This is the moment I’ve been waiting for; the chance to finally see in the flesh the paintings of Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. I’ve been a fan of the music of Captain Beefheart for over 20 years. He was a one off with an incredibly singular vision and a style that was completely his own, without competition. And this is what attracted me to him; I’d never heard anything like him before.
Through discovering and immersing myself in his music I soon also learnt about his paintings. Quite often when great musicians also produce (or in most cases “dabble in”) paintings, sculptures, etc, their works tend to fall short next to their songs. Bob Dylan is one of the greatest songwriters of all time; a timeless poet and a genius with words. Yet when I look at his drawings, I don’t detect anything special. They are far from bad drawings, but they don’t match his power as a towering wordsmith. David Bowie is another example. Even though he had an impressive and deep understanding of art, his paintings pale next to his magnificent body of music.
What makes the Captain different is that his paintings are on par if not even better than his magical and highly distinct music. They are not divorced or different from his music. All together, along with his own unique and idiosyncratic being, they are a total work of art. Projecting the same rhythms, grooves and off beat time signatures that I hear on Trout Mask Replica. And this is why I love his paintings. When he stopped making music in the early 1980s, he devoted himself fully to painting.
Looking at the paintings on display at the Michael Werner gallery in London, created in the 1980s and 1990s, one can conclude that his own vision, code and core never deserted him. When I focus and meditate on his paintings, I unearth so much. I see animal, human and other organism spirits of the infinite and asymmetric world. I also see a multitude of symbols each with their own irregular shapes and DNA. In the painting, Crow Dance A Panther, I see a celestial dog-like creature in a state of drifting metamorphosis with a raven head and an object in the form of a chair forming from its mouth in a weightless state of perpetual cosmic motion. The paint marks and elements don’t seem random. They each all have their own connection and balance in the composition. Paint is often applied thickly. The heavy white impasto marks have a physicality resembling frozen smoke and other forms of invisible moving matter; as if the paintings are always moving beyond their earthly boundaries.
The large painting, China Pig, has elements in it that remind me of some of the earliest cave art paintings found in South Africa and Australia. At the bottom of the painting painted in yellow is an extraterrestrial-like supernatural animal creation, a lively golden eagle bunny type of creature, riding on top of what appears to resemble a warthog or the Captain’s china pig! Elsewhere in the painting are pools of energy in non-stop flux; semi-buried faces, the dead, the living, the living dead, dynamic bodies and spirits, a myriad of colliding landslide landscapes; remnants of our dreams and nightmares without any filters. The golden eagle bunny keeps riding on its china pig through all these forever changes.
The adjacent Feather Times a Feather painting appears to be on the same wavelength as China Pig and the next destination. The horizon and world of that painting is where the golden eagle bunny on its china pig feel like they should be heading towards. It’s the next stop in their no-return voyage. Feather Times a Feather is the Captain’s very own Garden Of Earthly Delights; hues of pink, yellow, orange, blue and green all representing symbols, cosmic fragments and morphing spirits, dominate the vacuum above and appear, perhaps deceptively, relatively gentle and calm. Below this area in the painting things are more unsettling. A distressed face bent below an ominous black crow symbol. An awakening crimson warrior to the right shows no mercy. In the far bottom left corner is a stagnant but ecstatically demented grey evil space cadet scarecrow figure – like a highly toxic deep sea creature. This painting is a veritable tripped out minefield. Pleasure and decay traps mingle hand in hand.
In the painting Red Cloud Monkey, there are three towering mountain-like beings cunningly statuesque, but not too dissimilar to active volcanoes, they can erupt without warning. Meanwhile a frantic red figure features like a nimble devil, restless and insecure, in the bottom of the painting. In the night next to the volcanic trio, the figure is doomed. The Captain channels and strengthens this energy by his gift of creating bold hunks of space and discordant brush strokes. The black, yellow and green empty quarters are applied to the canvas furiously. Their primitive physicality is palpable.
The other paintings that draw me in are the ones that have an afterlife kind of eternal calm; albeit a collapsing and destructive calm. I see this is the paintings, The Drazy Hoops #2, and Luxury Rack. In the former painting, I see an extinct and dead frozen-in-amber type of creature with prominent and luminous yellow and purple gases forming from it’s behind well after it’s long gone. The yellow paint is applied generously to the canvas making it appear like it’s in constant motion. One can almost smell and taste these noxious gases. In Luxury Rack there is a beaming plankton type of silence. The Captain knows where to find the gold in the trenches of the deepest oceans. He doesn’t need a submarine. There’s no need for him to embark on some intrepid physical adventure or to travel to Mars. For it’s all present and well illuminated in his limitless and fertile mind.
By Nicholas Peart
11th January 2024
(c)All Rights Reserved
Image: Don Van Vliet Feather Times A Feather 1987
Don Van Vliet: Standing On One Hand is on display at the Michael Werner Gallery London until 17th February 2024.
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