Ronnie Wood shot to international fame when The Rolling Stones added the guitarist to the lineup. He wasn’t one of the five original Stones members, but he’s one of the longest-serving. Wood is best known as a guitar player, and a childhood art contest he won predicted his successful future career.
Ronnie Wood played with The Rolling Stones before he officially joined the band
Wood played guitar in the Jeff Beck Group and Faces before strapping on the guitar for the Stones. He also released solo records before Mick Jagger and Keith Richards extended an invitation to join.
Yet Wood was very familiar with the band. He opens his autobiography, Ronnie, describing his awe during a 1964 Rolling Stones concert. Wood helped write the Stones’ song “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)” during a 1973 jam session with Richards and Jagger while recording Woods’ solo album.
Wood was well known to The Rolling Stones when the band was at its peak, and Richards once said adding Wood to the lineup was one of the easiest decisions the group ever made. The second guitarist was about to rock stages worldwide, but an art contest Wood won as a child predicted his future all too eerily.
Wood’s art won a contest that predicted his future fame
Wood grew up modestly in a working-class east London neighborhood, he writes in Ronnie. Yet his parents provided as much as possible, including purchasing a TV for the family. One of his obsessions was watching the BBC show Sketch Club, Wood writes.
Always a talented artist, Wood won a contest run by the show (a nationwide broadcast) that predicted his future:
“[I] won the show’s main prize for a picture of an audience in the cinema, shocked and scared, looking at them from the screen out, as they reacted to a horror film. Winning that prize got my drawings into an exhibition, and that was my awakening to art. I sometimes look back to this picture as the seed to both the worlds I ended up in. Depicting an audience in shock and awe meant my two worlds of art and performance came together in this little picture and preceded my night and day jobs.”
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Ronnie Wood describes his art that won a BBC contest
His picture from the viewpoint of looking out at an audience was eerily prescient. It’s almost as if Wood could predict that he’d someday strut across the stage playing for awe-inspired fans. His stage walking wasn’t the only indicator of his future.
Wood started drawing and painting as a child and never stopped. He sells his work on his website, and he’s had his art displayed in galleries. One drawing made years before he achieved fame with The Rolling Stones predicted Wood’s future success in art and music.
What do critics think of his art?
The future Rolling Stones guitarist won a nationwide art contest as a child and hasn’t stopped drawing and painting. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, and some professional critics struggle to see the allure in Wood’s art.
The guitarist’s heavy Picasso inspiration led some critics to lambaste Wood’s art when he displayed it in 2020, The Guardian reported.
Professional critics might have been harsh, but one piece of Wood’s art was quite impressive — the drawing that predicted his future success in two mediums.
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