Lover's Leap

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA

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Lovers leap worldwide. Across the globe, these romantic dramas climaxed on romantic real estate. Actual geographic locations presumably add veracity to the implausible stories. Our research revealed the global reach of this tale of stalwart and undying love.

Souvenir and postcard of the Lover’s Leap in Guam from Todd Hoose.

Tourist postcards identifying Lover’s Leaps have been produced by the millions and I recently received such a reminder from a friend. Todd Hoose was deployed by FEMA to Saipan following Super Typhoon Yutu. While there, Todd emailed, saying he would be in Guam for a meeting; where was that Lover’s Leap we were putting in the book? I sent him the story:

Puntan dos Amantes, Two Lovers Point, Guam, USA, is a full-service tourist attraction. … The park honors Guam’s Lover’s Leap legend. A 25-foot tall statue of the two tragic lovers by Philippine sculptor Eduardo Castrillo was created in 1984. It was destroyed by Typhoon Pongsona in 2002, but retrieved from a junkyard, restored, and reinstalled in 2015.

A plaque on the base tells the story of “The Legend of Puntan dos Amantes.” It’s the familiar Romeo-and-Juliet premise with a Sappho conclusion. An “impressive beauty” is ordered to marry a “powerful, arrogant Spanish captain” by her “wealthy Spanish aristocrat” father. Alas! She loves a “young, gentle, strongly-built and handsome Chamorro man.” They rendezvous on the cliff where they first met:

When the father discovered that his daughter was gone, he told the captain that his daughter had been kidnapped by the Chamorro boy. The father, the captain and all the Spanish soldiers pursued the lovers up to the high cliff above Tumon Bay. The couple stood at the very edge of the cliff. The boy and girl took the long strands of their hair and tied these together into a rope-like knot . . . They looked deeply into each other’s eyes and kissed one last time. In that instant, the young couple leaped off the long, deep cliff into the roaring waves below.

French explorer Louis Claude de Freycinet in 1819 published a slightly different version, which he claimed to have learned from locals. In it both the boy and girl were Chamorro (natives of Guam). She was of higher caste. Without her father’s permission to marry they became impoverished outcasts. They put their love child in a stone vault and climbed to the overlook. Binding their hair together they jumped to their deaths. In later renditions, the baby has disappeared. This unique tying of hair together has persisted and is portrayed in all graphic representations.

Guam. Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
Courtesy Todd Hoose
View of Tumon Bay. Courtesy Todd Hoose
page 228, Lover’s Leap Legends
page 228, Lover’s Leap Legends
page 228, Lover’s Leap Legends
page 228, Lover’s Leap Legends

Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco is available on our website, at Barnes & Noble, and on amazon.com

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste, Uncategorized

Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden – a Pilgrimage

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It was the weekend of Finster Fest, a gathering of folk artists in Dowdy Park in Summerville. I was working in Atlanta at the time, so I headed north that summer day to wander in the fantastical Paradise Garden of Howard Finster. Leland and I have known of his Bible-inspired paintings since the late ‘70s or early ‘80s when we dealt in Americana, folk art, and American Indian goods. Back then self-taught artists like Finster were categorized as ‘outsider’, ‘visionary,’ ‘naïve’ and folk – sometimes all of these, depending on who was writing.

The U.S. Bicentennial spurred interest in all forms of Americana – from colonial furniture to the quilts of Gee’s Bend and the independent visual voices of folks like Finster. We had worked with Dale Eldred and the Kansas City Art Institute to acquire and preserve the works of Jesse Howard. We found Robert E. Smith after seeing his paintings at the Missouri State Fair. Leland found a stack of Edward Patrick Byrne’s paintings of futuristic houses in the back room of a north Missouri antique shop. So my day trip to Summerville Georgia really was a pilgrimage.

In the intervening decades, Finster’s work had been recognized, collected, exhibited and become the subject of academic and museum publications that placed him and likeminded artists in a legitimate cultural context. Catalogued and preserved in museum collections, documented, inventoried and explained as his work is now (the High Museum in Atlanta has a large collection on permanent display), I was curious to see his built environment, Paradise Garden.

Finster’s couple of acres were buzzing with visitors. The small frame house, well decorated by his hand and tastefully expanded by the Paradise Garden Foundation to include a gallery of works, held a small gift shop, a couple of rooms of prints, video room with an interesting documentary playing on a loop. We roamed the garden and buildings freely, wandering from Mirror House (all mirrors inside and out) to Mosaic Garden, past the bicycle tower and Serpent of the Wilderness concrete sculpture. According to the Self Guided Tour booklet, Howard was fascinated by real snakes (“Please stay on the path,” the booklet cautions.) The High Museum has one of his snake sculptures; another was created for an album cover for sort-of-local rock group R.E.M. (from Athens, Georgia). Bits of glass and ceramic are inlaid into meandering concrete sidewalks and rock walls. “I built this park of broken pieces to try to mend a broken world of people who are travelling their last road,” he said in Man of Visions. It is a wondrous place.

