How the Rock and Roll Icon Artwork began. 

 

What factors prompt an artist to begin a new body of work? For me, the reasons were complex, so complex that this may turn into a truncated autobiography. In junior high school, I made work that was symbolic (I loved Dali). It helped me sift through issues in my psyche (like a bad drug experience). Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I explored the work of Carl Jung, Carlos Castaneda, and various Eastern religions and occult practices. I began channeling imagery like the third eye and alien imagery (which I'd never seen).  I was trapped in my own world of fear and schizophrenic thoughts. The picture below (taken by the school newspaper for winning best of show) sums up my state of mind. I stand beside a drawing of myself sitting in the dark. My thoughts are symbolized as shackled doves.

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After four years of training at the Kansas City Art Institute and a decade of working as a freelance artist, I thought I’d found my passion as a portrait artist, but it soon soured. Although painting like John Singer Sargent had been my dream, I soon realized I lacked the skill and the inspiration to pull it off.  

 

My Father’s dream for me was to become the next Norman Rockwell. Fast-forward to this current time, and I explain my work as a blend of Norman Rockwell and Dr. Seuss…(So maybe my father got part of his wish.) 

 

In the late 1980s, I was living in Nashville, Tennessee. Frustrated by the lack of direction for my work, I had an epiphany during a show by Randy Toyzini. He was classically trained but painted symbolic narratives in a folk art style. (see picture below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Spellbound by the freedom he enjoyed as a storyteller. The pieces encompassed themes from the Last Supper to sexuality. I envied him, unshackled from conventions of perspective and anatomy. I’d never been trained well in them anyway…(having attended an art institute during the mid-seventies). I have a good example to interject here. In my forties, I went back to graduate school. Advanced anatomy was taught by a Professor whose undergraduate training was during the 1970s at Yale. He told me about the day his fellow students hoisted the plaster busts (used to teach classical drawing techniques) over a balcony. This true story is a perfect picture of how artists were encouraged to leave old conventions behind during the seventies. I also heard stories about how many art students rarely saw their professors during the 1970s. Even in the best art institutes, instead of spending hours a day drawing from a classical sculpture or a live model, students hung around their studios, dropping acid and painting psychedelic stuff.

 

Back to living in Nashville in the late 1980s, I made my first trip to Graceland. It stirred up new work in me. Noting the way Elvis’s image was dumbed down and glamorized in the gift shop struck me as strange. It made me curious about the real man behind the image. Things also didn't add up during the tour of Graceland. For instance, the guide said Elvis had chosen the kitschy furniture for the jungle room as a joke. I questioned that official story (knowing that tour guides like to make stuff up). So I asked myself what Elvis thought and decided he probably thought it was classy. In addition, the moment we entered the front hall, I was shocked by how tiny the house was - (it was called a mansion). The glossy color photos from books made the rooms look huge! In retrospect, I realized the pictures must have been taken through a fish-eye lens to give the illusion of spaciousness. In the gift shop, I  asked one of the cashiers if she had known Elvis, and all she said was “he was a very nice man”. So I tracked down a restaurant where Elvis was rumored to hang out and asked the bartender if he knew any stories about Elvis. He said Elvis wanted to be a medic when he was younger (not a musician).

 

Upon returning home, I decided the real Elvis had been gone for too long, and all that remained were stories and myths about him, so I decided to make up a few of my own. My first Elvis work was made in a folk art manner (like Toyzini’s)... and like Howard Finster’s (whom I’d also just discovered). It was a series of “I Saw Elvis” paintings. There was “I saw Elvis at the Laundromat” and I saw Elvis Selling Velvet Elvis Pictures in a Parking Lot from A Van” ... etc. The idea was that if Elvis had faked his death (as some modern mythology taught), then he would need to do his laundry and support himself somehow (and what better way than to sell velvet paintings of himself?). As a side note, Susan Sarandon purchased that painting about a year later and became my first celebrity collector. 

 

The work was fueled by the time and place I lived and the way my life paralleled what I was seeing. It was Nashville, TN, during a time when people were loading up their pick-up trucks and leaving everything behind to move to Music City with the hope of becoming famous. A waiter one day told me he'd tossed a few suitcases, his demo tapes, his wife, and baby in his truck and moved to Nashville because he had a showcase at a listening room called the Bluebird and was certain a big record company would be signing him soon.

 

I’d done the same thing in my own life as a visual artist just a few years earlier. In 1984, I left Charleston, S.C. (which I claimed as my home at the time) for the chance to become a famous New York artist. It never happened- but that’s another story. Back to Nashville- I watched former carpenters and school teachers waiting tables in Nashville- and handing out their demo tapes to anyone who might help them get a foot in the door of the music scene. I’d done the same thing while living on Long Island. One of my jobs to make ends meet was office cleaning. The job was done at night when the offices were closed. One night, while cleaning under a desk on my hands and knees, I was startled by a handsome man who came back to his desk to retrieve something. I was so embarrassed by my lowly job that I blurted out, “I’m really an artist”.

 

I saw myself in the would-be Nashville stars. I saw myself like Elvis, wrestling with the enigma of who I thought I was, who I hoped to become, and who I would be if I were famous.

 

This leads me to a paraphrased thought by Annie Berman, who analyzes the fascination with the images of Elvis, the Pope, and Princess Diana in her documentary (linked in the footer below). She says people once venerated images of saints and royalty, but now we venerate pop culture icons.

 

I’m often asked if I like Elvis or the Beatles, and the answer is “kind of... but that’s not why I make art with them in it.” They work as my doppelgangers to express my own ideas about life and culture. Consequently, the images track with my own life in autobiographical ways.

 

The rock and roll art I make has developed over the past few decades. It began with Elvis and now encompasses scenes with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and a few others, like Janis Joplin. The scenes I put them in are compositions through which I tell my stories about life. I think one of my strongest artistic capacities lies in composition.

 

This body of work continues to evolve.