So my Don Van Vliet catalogue arrived from the brilliant Michael Werner Gallery (such lovely staff; from the guys answering their phones when dumbo here called on the day the gallery was shut to the people sorting out my purchase of the delayed booklet on the man). Text is by the extraordinary Charlie Fox who I am ashamed I did not know* small example of his writing from the catalogue below and somewhat totally in keeping with the work and poetic to boot!
Don Van Vliet “Ming Move”, 1985 Oil, India ink on canvas 84 x 60 inches © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London.
Look at Ming Move (1985): a chocolate fawn lifts a slender leg, as if to be kissed on the hoof by a new suitor. Is it the monkey? Or is that a gift—a mask?—offered by smitten ghoul. Blue cloak, blue flesh. Alien meets Bambi meets Leonora Carrington, maybe? Two breeds of surrealism fed on unusual milk. Leonora more obviously prog and hot for Bosch but still… look at her painting Untitled (c.1949-1950) next to Ming Move: an Afghan hound and an orange marmalade cat chilling in a green lagoon under a tree full of cavorting beasts, the ghost of a bat being God… you’re normally eyeballing a scene in their paintings, some kind of bewitchingly weird ceremony. If animals and people appear together—in their two worlds, they’re almost always together—they look like they know something, in dark cahoots.He did love animals. He said, “I was in love with a mandrill before I met my wife. Very high style with a rainbow across the nose. Beautiful.” He drove around as a teen with a sculpture of a wolf head on the hood of his car.
He loved even the rat-fanged Chihuahua from Two Rips in a Haystack (1985) who reminds me of deranged Ren from that cartoon, Ren & Stimpy, except he’s all stoned and sleepy. He strokes them into life with his brush. The ghostly lines around the horny star of Ibex (1986). Or the gooey soft panther in Crow Dance a Panther (1988), mesmerised as a kitten with a mouse at the trippy menagerie playing out above him. You know they’re animals from a lil’ slurred mark or two: smudgy, furry glyphic forms, rough sculptures of beasts.
Meanwhile, Red Cloud Monkey (1985) is on his way to bigger things, a loose-limbed capuchin schlepping a majestic swan: “Outta the way, kids!” A devil and a lamb look on, wondering who put psilocybin in the Bible.
Or he uses the paintbrush like a claw, throwing down the paint in little screams and barks and yowls. Get the aggression out. I love that feeling.
“Raven
they hold the
air like a brush
painting
with strokes
as they go
but never grasping
for fear of
halting their passage
through the space”-Don Van Vliet, July 1991
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