It wasn’t always this way. Finster’s 2.5 acres were once a low-lying, swampy place with not much to recommend it. But his vision saw a beautiful garden, with trickling streams and flowering vines and dancing light. A place where angels would appear. And he made it so. He ditched and drained and planted and built. He recycled long before recycling was cool. He organized the leftovers of life and machines – and then made something out of them.

Larry Schlachter, owner of Folk America (www.folkamerica.net), a shop just down the road from Paradise Garden, knew Howard Finster. In his recollection, Howard was not as concerned with maintaining the existing structures as he was with creating more. The Foundation has done a good job of restoring and maintaining the grounds, which had become overgrown and worn. Schlacter handles a number of artists as well as carrying pieces from Finster and family members.

Athens Georgia rock band, R.E.M. graced the cover of Rolling Stone, April 20, 1989, labeled America’s Hippest Band, in an article entitled R.E.M.’s Brave New World by Anthony Decurtis.

Finster did not make the cover himself, but got a five-page color spread inside. “God’s brushman,” David Handelman said, was hip, his art making the album covers for both R.E.M. and David Byrne (Little Creatures).

 

Click on any image to see the full gallery.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

DAVID WILSON POSTSCRIPT

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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.

 

 

 

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

SEDALIA/PARIS CULTURAL EXCHANGE: Wilson and Picasso/Joplin and Stravinsky

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Some might think David Wilson a folk or outsider artist because he was isolated and self-taught. His work however shows a debt to French Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s era. As the Bizarro cartoon shows outsider artists usually use found materials instead of professional paints like Wilson.

Both Doug Freed and John Hawkins thought /David Wilson had been influenced by Picasso. Neither had any knowledge of Wilson’s exposure to modern art or even if he had any training. Painting by a self-taught itinerant from a middling Midwestern town would normally fall into the Outsider Art category. Indeed, Wilson’s socio-economic status is well outside middle class perimeters. He was an unemployed, poor, alcoholic with a penchant for challenging authority and landing in jail. Without clawing through the history of outsider art definitions (like any esthetic marker it shifts over time, especially when it becomes a marketing term), there are some shifts in its meaning but also commonalities, none of which characterize Wilson’s work. Outsider Art is quite often crude and that naïveté constitutes its charm. Wilson’s paintings do not have this slapdash look. Placing them alongside a Pablo Picasso canvas tends to confirm Freed’s and Hawkins’ linkage. Wilson adheres to a flat picture plane and his fractured Cubist and biomorphic shapes and use of a kind of pointillist brushwork are characteristics of School of Paris works, not folk or outsider efforts.

Yet Wilson’s paintings are not in the Museum of Modern Art of New York City, or any other prestigious urban temple of high art. Sedalia’s Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2002, has nine galleries of “thoughtful grouping of paintings by renowned artists such as Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, and Gene Davis, and abstract sculptural ceramics by the likes of Peter Voulkos, Jim Leedy, Jun Kaneko, and Ken Ferguson,” it has no David Wilsons. Doug Freed, former director, pointed out the reasons for this oversight, confirming also his affinity with Modern Art: “I think you are correct in connecting it with the 1920 school of Paris.  His work has not been available. He didn’t have a dealer. Maybe with the attention he is getting a painting may be acquired by the Daum eventually.”

Occasionally a frame shop in Sedalia would accept consignment paintings, but efforts at marketing wall art have floundered. In the May 29, 1974 The Sedalia Democrat was a display ad for “Sedalia’s New Crimson Gallery, Home of Fine Arts” at 507 W. 16th St. David Wilson is listed as one of the six “fine artists.” The August 2nd newspaper ran another, smaller display ad announcing the gallery’s closing. Modern Art might have been an especially hard sell. Images that depart from sentimental realism rarely graced the walls of mid-Missouri domiciles. Critic Leo Steinberg said modern art “is always born in anxiety” and its purpose is to “translate this anxiety to the spectator.” That’s not an emotion middle class Americans wanted from the pictures above their sofa.

If Picasso somehow inspired David Wilson Scott Joplin influenced a modernist luminary, reversing the transatlantic flow of culture. Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, around the first world war, heard ragtime piano music and got his hands on ragtime sheet music, some of it likely by Scott Joplin, its most prominent composer. Stravinsky wrote nine pieces incorporating elements of ragtime.

