Why does grayson perry dress up as a woman

Some of them we don't really give a damn about. What's interesting is what might not re-emerge. Also discussing the coronavrius pandemic, Perry added: 'The environment has benefited, forcing a long-overdue readjustment in our consumerist, carbon footprint-heavy ways.

We don't want to fly now; we're all cycling. Also discussing the coronavrius pandemic, Perry said his Greta Thunberg will be 'wetting her knickers' as it's good for the environment.

He is pictured in March as his alter ego Claire. The poor suffer more, the non-whites suffer more It's a ripe moment for social revolution. While his creative days have too undergone considerable changes, Perry has had a productive year.

Perry is pictured as Claire in May last year. The show encouraged those at home to make art at a crucial time when the nation found themselves with extra time on their hands and in need of a creative outlet. The show followed Grayson and his psychotherapist wife Philippa around his North London studio as they themselves made art, while the public also submitted artworks on weekly themes from portraits to fantasy.

The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. Argos AO. Privacy Policy Feedback. He was born in Essex to working-class parents. He says his father, an engineer, was a weak and narrow-minded man. His mother suffered from mental illness, had a volcanic temper and was eternally disappointed.

When Perry was four, she ran off with the milkman this is why, he tells me, he has always hated cliches and married him. His stepfather was violent and intolerant, a newsagent by day and an amateur wrestler by night. He is no longer in touch with his mother. Like his mother, young Grayson was bright and mixed up. He knew from the off that this was an unusual combination.

At 10, he had not heard of transvestism and felt he must be a solitary freak. He asked his sister if he could borrow a dress and wore it in private. He was outed only when his stepsister found his diary. How did his family react? I reacted badly to that as well. I was a big sulker. And I put a cap on it until I went to university. His lifelong exploration of identity has always been about more than the girl-boy thing, though.

Nor is Claire a stable identity. She has evolved from Monsoon girl, to Little Bo Peep, to chic woman of the world — and now has a thing for clown outfits. Did he stitch it himself? No, he says, of course not — it would take for ever. As it is, it took him two months to complete the drawing on which it was based; the sewing is then done digitally.

Can he sew? I did basic embroidery and can probably mend a sock. I embrace the middle ground, because curiously it has more edge to it than the cutting edge. It has been a weirdly neglected path for the audience of contemporary art.

He then gives me a brilliant off-the-cuff lecture about how photography destroyed classical narrative paintings, leading to the formation of a new intellectual art elite that trades on abstracts, concepts and multiple meanings. Perry says the problem with many art students is that they are too anxious to create stuff they simply like. It is very self-conscious: it knows, or should be seen to know.

Irony has become this crippling get-out-of-jail-free card. Britain has the toad of irony sitting on it. Has he been squatted on by the toad of irony? Oh yes, he says. He admits that what attracted him to pottery in the first place was its very naffness. There is a long history of ceramics, of course, but nobody who had really embraced the conventional craft, the orthodoxies: pots that are pot-shaped, that are fired, that are glazed, that are decorative.

When did he realise it was a niche? I, like many artists, am brilliant at post-rationalisation. You stumble into it. He was 24, living in a squat and shocked that anybody would want to buy his work. Is he loaded? He laughs that great brute of a laugh. Perry admits that he is reaching an age, 54, when it is more challenging to be a beautiful transvestite. When I look back at the first photographs, I realise what a wasted opportunity it was.

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