I stand by the honeysuckle-overgrown gate in the weedy lot where David Wilson’s family home once stood. We were hoping there was some junk to pick through as the outdated Google Earth map showed a collapsed structure here. It had been carted off or burned and the fence was the only remnant of life once lived here.
Weeds covered the lot at 1403 E. Third, Sedalia, Missouri, where the Wilson family home once stood. Crystal snapped a photo of me standing by a dilapidated, honeysuckle-covered gate that led to the Missouri Pacific tracks. Sedalia’s lone School of Paris-inspired artist has been dead thirty years. Archeological evidence of his existence cannot be exhumed. Likewise, memories of him are fast becoming irretrievable.
I recall vividly the two jarring phone calls with David Wilson I had forty years ago. After buying the paintings he had on consignment with Ed Yuell I inquired how to get in touch with David. “Don’t have a phone,” said Ed. “What’s your number?”
A week later, the artist called. I told him we appreciated his work and would be interested in buying more. David asked why? What would we be doing with them? We collect and sometimes deal in art and antiques, I told him. Wilson’s tone became strident and he indicated he would object to someone making money from his work. His short diatribe about the exploitation of artists fell between a hardcore Marxist and a militant union member’s critique of capitalism. He expressed a desire to hurt those who profited from artists’ labors. I seem to remember he even said “kill”, but I’m not absolutely sure. There was some kind of physical threat. I told him I was sorry he felt that way and he hung up.
Wilson called back a few days later to continue his grievances with the selling of art. This time I hung up. Ed Yuell furnished us with the phone number of someone in social services. After telling them of our experiences, we never heard from David Wilson again.
Of course, the “what might have been” syndrome pops up now. We, along with Dwaine Crigger and Greg Thielen, had been early fans of Robert E. Smith, a bona fide outsider who became widely acclaimed for his art. We discovered Smith’s paintings at the Missouri State Fair in 1977. Smith was using magic marker and crayons and pieces of paper scotch taped to shirt cardboard to create his crowded, hyperactive, interesting story paintings. A monograph edited by Eric Pervukhin and Carla Stine, Robert E. Smith (2011), documents Robert’s struggles to survive: “The ascent of Robert’s career as a professional artist was anything but glamorous … his tenacity paid off, though, and in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s he began to attract the attention of galleries and art dealers. Leland and Crystal Payton, a couple in Sedalia, Mo., appreciated his work and began selling Robert’s paintings during their travels.” Robert is quoted recalling our early patronage:
A letter had come to me from Leland and Crystal Payton and they would be down to see me the middle of January buy my few paintings from me so they could sell them on a trip to California take me to the NATIONAL ART SHOP and buy me some paints, brushes, drawing pens and about 6 drawing boards to keep me busy for a while. When they arrived in January, a week before school started, it seemed like a new beginning for me.
Bob wanted nothing more than to sell pictures. He was very productive and could dash these complicated, wild, illustrated fantasies off, a couple a week. We passed them on, adding $50, to Larry Whitley, an art and antique dealer in Los Angeles. Probably we handled over 150 paintings this way. When he began to get other clients, and was able to substantially raise his prices, we were delighted and stopped buying all his output. We stayed in touch but only bought a few in later years. His rise to celebrity status in Springfield, Missouri, is recounted in the monograph: “As his popularity grew through the ‘80s and ‘90s, fans clamored to acquire custom-made paintings.”
The Missouri Pacific tracks are only a hundred feet or so from the homesite. We leaned one of his paintings up against the tracks. Behind it is the row of trees that probably didn’t effectively muffle the whistles, rumbles and clanging of the once-busy tracks.
This was the model of artist/patron relationship we wrongly assumed would work with David Wilson. Although he did sell pictures when he needed money for beer, and had placed some on consignment, probably for the same necessity, his motivation for creating art was not commercial. His antipathy for capitalism perhaps was mixed with anxiety over being separated from his works. Don’t know, don’t know how to find out.
If Wilson absorbed the basic esthetics of 1920s and ‘30s modernism, perhaps he picked up on the leftist rhetoric Picasso and many other European artists espoused. The myth of the struggling, misunderstood artist personae had been part of popular culture well before the emergence of Cubism. This romanticism sanctioned prideful poverty. Wilson was reputed to be reasonably social, but difficult, especially when drinking. He not only verbally assaulted me; he did the same to the police with more dire consequences.
Crystal and I always liked his paintings and regret we couldn’t have furthered his career or rewarded his talent, courage and diligence. David was obviously confronted by many disadvantages, not all, or even probably most, were of his own making. Truly his work is “a feast for the eyes” and we hope these posts create some awareness of him and his struggles, however belated.