The Art of Ron Meerbeek

My most favourite living artist (the kind who paints, draws and does other stuff you look at) is a guy living in Brixton, London SW9, named Ron Meerbeek.  He grew up in Geelong which is a place about an hour away from Melbourne, where I now live.  I think he’s been based in the UK since around 1980.

Meerbeek’s work is very clever, often humorous, complex, and I love it!  

This work is entitled God Fucks Dog.  

Meerbeek has a dog he is besotted with.  

I’ve been collecting prints of his drawings for years.  They are, as I mentioned, often funny, always intricate, meticulous, naughty, and fascinating.  His drawings are a bit like an interesting orchestra, they often have lots of little clever things going on, that upon repeated viewings, you discover make up the whole. 

I feel if he'd been a composer Meerbeek would have been at the more bizarre (i.e. interesting) end, like the best work of Charles Ives.

Ron Meerbeek’s paintings are remarkable too.  He is mad for sure.  Like his drawings, they are often witty, sometimes grotesque, sometimes pretty, sometimes all three.  At times cartoonesque (is that a word?) too, but, I believe his work is more fun than that type of art.  I think, a million times more fascinating than Roy Lichtenstein for example.  Meerbeek’s work doesn’t cost as much as Mr. L’s does.  Yet.

I now own four original works by Meerbeek, three from his shoe painting series. They are small works but very clever with a healthy tiny dose of misogyny.  What genius male painter doesn’t have that, I ask you?

I never tire of looking at my shoe paintings; the one that looks like a hairy cunt is the funniest.