Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Painting With John’ Season 3 on Max, Where The Inimitable John Lurie Is Artist, Ringmaster, Musician And Philosopher

It’s the third season of Painting With John (Max), featuring the creative restlessness of artist, musician, actor, and director John Lurie. These brief episodes typically revolve around Lurie’s observations on life as we know it, light comedy, the health of our planet, his personal history with a host of famous faces, and the creation of another one of his thoughtful watercolors, often to music performed with his band. (There’s an official PWJ soundtrack streaming on Spotify.) Painting With John is executive produced by Adam McKay, and in season 3 will include Flea as a special guest. 

PAINTING WITH JOHN – SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “Previously on Painting With John,” we hear John Lurie intone. But it’s a misdirect, which is pretty normal around these parts. And instead, Lurie and his contributors Nesrin Wolf and Ann Mary Gludd James strike up a few seconds of radical vocal harmonizing.

The Gist: If you’ve ever come across Fishing With John, his early 1990s series that featured him tackling strange and forbidding places and occurrences with guests including Jim Jarmusch and Dennis Hopper – nowadays, it’s streaming on The Criterion Channel – then you might have a sense for what John Lurie is doing in Painting With John, his current series for Max that takes place in and around his Caribbean island home. That’s its physical setting, at least. Because across its three seasons, what the veteran musician, actor, artist, and director has proven is that this latest outlet for his voluminous creativity occurs as much in his mind or in the space between canvas and paintbrush. Lurie always seems happy that we’ve joined him. But it’s been clear since Painting With John began that he’d probably be doing a version of what we see anyway, for his own volition, even if the solitary camera was never there.

In the first episode of PWJ season 3, “Hermits Unite,” Lurie addresses the camera in his usual manner and relates a story about the chaos and unnerving occurrences of airports and travel. Aggressive strangers, lines to nowhere, and unexpected threats to personal safety combine until he’s mostly fed up – “I think I’ll never leave the house again” – but luckily humanity is redeemed by a family he observes making the best of the grind. Lurie has led an eventful life, and he’s always been a storyteller; he published an acclaimed memoir in 2021. And so it is with these vignettes that they are as much an anecdote as a snippet of a larger thing, his work in progress about life in general.

That’s a recurring theme in Lurie’s show, of course, what we’ve got up to as a human race and how our foibles make us both gorgeous and grotesque. But he’s rarely interested in approaching those ideas head on. Instead, he’ll find famous faces in nooks and crannies of a piece of toast, perform a few bits of gallivanting Vaudeville alongside Wolf, one of his regular collaborators, and drift into a soliloquy about the perils of binge watching, an activity we enter into innocently until it’s three weeks later and our loved ones are attempting an intervention, even as we long to finish the ninth season of some streamer’s offering. Ultimately, he wonders if it’s time we produced less. “We have to curb this impulse. The planet wants no more of it. Do less. Slow things to a halt. Hermits unite.”   

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There is the aforementioned Fishing With John, of course. And episodes of Painting with John would also feel right at home next to Joe Pera Talks With You, the ruminative and very funny series which ran for three seasons and a few specials on the live-action side of Cartoon Network. 

Our Take: There is so much stuff out here getting canceled right and left. Expensive stuff! Stuff with entire casts of actors, and writing rooms, and crews! And always for the slimmest of stated reasons or some vague corporate decision regarding “metrics.” And yet, here is John Lurie and Painting With John, continuing to defiantly go nowhere fast. Minutes seem to lengthen as the camera lingers on his intricate brushwork; he renders a kind of sea anemone here, some other creature there, and floating banks of seaweed, busy root systems, or a disembodied human hand. His delicate touch with watercolor lends precision and detail to cherry blossoms, or the pistil of a flower, and there is no dialogue to trouble the earthy and moody but also very catchy jazz number on the soundtrack. The completion of a painting isn’t shown in full, though it does appear in its finished form in the credits. But if PWJ was really just a show about its creator and star working steadily with his watercolors, its magnetism as comfort viewing wouldn’t be diminished.

There’s an ASMR quality to this. Lurie can be mildly abrasive – his temperament can at times suggest Anthony Bourdain. (The two men were friends.) But in his first person delivery, combined with the show’s stretches of unstructured painting time, there is a soothing sense of being alongside him on a journey into an eccentric unknown. And that’s a place where there’s something to be learned, even if the satisfaction lies even more in not quite getting there.  

Sex and Skin: Nothing here, man.

Parting Shot: In a clip of what he says is part of an exciting second episode of Painting With John, Lurie is seen in noirish black and white, stalking along an ivy-covered wall, cartoon pistol in hand, a trumpet blaring squalls into the shadows. 

Sleeper Star: Nesrin Wolf and Ann Mary Gludd James are regular participants in John Lurie’s amiable madness. But for as much as they are willing supporting players, Wolf and Gludd James also lend real humor to the proceedings whenever they consider Lurie’s slow-motion antics with grins and bemusement. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “I don’t know why they gave me my own show, because I’m a mess. Really. When we started out doing this, it was just going to be these little clips that we posted on social media to cheer people up, but…” John Lurie trails off.

“The world is getting to me, lately. I really thought by this point that human beings would be doing better. So I’m going through a grim period, and I can’t even cheer my own self up. So you people are on your own. Sorry.” 

Our Call: STREAM IT. John Lurie sometimes calls his program a variety show, and that’s probably apt. Painting With John is part philosophy trip, part left field comedy, part visual and artistic sensation, and part transmission from a perpetually restless creative soul. 

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges