Don Van Vliet the Painter

There has been an exchange on one of the Beefheart facebook pages about Don and his painting. His hanging out with Henry Geldzahler and David Hockney when someone was wondering what year it was they met. Augmented with some interesting snaps this led me to think about Don's career as an artist/painter as opposed to artist/musician and I admire his work greatly and always did from the first portraits of the band found on album covers to his shows at Michael Werner and I visited the show 'Stand Up To Be Discontinued' at Brighton Pavilion with fellow painter and Beefheart aficionado Graham Dean ( it is Graham who introduced me to the work of Richard Thompson so he is a muso without equal too in my book and his video work stands testament to that. He is or was great friends with Peter Gabriel who admired his work - well each the other's actually)

The Drumbo Club - FACEBOOK

China Pig

So some notes from the interwebbie thang

'Van Vliet’s visual arts practice proved to be more financially secure than his music had ever been, and it was when Julian Schnabel purchased one of his paintings and he received his first solo exhibition at Mary Boone Gallery in New York in 1985 that his visual arts career really took off. Although many people initially saw him as just another rock musician trying his hand at art as a form of creative indulgence, his unique paintings soon received more serious attention. His works have been described as Expressionistic and Primitivistic, both descriptions are anathema to me and as “outsider art”, and have been compared to the work of Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock.' Comparisons are odious indeed and Don Van Vliet has a unique voice that has little to do with Pollock of Rothko or indeed any of the American Abstract Expressionist circle. The work is neither 'outsider' art nor 'primitivistic' is to misunderstanding the reading of Van Vliet's poetic meaning and link to his lyric poetry.

Of course Don had always made art even as a child . . . . . . .

Donald Vliet (sic) at age 10, with some of his award winning clay sculptures of zoo animals.

Photo taken in 1951 .

Photo: Raymond Foye.

Another shot of Captain Beefheart (in the hat, of course!) and David Hockney (in the blue jacket), taken by Raymond Foye in New York, 1982.

'Left to Right: Diego Cortez, Don Van Vliet, Bradford Morrow, David Fricke, David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler. 33 West 9th Street, NYC, 1982.

Photo: Raymond Foye.

'THE HOST, THE MOST, THE HOLY GHOST:

The Cosmic Genius of Captain Beefheart' - Melody Maker, October 2nd 1982, article by David Fricke.
'On a recent grey August afternoon, Bradford Morrow - the bookishly handsome young editor of the New York-based literary journal 'Conjunctions' - sat on the front step of his Greenwich Village townhouse chewing the fat with his downstairs neighbour, English painter David Hockney. Joining them were local graffiti artist Diego Cortez and a roly-poly gent with a bushy snow-white beard and cheery candy-striped shirt named Henry Geldhazer, an esteemed art expert and the city government's liaison with both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
The conversation turned to Morrow's recent marriage break-up. 'You okay?,' asked Hockney with some concern. 'I'll survive,' Morrow replied, adding: 'i can do much better.' Hockney beamed an encouraging smile. 'Oh,' he nodded sagely, 'i think so, too.'
Morrow immediately perked up. 'That's funny. that's the second time I

've heard that today from an intelligent man.' 'Who's the other one?,' Hockney asked. 'There's one upstairs. Don Van Vliet.'
'Less than 24 hours after he had arrived in New York to edit a new video, Beefheart had already formed a mutual admiration society with some of the New York art mafia's biggest dons. At Morrow's drop of Beefheart's name, Hockney and company urgently requested an introduction. Beefheart liked their style; they liked his style and his work, certainly enough to propose a campaign to get Beefheart a major New York exhibition of his paintings.'

https://beefheart.xyz/argue/cosmic.html

https://beefheart.xyz/argue/cosmic2.html