Charlie Fox on the art of Captain Beefheart

The American singer-songwriter Don Van Vliet (AKA Captain Beefheart) might be best known for fronting the eclectic, experimental music group ‘The Magic Band’, but following its explosive end in 1982, Van Vliet turned to painting.

In many ways, he was returning to his roots; Van Vliet had been a sculptor in his youth, his tutor thought he was a child prodigy. In later life, he recalled being so obsessed by sculpting that his parents had been forced to feed him through the door of his studio. He even claimed to be related to a 17th-century Dutch painter named Peter van Vliet, a contemporary of Rembrandt. That said, Van Vliet was a notorious self-mythologiser, you had to take everything he said with a pinch of salt.

Whatever the truth, his paintings speak for themselves. They’re no-nonsense. Like his voice they’re raw and rough. They recall the fervent, febrile atmosphere of 20th-century America; everything was new, the world was there for the taking, and anyone could make it.

A number of Van Vliet’s works are on display in the exhibition ‘Standing on One Hand’ at Michael Werner Gallery, London. To accompany the exhibition catalogue, the gallery commissioned an essay from Charlie Fox – artist, curator, author of This Young Monster (Fitzcarraldo Editions), and contributor to Artforum, Dazed, 032c, The Paris Review and The New York Times. Fox absorbed the animal art of Van Vliet, and wrote his catalogue essay from the point of view of a coyote. Read an extract below.

Why do humans stink like that?

OK, begin again with the grainy picture of Don as a little kid on a California public access TV show in the early 1950s with his sculpture of a rabbit, trickster and shapeshifter in American folklore. He winks at the camera. Score it with “A Carrot is As Close as a Rabbit Gets to a Diamond.” What’s up, Don?

Remembering his ultra-precocious (prodigious!) childhood as a sculptor, he said, “These were my friends, these little animals that I would make, like dinosaurs, and… I wasn’t in reality very much actually.”

Begin again with the canvas. I loved to watch him paint: his hand, surprisingly slender, extremely nimble, moving over it like a strange bird. Swoop. Glide. Snatch. Pause. Repeat. Maybe he didn’t catch anything that day, the whole thing melted. Unsalvageable. But then another day cracks open like a gorilla’s skull and, uh huh, you start again. It’s a big question: what are you gonna do with the canvas? A different desert: all white and empty. Amazing just to think, nope? It all flowed out his brain. Those disembodied crooked paws in The Drazy Hoops #2 (1997) looming over a poor ox (or the Hiroshima’d shadow of a poor ox), they look like magician’s gloves to me.

Hiroshima too much?

Let’s ask the crows.
Where did they test the atom bomb, boys?
Out in the desert!
Congrats on burning the whole world down, everybody. Don’s works can look like cave paintings left over from some unknown extinction event: human, animal, nature, situated in a wilderness. “The new dinosaur is walkin’ in the Old one’s shoes,” he sang. Existence all raw and hungry. Strange folk coming through, never coming back again.

A lot of the time, the surface of the paintings is so gnarly and coarse, deep-fried by sunshine, it’s like he painted on rock. Or in a cave. I’m sure he liked that. A rock is a playground for lush moss and bugs. A cave is a house. No straightforward houses here—I guess we’re always outside. Animals, birds, rocks, snakes, ghosts. Things outside of time.

“If I could fuck a mountain,
Lord, I would fuck a mountain”
Will Oldham

The surface can be weirdly rippled, too, as if there’s a breeze caught in the paint.

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.