most surprising layer.
Sometimes his tattoos are simply decorative elements, getting inspiration from the library of visual knowledge on the painter’s bookshelf. Other times, the vibrant designs that catch Gary’s magpie eye mash and merge with snippets from his own life. Gary opens a book of book cover designs and reads out ‘beware of harlots and many friends’ and muses how ‘I might swap that for beware of harlots and vasectomies because I had a bad time with my vasectomy’.
His wicked and subtle sense of humour creeps up on the arms of Claude. In another rendition of the blue eyed sailor, tattooed is ‘Beware Guns and Ford Capris’. Illustrating why he chose that sentence in particular he offered the explanation:
‘My nan, when she was 80 she was doo lally. She had Alzheimer’s and she lived alone. She was proper cockney and she used to just go down the road to the pub and clear glasses up and they’d give her free pints. So she was Alzheimer's and drunk as a lord and was on her way home when the pub closed and she got taken out by a Ford Capri. She died instantly, so it was lovely. If you want to die that’s the way you’d want to go.’ Finding humour in surprising places Gary illustrates that ‘you can smuggle stuff in your paintings’ and reassures me; ‘and I do.’
His process of layering stories, personal references and found visuals, allows him to test ideas as though they were designs for a new jumper. With each artwork showing reference to one that might have existed before it. When describing his source of inspiration when painting, he references David Lynch. ‘Once you get a flicker of an idea it’s like a little fish, and dangling a little fish you get a bigger fish. and that’s what happens’. Each version of Claude follows a different humorous thought, stating ‘I quite like the idea of it being subversive, without people knowing they are buying what they’re buying. there’s lots of cheeky secrets.’
Even Claude himself is a collage of his personal life and found artefacts. Nodding to a poster of an Edwardian man riding a penny farthing, he explains how when he moved into his home in 1976 the previous owners had left ‘a poster of a man on a penny bicycle in the hallway’ and a dog. While the dog was of no influence to the painter’s style, the poster became the visual basis for Claude. Mixed with a couple of old photographs of men and developed over the last 35 years, Gary recently arrived at the Claude we know today.
‘Claude is my alter ego’ Gary states. ‘He can do things I can’t. I haven’t got any tattoos, he is quite the ladies man (even though he is quite attractive to men), he can say political things. I can do anything with him.’ Hidden in plain sight, Claude is a reflection of Gary's playful mind, his far away thoughts and mementos from his full life.