Picasso did the sketch for the sheet music of one of Stravinsky’s ragtime influenced compositions. Modernism was a global phenomena that involved a middling town in central Missouri. David Wilson was influenced by it and Scott Joplin’s music had an effect of one of Modernism’s giants.

In 1919, the year David Wilson was born, Stravinsky published a piano version of his Ragtime for Eleven Instruments. His friend Pablo Picasso supplied a sketch for the cover of the sheet music. Just as Wilson’s work isn’t a clone of Picasso’s style, the famous modernist composer didn’t write a rag, but used elements of the American popular music. Alexy Viegas, in his 2018 PhD thesis, Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments, believed Joplin indeed was Stravinsky’s source:

Stravinsky uses the American genre in Ragtime for Eleven Instruments as a basis for creating unique and quirky music. According to Taruskin (1996: 1307), Stravinsky borrows Joplinesque clichés in this piece to create a unique musical text. Through the study of this work, we notice clichéd adaptations not only of Scott Joplin’s compositions, but also of stylistic features of traditional ragtime.

In Stravinsky and Jazz (2017), Andy Jarema states this incorporation of the “freshness and novel rhythm” of music of “Negro origin” is indicative of modernism’s appetite for arts of non-Western origin:

Stravinsky’s interest in jazz is also representative of a fundamental core belief held by not just other composers in the 20th century, but artists flying under the banner of the modernist movement as a whole. The modernist movement emerged out of the need to find the reconciliation of two dichotomous worldviews: One which attempted to capture the nearly infinite pluralism of local cultures in the world, the other that saw the industrial age paving the way towards a futuristic, machine driven society. Artists were seeking out the myths and legends of cultures as faraway from their own as possible, sources capable of, “transcending contemporary local traditions, of speaking of the very source of culture.” However, by pulling this culture from its source and appropriating it in a different context, authenticity was almost guaranteed to be lost. In place of the lost authenticity, though, he gained a new perspective by bringing it into tension with the vision of modern day society. … In the vein of many other modernist artists, he was a pluralistic connoisseur who attempted to encapsulate and internalize authentic looks at cultures outside of his own into his own style as an artist.

David Wilson’s work (left) has an inexplicable similarity to Picasso’s painting (right). We haven’t a clue why or how.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

David Henry Wilson (1919-1989) Biographical Fragments

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David Henry Wilson’s obituary is not online. His father’s is and was published in The Sedalia Democrat June 8, 1973. This lists David Henry’s immediate family.

The family home at 1403 E. Third is now a grassy vacant lot. Google Earth shows it’s only about a hundred feet from railroad tracks. Trains still rumble through Sedalia, but many fewer than in the past. The quality of sleep so near to the tracks must not have been good. All that clanking, banging and whistling may have been music to Missouri Pacific engineer, David Senior, but it may not have been a lullaby for the rest of the clan.

The lot of the Wilson family home as seen on Google Earth.

David H. Wilson’s art is indeed “a feast for the eyes.” It’s rhythmic, clean colored, harmonious, cheerful and upbeat. The artist’s life was anything but. A search of the archives of The Sedalia Democrat reveals minor run-ins with the law, but nothing dramatic and nothing social or positive. Except for the photo of Wilson standing by his Ragtime picture in 1974, there are only bare bones public records, which reveal nothing of his personality and nothing of his artistic motivations. He passed through seven decades of life in Sedalia, Missouri, unnoticed, unheralded and unrewarded.

The following is a scant chronology from the Democrat:

July 12, 1942, “Local Board Names Thirty for Induction”: “Leave July 23 For Jefferson Barracks St. Louis.” Along with twelve other inductees is “David Henry Wilson, 3027, 1403 East Third.”

August 18, 1947. “Fine Arts Awards”

Under “Oil Paintings by Amateurs: 3. David H. Wilson, Sedalia.”

September 11, 1964. “David Wilson, 1403 East Third, charged with being intoxicated and disturbing the peace on complaint of D. E. Wilson, pleaded guilty and was given a suspended 30-day jail sentence.”

November 10, 1972. “The following persons were charged with disorderly conduct: … David H. Wilson, 1403 E. Third, fined $10.”

August 10, 1973. “Cash, paintings taken from home. David Wilson, 1403 East Third, reported $60 in cash and two paintings of undetermined value were stolen from his home early Friday morning. Wilson told police that a woman was visiting his home and after she left the items were missing.”

July 30, 1975. “Disorderly conduct: David Wilson, 1403 East Third, fined $50.”

Today there are few remnants of the Wilson home place by the tracks.

