“House lights out, cue intro”. The countdown has reached zero, and the fans know it. The band knows it. Frantically searching for where these rock and roll gods will descend from the crowd comes alive with an electric roar as powerful as any riff the Rolling Stones can play.
Aside from a dull vibration caused by the stadiums occupants, there is still quite back stage. But the tension is mounting as the band walks past the metropolis of back stage scaffolding, guide wires, and walkways; flickering LED's showing them the way to their awaiting audience.
In the half-light, Charlie is relaxed in front of his drums as he begins. The speakers come alive with the rhythmic boom, tap, tap boom; hypnotising the audience. They are not just hearing the warm up music from the dark stage, they are feeling it. The regularity of the beat is suddenly sharply pierced, by a single ear splitting chord bursting with a million watts of power forth from a red Dusenberg. The stage is no longer dark, it has been painted with rock and roll, the rock and Roll of the Rolling Stones.
When Martin Scorsese decided to call his feature film about the legendary Rolling Stones “Shine A Light”, it made perfect sense. The Stones shine a light from the dark every time they perform. The films premier at the Beacon Theater was a metaphor for Rolling Stones performances; at the start the screen was black and white and only once the film had truly come to light did the colour return. This representation of Rolling Stones bringing light into the flat, dark world of the stage that exists before a performance follows exactly the work of Ronnie Wood in his newest series of works, Paint It Black.
The crisp, elegant form of the Paint it Black figures is synonymous with the style of Ronnie Wood. Leaping forward from the canvases black void, the paintings subject represent the ability of the Rolling Stones to conjure colour and energy from the dark. By only using the media of light and colour, Ronnie has been able to perfectly capture the nature of swaggering ballet of Keith, the hypnotic rhythm of Charlie's drums and the powerhouse of Mick. Each line in the dark acts as a haiku, revealing just a little more of the poetry behind the Rolling Stones; resulting in a stunning collection of 5 works helping to bring into the light another part of the Stones' story as only Ronnie Wood can.
