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In this noisy world, the zen calm of Painting With John season 2 is a blessing

If you liked the first season, the next six episodes of this beautifully silly HBO show offers more of the same… thank goodness

By Noel Murray | February 11, 2022 | 7:00pm

TV Reviews Painting with John

In this noisy world, the zen calm of Painting With John season 2 is a blessing

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There is no “previously on Painting With John” at the start of the show’s second season, although for those unfamiliar with John Lurie’s weird TV art project— or for those who need a refresher on what it’s all about—the host does helpfully catch us up in the opening minutes of the first episode. “Hello,” he says, “And welcome to Painting With John season two. The show where I do not teach you how to paint.” There follows a 25-second shot of a lizard on a rock.

For those who need a fuller explanation than that, here goes: “John” is John Lurie, a musician, artist, and actor who has been a staple of American underground pop culture since the 1970s and ’80s: as the co-founder of the avant-jazz band The Lounge Lizards, as the star of multiple Jim Jarmusch movies, and as the host of the unclassifiable IFC television series Fishing With John. With his gravelly voice, his puffy-lipped embouchure, his low-key hipster cool, and his genuine passion for art and life, Lurie has always had a one-of-a-kind presence.

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Season one of Lurie’s wonderfully bent HBO show Painting With John debuted in January 2021, at a time when it helped soften the last few pre-vaccine weeks of the pandemic (while also filling the void left by the conclusion of HBO’s similarly shaggy and lo-fi series How To With John Wilson). Created in collaboration with Erik Mockus—who holds the camera and helps edit the footage—Painting With John is true to its title, with each episode consisting mostly of long scenes of Lurie creating imaginative and strikingly beautiful artworks in his studio, while he talks about his childhood or about his heady days as one of the legends of the New York art scene. The show is like one of those old Bob Ross painting demonstrations, but rather than describing what tools to use to make trees and clouds, the host shares long, winding anecdotes about Klaus Nomi and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Those Nomi and Basquiat stories pop up in season two, along with a fun memory of Joey Ramone, a recollection of a trip with Lurie’s dad to a 1962 World Series game, and a hilarious description of the time Lurie tried to make some extra money by faking his way through a lecture to a foreign audience about cutting-edge technology. Pieced together, these memories—coupled with Lurie’s reveries about his family and his schooldays, and his thoughts on topics as wide-ranging as the hideousness of TV makeover shows and why men should never tell women to “smile more”—form a kind of cockeyed memoir, combining bits of biography and philosophy. They’re the portrait of a man who hustled his way through some wild times in New York and is now relaxed and semi-retired on an unspecified Caribbean island.

As with season one, Painting With John’s second season features interludes shot around Lurie’s small estate. Sometimes Lurie and Mockus marvel at the local flora and fauna, including some absolutely enormous insects and vividly colorful fruits. And sometimes Lurie goofs around with his two “co-stars,” his assistants Nesrin Wolf and Ann Mary Gludd James. A new addition for season two is the recurring sketch “Cowboy Beckett,” where Lurie and his employees dress in western gear and perform absurdist theater in front of digital backdrops that resemble his paintings.

To be honest though, calling Cowboy Beckett a “sketch” is a bit of a stretch. A hallmark of Painting With John is that nothing here—with the exception of the paintings themselves, displayed at the end of each episode like a little gallery exhibit—is at all polished or “finished.” At the end of the second episode, Lurie makes a funny sound with his face and lips by shaking his head back and forth vigorously and then looping the noise. At the beginning of the third episode, he repeats the effect. In between, he quips, “Thanks for the money, HBO!” (In another nod to his cable TV benefactor, in one episode Lurie starts quoting the true-crime series The Jinx as he walks out of frame and into the bathroom.) If some strange idea pops into Lurie’s head, he tries it out. If it’s utter nonsense, all the better.

There are a few more self-referential moments in Painting With John’s second season, as Lurie talks about the reaction to his previous episodes and expresses some ambivalence about hundreds of thousands of strangers suddenly thinking they know him and his life based on the little 20-minute glimpses he’s allowed with this show. This doesn’t really affect the direction Lurie takes this year, though—aside from a few moments where he purports to expose the “problems” with his seemingly idyllic beachfront paradise, which includes occasional flooding and a washing machine that vibrates too much.

But while Lurie may be right that no one can really figure him out based on a funky TV series, there is something to be gleaned about his artistic sensibility from this freewheeling mix of painting demonstrations, nature photography, music videos, monologues, and recipes. Everything here fits together in a way. The paintings are a lot like Lurie’s music, in that they seem to begin with a mess—a splotch of ink here, a clanking rhythm there—which the artist then shapes into something at first recognizable and then lovely. Lurie finds patterns in disorder, and while he doesn’t try to tame the craziness, he does find uses for it.

More than anything though, Painting With John is just very calming. Its pitch rarely rises above a murmur; and because there’s no pressure to figure out exactly why Lurie and Mockus include what they do, viewers can relax and let all the pretty pictures and odd sounds wash over them, carrying them wherever they may.