Ron English was once called “the Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” for his guerrilla attacks on billboard advertising. He put Hitler and Charles Manson’s faces on Apple’s “think different” posters. He’s mocked Camel cigarettes and McDonald’s hamburgers (“Over 50 billion super-sized. We’re lovin’ it”). He is the godfather of street art – Banksy’s spiritual papa, but more overtly political.
He is also a painter. In an exhibition that opens at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in May, English has produced a 50ft painting recreating Picasso’s Guernica, transforming the original Spanish civilian characters into Disney and Peanuts characters, soccer players and schoolchildren.
English, in his mid-forties, is a shaggy-haired survivor who grew up in smalltown Illinois. As a teen, he was into drugs and had a fight with Angus Young of AC/DC. He was on acid the day he was interviewed for a job at a factory. He got into bed with the enemy at the outset of his career, enrolling to study advertising at the University of Houston. His anticorporatism took root, he told me, when he realised that if he took a picture of his children’s Mickey Mouse nappies and made it into a poster, he would be infringing Disney’s copyright.
English has painted topless Marilyn Monroes with Mickey-like faces for boobs; and a “Muslim Mickey” guaranteed to offend just about everyone. He told me he was “trying to reclaim culture, in the same way the earliest people were overwhelmed by the animals that killed them, so drew their images on cave walls to give them psychological power”.
The odd thing is, he has become part of the Establishment. He is famous, fêted, seemingly well-off – and not that anticorporate. He told me he used Kinko’s and Dell equipment. He let his children go to Burger King and “would rather wear Nikes than go barefoot”. He said he saw himself as an artist rather than activist: “The billboards are something I do at the weekends. It’s romantic to be an angry young man, but not an angry old man.”