And even as he befriended Frank Zappa and went on to make several classic records of iconoclastic genius, a career in the visual arts was always where he saw himself ending up. The future Captain Beefheart didn’t become enthralled with music until his parents moved from Los Angeles county to the Mojave Desert, where he would spend so many hours in his room painting, sculpting, and listening to music (Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Robert Johnson, etc.) that his parents reportedly served him dinner through his bedroom door. By age nine, Van Vliet won a children’s sculpting competition that would result in an apprenticeship with local tutor Agostinho Rodrigues who regarded the young Beefheart as truly gifted. He began painting and sculpting at age three and gained local notoriety for his renderings of various animals. But despite the perceived primacy of his paintings, Van Vliet was a locally famous artistic prodigy long before he was a musical icon. Van Vliet never received any institutional artistic training, and liked to joke that “half a day of kindergarten” was the extent of his education. But they are totally divorced from contemporary art, and can’t neatly fit into the history of what we know as outsider art or art brut either. There is none of the sophistication of those aforementioned artists, but there is a kind of primal connection to the sort of pained imagery that haunts the closed mind’s eye.Īre the paintings actually good? Well, yes they are quite good. The images in the paintings appear blotted and haphazard – almost disturbingly so. But at the same time, Van Vliet’s paintings really don’t look like any of those artists. When viewing the paintings currently on view at Michael Werner Gallery in New York, entitled Don Van Vliet: Works on Paper, you could point to similarities that Van Vliet’s paintings share with abstract expressionists like de Kooning or Franz Kline, or perhaps latter day neo-expressionist painters like Basquiat or David Salle. Van Vliet’s paintings, by turn, examine the landscapes of the United States – and in particular the deserts of California – finding in its visual cues something more sinister, unhinged, and wild. But in the case of Van Vliet’s paintings and sculptures, an understanding of the man’s music actually helps understand what he was trying to do with visual art.Ĭaptain Beefheart and his Magic Band, with records like Safe as Milk, Doc at the Radar Station, and his magnum opus Trout Mask Replica, sought a contemporary and avant-garde subversion of musical genres steeped in decades of Americana: rock n’ roll, country, and the blues. How do you not immediately view the work through the lens of the music that you already know well and potentially love and/or loathe? When the artist in question is none other than Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, already iconic for his wildly unpredictable approach to blues and rock n’ roll, that subjectivity gets mired in even more layers of preexisting opinion, and in my case, a deep and long-standing love and appreciation. It’s still white compared to the black.Objectively critiquing the visual art works of a famous musician (or actor, or novelist, etc.) is no small order. It doesn’t bother me whether it does or not. The whites, of course, turned yellow, and many people call your attention to that, you know they want white to stay white for ever. As a matter of fact, I just used any black that I could get ahold of.ĭAVID SYLVESTER: And the whites the same say?įRANZ KLINE: The whites the same way. No, I didn’t have any idea of mixing up different kids of blacks. Sometimes a black, because of the quantity of it or the mass or the volume, looks at though it may be a blue-black, as if there were blue mixed in with the black, or as though it were a brown-black or a red-black. I didn’t have particularly a strong desire to use colour, say, in the lights or darks of a black-and-white painting, althought what happened is that accidentally they look that way. I mean there was that marvellous twenty-minute experience of thinking, well, all my life has been wasted but this is marvellous – that sort of thing.ĭAVID SYLVESTER: During the time that you were producing only black-and-white paintings, where you ever colour and then painting over it with black?įRANZ KLINE: No, they started off that way. And then, when they got that way, I just liked them, you know. I think there was a time when the original forms that finally came out in black and white were in colour and then as time went on I painted them out and make them black and white. It was edited for broadcasting by the BBC and first published in “Living Arts” in the spring of 1963:įRANZ KLINE: It wasn’t a question of deciding to do black-and-white painting. An excerpt from the interview with British critic David Sylvester recorded March 1960 in New York City.
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