I hadn’t meant to do another rock star painting so soon after finishing “Thunderstruck” but a suggestion led to inspiration, and so we have this…

Eric Clapton should need no introduction. One of the best and most innovative rock guitarists of all time. A solo artist but also a member of multiple bands over the years, including the Yardbirds, Derek and the Dominoes, and Cream. My all-time favorite example of his artistry is the lead guitar he did for the Beatles on George Harrison’s song, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Without Clapton that song would have paled by comparison.

The main setting of this painting is the Concert for George on November 29, 2002, which Clapton arranged and headlined to celebrate Harrison’s life and work. Together with Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and multiple other musicians on stage, Clapton sang and did lead guitar on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” (Later, Prince did his own lead guitar interpretation for that song when Harrison was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame…)

But the portrait was a challenge to paint. Clapton’s face was blurred when the reference photo was enlarged to the size I needed, plus his head-down pose, eyeglasses, and reflections from stage lighting made it difficult to be confident I was capturing his likeness. I pulled stills from the concert video to help. The background in the scene was not suitable and so I substituted another reference photo of drums behind Clapton and tweaked the coloring accordingly.

Another tweak is that I found reference photos of Clapton’s unique guitar in order to paint its true colors, rather than the muted colors found in the reference photo. It’s a Fender Statocaster painted in graffiti style, and affectionately called the Crashocaster. He used it between 2001 and  2004. It’s also become known as Crash 1 because Clapton has had a series of these painted guitars, including Crash 2 and Crash 3.

It seemed only fitting to call this “Slowhand,” which is Clapton’s nickname. He’s told varying stories about the origin of it, which you can read at this link. The most widely used story is that during his time with the Yardbirds, Clapton used light-gauge guitar strings to make it easier to bend the notes, but this caused him to break at least one string during concerts. During the pauses while he restrung his guitar, the audience would often break into a slow handclap to fill the time.

The main reference photo from the Concert for George was taken by Marka and licensed from Alamy.

In addition to “Slowhand,” my rock musician paintings now include Pete Townshend of The Who in “One With the Music,” the Fab Four in “Beatles on the Rooftop,” Bono and Edge of U2 in “With Or Without You,” Jagger and Richards of The Rolling Stones in “Mick and Keith,” Bruce Springsteen with Clarence Clemons and Steven Van Zandt in “Born to Run,” Stevie Nicks in “One-Winged Dove,” and Angus Young and Brian Johnson of AC/DC in “Thunderstruck.”