"1967"

Ron Wood's Portrait Of Darryl seethes with repressed rage. Wood depicts his subject against a field of acid green, immediately establishing a mood of nauseous unease. A series of black strokes defines the head, torso, and a hat that looks half Rasta, half Taliban fighter. A helmet for war.

The colors include unnatural blues, reds, yellows and greens, harkening back to the unsettling human figures of Weimar-era German art. A coiled energy threatens to burst out at any moment, like a lifer trapped behind bars of oil and pigment.

The sitter is Darryl Jones, the Rolling Stones’ bassist. His face is a stern enigma, a mask that recalls Picasso's African motifs, as well as Italianate religious art, where the righteous anger of God was rendered with a recognizable humanity.

In a reference to Delacroix’ Orientalist paintings, which themselves are a tumult of double meanings and hidden desires, Wood has posed Jones frontally. Yet the eyes look sideways, searching for something outside the canvas. Respect? More money? His seat in the back of the tour jet?

Or perhaps it is Bill Wyman who lurks just beyond the frame, a troubling ghost haunting Darryl’s – and Wood’s – psyche.

His mouth a hard line, his brow narrowed and downturned, Portrait of Darryl demands an answer that may never come. Unless Charlie Watts starts painting.

– Rick Majestic

Among her many White Rabbit paintings, Very Important Date is Grace Slick's ultimate masterpiece of contradictory messages.

She begins by defiling the original referenced work, as the phrase “very important date” never appears in Lewis Carroll's book – it’s from Disney's Alice where the White Rabbit sings “I'm Late,” which includes the title in its lyric.

Next, Slick creates overwhelming Surrealist sexual tension. In a feminist twist, the White Rabbit, originally male, is depicted as female. The title’s “date” becomes an invitation to carnality, an “adventure in wonderland” where any kind of sexual experimentation is allowed.

The pink umbrella, pointing downward and obscuring the genitals, is an outsized phallus, an instrument of both pleasure and pain, echoed by the strangely human teeth flashing behind rouged lips, flirtatious and threatening.

With its detailed construction of cultural allusions and sexual provocation embedded within a benign surface, Very Important Date is a work that both Jeff Koons and your grandmother might want to hang on the wall.

– Rick Majestic

Carly ended 40 years of Anticipation by revealing the person Who's So Vain is someone no one knows. Now when David Geffen hears the song, he can say, "I DO think it's about me and it is, it is, it IS about me."