Doug Freed, an educator and artist whose work is well-represented in public and private collections, gave us his impressions of David Wilson:

I met David Wilson when I first arrived in Sedalia in late 1968. I really didn’t know him very well but respected his paintings. The work’ s content was often religious but not entirely. He was definitely influenced by Picasso and Leger. His work was meticulously crafted. I don’t think he had any formal training but don’t know for sure. He was a real character but was in the throes of alcoholism. He would call me as well as others and threaten to jump in front of the train which passed through town on a regular sequence if I didn’t buy him a six pack of beer. He used this ploy several times with me, my wife, as well as numerous other people that knew him.

John Hawkins said his father, Allen L. Hawkins, mayor of Sedalia (1978 to 1981) and David were “close friends”:

He (Wilson) was quite a character, nice guy. He used to call my dad sometimes when he was out to the bar and needed a ride home. … We’d have to stop at a liquor store on the way home. I’d drink a beer or two. Don’t think he had a job. … David used to go to our church quite a bit, to counsel with our priest (Father Lusley?)—counseled Wilson. Calvary Episcopal Church) at Broadway and Ohio. He was counseling there. He drank a little bit you know. … I was always intrigued by his paintings. I don’t know if it was sand that he used in them. … He was a starving artist for sure. I don’t know if he ever had a vehicle or not, because he walked everywhere. The Democrat had written an article and interviewed him. He wore glasses. … Kind of like a Picasso style. He done quite a few of Scott Joplin. … He would voice his opinion. He was definitely vocal. I think he was more of a Republican or a conservative as for political. It didn’t bother him to give his opinion. Bars—the Pacific, Interlude, and Leo’s Budweiser bar was on Main Street.

Art, Hooked on Iffy Taste

“A FEAST FOR THE EYES”: An Online Showing of David Wilson Paintings

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David Wilson (misidentified as David Walker in the photo of him and his Ragtime painting in the May 23rd 1974 article in The Sedalia Democrat) was quoted as saying, “his aim as an artist is to create a fest for the eyes.”

That phrase, “feast for the eyes,” was used In Chapter XV, “A Walk on the Bottom of the Sea” in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870) to describe the vision a diver had of a coral reef:

It was marvelous, a feast for the eyes, this complication of colored tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colorist!

We have no way of knowing if Wilson read Verne. It’s not a unique simile. That Wilson was familiar with the Greek goddess Hygieia signals he had wider literary interests than the funny papers. Verne, a literary precursor to science fiction and surrealism, could have been describing Wilson’s art, which is a “whole palette of an enthusiastic colorist!” His colors are somewhat muted, but he engaged a “wide range of hues” that interact radioactively. These colors interact, abetted by his pointillist application of paint. Every surface is covered by a stippled effect of small blobs of thick oil paint using several hues.

All the paintings we’ve seen are signed WILSON.

None are dated.

No titles are on the front or back.

The ground for all but one is Masonite.  Some are painted on the smooth side, some on the textured side.

Our following divisions are arbitrary, but they show Wilson exerted selective control over his output. All share stylistic and technical similarities. Clearly they are all by the same hand.

Biomorphic Abstractions

These compositions are almost totally curvilinear shapes. Occasionally one suggests a recognizable figure but stops short of being conclusively figural.

Above left: Oil on Masonite, 17 ¾ x 24 ½

Above right: Oil on Masonite 24 x 23 ½

Click to enlarge.

Biomorphic Abstraction with Figure(s)

The two large ragtime paintings have stylized figures with cubistic, fractured backgrounds, but they are a mix of straight-lined divisions with rounded, organic, i.e. biomorphic shapes.  The 22 ½ x 27 oil on Masonite (left) has a bearded face with a headdress in the upper right hand quadrant.

Click to enlarge.

 

 

 

Geometrized Faces

Above left: This 13 ½ x 14 ½ oil on Masonite appears to be a convict.

Above center: The Asian portrait is 21 ½ x 15 ¾ It is oil on plywood.

Above right: This vaguely Dogbert-looking figure appears to be in a vehicle. As Scott Adams introduced the malicious beagle only three month before Wilson’s death, it’s likely a coincidence. Oil on Masonite 12 x 15 ¾

Click to enlarge.

Religious Works

 

The Calvary Episcopal Church, 1713 S. Ohio, Sedalia, Missouri, has two large paintings signed WILSON. They too are oil on Masonite, but are stylistically more conventional than most of his art. Although the faces are realistic and the proportions accurate, the backgrounds have some degree of the abstracted treatment of his other work. The fabric has not been rendered three-dimensional, but is decoratively realized. They prove Wilson could produce more illusionary pictures than he usually chose to.

Above right: Appears to be a profile of Christ, 19 ½ x 10, oil on Masonite.

Click to enlarge.

Close-ups of Wilson’s quasi-pointillist technique.

Click to enlarge.