Who, after all, is Andrew Wyeth compared to Ernest Crudely? : On the Left Bank of Reseda

Anyone who thinks there’s no arts scene in the San Fernando Valley must have his head in the sand. I myself move in a reckless circle of avant-garde young post-Expressionist poets and painters who meet at all hours to smoke foreign cigarettes, drink coffee and sample the exotic cuisine up and down Ventura Boulevard. We are part of a growing and vibrant arts community that has taken up residence in cosmopolitan precincts of the Valley like Chatsworth and Canoga Park, where our daring work and unconventional life styles are greeted by wary tolerance instead of the disapprobation we’ve grown so accustomed to elsewhere.

I remember distinctly that I was with Chloe, Edo and Wolf in this extraordinary, almost radiant Pizza Hut that we’d found, reveling in the shameless plastic authenticity of the place, the sheer petrochemical earnestness, when we heard about the latest artistic brouhaha back East.

Surrounded by defiantly unpainterly colors and remorseless fluorescent lights, we read in utter fascination that the well-known painter Andrew Wyeth had done a barnful of allegedly secret works portraying a beautiful but mysterious Teuton named Helga. Helga later turned out to be not so mysterious, since she was his sister’s cleaning lady, yet the story’s impact on us was undiminished.

Indeed, it struck with the force of a Southern Pacific freight train, because we were privy to a similar tale that dwarfed the Wyeth disclosures by comparison, and that could, we knew, shake the arts world to its very foundations. Knowing of my connections at The Times, my friends implored me to act.

“You must do something,” Chloe said passionately, focusing her sultry gaze on me. “After the Wyeth news, dealers will be scouring the country for unknown works by other important artists. It would be a shame to let him fall into their grasping clutches.”

The time for restraint had ended. Who, after all, is Andrew Wyeth compared to Ernest Crudely, a man whose privacy was even more zealously guarded and whose talent we knew to be infinitely greater? And what is Chadds Ford, that rustic Pennsylvania compound bursting with Wyeths, compared to Reseda, the center of bohemian life here, the Athens of the northwest Valley?

Now, at last, after impassioned consultations with the artist himself, the story can be told. The sole restriction is that none of Crudely’s own words, however eloquent, may be used.

Ernest Crudely has been painting in the Valley for 35 years but unlike Wyeth, whose resistance to the almighty dollar is so weak that he sometimes sells his art, and whose ego is so strong that he’s foisted a few of his retro daubings off on museums now and again, Crudely has never parted with a single one of his works, despite intense pressure from friends, relatives and fire inspectors who have visited the artist’s residence at a location it would be foolhardy to disclose.

What’s more, Wyeth relied on traditional media like pencils, oils and water colors. Crudely managed his achievement working solely with velvet, scissors and rubber cement.

I met this remarkable man for the first time at the Fabric Universe store in Granada Hills, where I’d gone in search of some Shantung that I might have cut into a fashionably Early ‘60s suit. Crudely was fingering the velvet, but perhaps detecting with his extraordinary insight our shared sensibility, he immediately took me into his confidence. Eventually I was allowed to see his remarkable life’s work, but only after swearing a blood oath never to disclose its existence.

And what work! How often I wrestled with the moral dilemma: better to keep my word and deprive the entire world of Crudely’s unparalleled art, or break my solemn vow for the greater good? What if Crudely was mad? What if his shrewish mistress should torch them one day in a fit of pique?

Now, at least, they’re safe--11,378 velvet-on-canvas creations of such expressive mystery, they might have been imagined by Lorca or Marquez. While black is the favored color, no hue is excluded, and no imaginable subject missed. There are animals, children, houses, cars, all in a kind of flat representation suggesting the perspectiveless art of the Orient or the Middle Ages, or perhaps even our own Native tradition.

Crudely kept it all secret because he literally lives for art. His own life is unimportant, he contends, and his is scornful of dealers and even viewers of his paintings. The important thing, he says, is creation, yet his work represents a unique history of postwar American life, simultaneously a celebration and a critique, that we can’t afford to ignore.

Crudely’s favorite subject over the years was his beloved San Fernando Valley, and as it turned out, that was his salvation. For velvet requires careful preservation--regular vacuuming, climate control, a coat of Armor-All now and then--and Crudely, having worked over the years in various pickup jobs that were always subordinate to his art, could never afford what was needed. As a result, his incredible legacy was endangered.

No longer. The Helga disclosures persuaded him to sell a single painting: his giant velvet rendering of the Valley seen at night from atop the Sepulveda Pass, the 405 running aortic into its vastness. The buyer wasn’t disclosed, but the price was in the six figures, and the epic painting is rumored likely to grace the lobby of a major new office building planned for Warner Center.

Invested in T-bills and mortgage securities (for the customary fee, I modestly assisted in assembling the necessary portfolio), the proceeds are sufficient to provide permanent care for this priceless collection, and Crudely can rest easy that his remaining 11,377 works are secure. So, at last, can all the rest of us.