Don Van Vliet

Don Van Vliet can still remember the day he was born in Glendale, California in 1941. Despite going on to lead one of the most innovative and influential bands of the 20th century, The Magic Band, Vliet began his creative life as an aspiring sculptor. His talent evident from the age of three and he had even apprenticed under a man called Agosthino Rodriguez who considered him a child prodigy, however it wasn't until much later in his life that fine art came to define the man. Vliet's parents had a deep aversion and mistrust of fine art and seemed to go out of their way to stem Vliet's creativity such was his passion. When he was thirteen his parents moved to the Mojave Desert, and it was here, (to his parents dismay) that not only would Vliet's creativity flair amplify, but so to would his love of music, coming into posession of old Jazz and Blues records by people like Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Muddy Waters.

You can imagine Don Van Vliet at this point, this young kid in the middle of nowhere, spending his time making sculptures and listening to blistering jazz and blues records. He no doubt found an affinity with those records as the music he went on to create was like some mutated zombie sister to it, channeling a spirit that was as riveting as it was bizarre. Warped surrealistic ideas about zig zag wanderers and ice cream for crows backed by the ordered chaos of The Magic Band...they defy description. Despite never making it big in the market, they went on to influence a myriad of future performers, from Tom Waits to The Clash. Beefheart could barely play a note yet he orchestrated it all.

It wasn't until 1982, after a fairly tumltuous time in the music business with no great critical acclaim that Captain Beefheart surrendered his alterego and reverted back to Don Van Vliet to focus on a future career fine art, which isn't to say any of his inherent weirdness was to take a rest.



Vliet's paintings are reminiscent of Neo-Expressionist artists like Georg Baselitz and Philip Guston, they have a distinctly abstract expressionist feel yet there are figures there. The works are alomst naive in their execution, with large parts of the canvas often being left white, and figures drawn so loosley they seem almost incidental. I like his paintings, they have a naturalistic element to them, a spiritual quality which i feel would be beyond the means of expression to say an inner city artist, they are untainted by dirty streets, by city lights, by cars. Vliet's subject is simple: nature and spirituality.

Below is a video on Don Van Vliet by the photographer Anton Corbijn which came out in 1993. It features both Vliet's mother and David Lynch.

Phillip Guston

Philip Guston's parents escaped the Ukrain to Montreal, Canada where he was born in 1913. They soon moved to LA, where Guston would later come to be one of the preeminent artists of the New York School. The New York School was comprised of the great Abstract Expressionists of the time, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning, yet Guston came to represent a lot more than just the Abstract Expressionist movement, and spearheaded a new type of painting which came to be described as Neo-Expressionism. Like the works of artists such as De Kooning, Guston's later work was also gestural and expressive, yet it incorporated a representational approach which allowed Guston to explore personal subject matter that had evidently stayed with him since childhood.

A recurring theme that surrounds modernist art is that of trauma and depression, and both effected Guston's life. At ten he discovered his father hanging from roof of his shed, and being Jewish he and his family were often confronted with racism and an oppresive and unjust justice system. His paintings are stories, picaresque scenes from the private mind of their creator, and whilst they aren't necessarily literal translations of life experiences, they are still in a way autobiographical...whilst often intangible. To quote Guston himself:

I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere, a trifle, some detail observed, wondered about and, naturally from the previous painting. The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

Looking at his paintings, they are utterly beguiling and mystifying. Bold and brash blacks and a sedated palette of pinks and creams form strange contrasts while the figures almost seem magnified on the canvas. It is perhaps the sheer otherworldliness of the work that makes it so captivating, his works are reminsicent of the comic strip artist Robert Crumb, yet there is something more to them that prevents them from being percieved as merely graphical works (which isn't to discredit the brilliance of Crumb), yet it's for this reason that Guston's works have caused great derision amongst the art world, and why he is considered such an important artist of the 20th century.

Pablo Neruda

DRUNK AS DRUNK

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

Pablo Neruda, Sex Poet

Edvard Munch

An artist I've realised I have a great affinity with is the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. It's a shame how some artists seem to be bracketed by just one or two works in their career as Munch was in his. The Scream is no doubt a breakthrough work, both in style and in sentiment. The style is fluid, the pastels seem to swell around the work like a raging tide. The motivation of the work stems from a feeling of deep torment, a trauma resulting from a horrifying confrontation with an imperfect world, a modernising world with an anxious future. Below is an exerpt Munch wrote about the work himself.

I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.

Besides this magnificant work however, Munch was an incredibly industrious artist whose skill branched into many different mediums; painting, etching and drawing were all well within his grasp. I feel his style was exemplary of the idea of an artists style reflecting their sentiment - in the same way that say Tom Waits' lyrics fit around the music, as though it were impossible for the two to ever be apart. His approach was often criticised for being naive and irresolved - but what better way to depict a world on the edge and inshrouded with doubt, it was 1893. Like many at that time, Munch had a severe mistrust for the industrial revolution and the way in which it would effect both the natural world as well as that of human relations. Looking at the state of the world these days, you must admit it's hard to think his anxiety unwarranted. He was a seer, a master and utterly humane, which are just several reasons for which he is one of my favourite artists.




The Dance of Life