Inside the Mind of an Artistic Outsider

When artist Jon Serl was born 96 years ago, cowboys and Indians were still shooting it out on the Western plain. Witness to two world wars, Prohibition, the Depression and 18 U.S. presidents, Serl has had a fascinating and wildly varied life, but his most remarkable adventure of all is taking place right now.

A self-taught painter who first picked up a brush at the age of 55, Serl is doing the best work of his career as he approaches his 97th birthday.

“For me, Jon’s the most compelling outsider artist presently making work because at a very advanced age, he’s still growing,” says Jeff Gold, a longtime collector of folk and outsider art (the popular designation for work by artists who either by choice or fate, live in isolation from the rest of society). Gold, who works as vice president of creative services at A&M; Records, also describes Serl as “a very smart man who’s been through a phenomenal amount in his life, and all of it comes together in his pictures--which grow increasingly ambitious every year.”

Born into a family of traveling vaudevillians, Serl worked as a female impersonator when he was in his early 20s, then took the name of “Slats” and did a stint in the Hollywood movies of the ‘30s as an actor and dancer. He went on to work as a screenwriter, wrote a book (about a cheap car) and worked dozens of odd jobs as a young man, living for the most part on small wages and fruits and vegetables that he grew himself.

In need of a painting for a house he was living in during the late ‘40s and short on cash as always, Serl decided to paint one himself and thus stumbled on his true calling in life. Since then he’s completed well over 1,200 paintings. A fiercely independent recluse who has as little traffic with his fellow man as possible, Serl spent the better part of four decades working in obscurity, until one day six years ago when Whitney Museum curator Susan Larsen happened to see one of his paintings while traveling through the small town north of San Diego where he lives. That afternoon marked a turning point in Serl’s life.

Now recognized as one of the leading outsider artists, Serl has a hot New York Gallery (Cavin-Morris Inc.) and is the subject of five concurrent exhibitions on view this fall throughout the West. The Smithsonian has acquired two Serls for its permanent collection, and his paintings fetch from $1,800 to $10,000.

“People ask what makes Jon different from amateur artists who paint still lifes on Sunday--well, there’s a world of difference,” Larsen says. “Jon has a highly sophisticated mind and an extraordinarily broad perception of reality. He never takes anything at face value and is always searching for the deeper reality of things. His work encompasses everything from small-town parades to mystical interpretations of after-death experiences, but the theme that seems to color all his work is the intermingling of the spiritual and the physical. These are not the themes of a Sunday painter.”

Serl’s new-found notoriety hasn’t changed his eccentric life style a whit. One arrives at the bizarre dwelling where he’s lived for the past 18 years to find a lithe, graceful man dressed in several layers of raggedy clothes, standing in the street as he waits to greet his guests and usher them into his peculiar home.

A labyrinthine maze of 25 tiny, unheated rooms whose windows are curtained with cobwebs, Serl’s house--which he basically built himself--is crammed with the accumulated booty of a very long life. An inveterate pack rat and swap meet devotee, Serl appears to save everything. Dust-covered books are stacked everywhere, as is clothing, souvenirs, art supplies and of course, paintings--they cover the walls from floor to ceiling.

Inexplicable oddities turn up throughout the house--a gaily decorated sheet cake is nestled among the clutter on the kitchen table, and an open sack of lye sits on the floor next to Serl’s bed, along with an early edition of “Bambi.” “I got to wondering just what happened to Bambi,” Serl explains, “so I decided to read it again and find out.”

A flock of chickens have the run of the house, which is ornamented with eggs left in unlikely spots by the undomesticated fowl. Also scampering from room to room are Serl’s three pet chihuahuas, one of which amuses itself with a dead mouse.

Serl’s been up painting since 3 a.m. and is ready for breakfast, so we adjourn to a nearby cafe to talk and are soon settled into a booth with coffee and eggs. A born storyteller, Serl would rather talk than eat, however, and his breakfast goes untouched as he tries to cram his life story into an hour. A sensitive and intelligent man with an excellent memory, he plucks episodes from the distant past and recounts them with great poetry and humor. And like all good storytellers, he begins at the beginning.

“I was born on an Indian reservation in Upstate New York,” he recalls. “My mother was a delightful person--she was honest, she was a whore. I didn’t realize until I was a grown man that she was lonely. Once when I was small she scrubbed me up and dressed me in a Fauntleroy collar and little short pants. Then she painted her cheeks with red crepe paper and took me down to the restaurant where my sister Lizzie worked. They put me on a stand and began feeding me coconut cream pie. This went on for about an hour and they stuffed me full, and I remember all the waitresses watching in their proper collars and black dresses.

“My father was a prude but he was a good man,” he continues. “He beat the hell out of me from the day I was born until I left home, but I deserved to be beaten because I couldn’t follow. I’d run away when I wasn’t yet 5 years old. I wasn’t really wild, but I was mischievous--I’d rearrange the flower pots on people’s porches at night.

“In 1915 my father came down with consumption so we left New York on a train headed for Denver. Denver! What a challenge. Denver had a street called Broadway and every other place on that street was a theater. I got a job as a waiter in a place on that street, and I liked that place very much because everything there was dainty. There were 13 in my family and I grew up in a house where you ate when you could grab something and run, so I liked this exclusive restaurant with flowers. I got a dollar a day to work a 12-hour shift, but I was happy--I didn’t know any better.

“I never went to church until after my mother died. My father was alone then, so he advertised for a housekeeper who he ended up marrying, and this woman made me go to church and school, neither of which I liked. To hell with school! I was learning more on my own. In the fifth grade, I was supposed to be learning fractions, while outside the school window was a stone ledge where a robin was building a nest. He brought so much mud and leaves and twigs and he packed that nest to make it solid for a wren--that’s where I learned about construction.

“Once I got out on my own, I always went up to Montana in emergencies because I had a brother up there. He was a leading architect in New York and he fell in love with a girl who was a professor at Cornell. In 1914 they married and moved to Montana because my brother didn’t want anyone looking at his wife, who was a very beautiful woman. They got 620 acres up there for free--it was called homesteading--and had a ranch where you could look for miles in every direction and see nothing but land and sky.

“As a young man I did a lot of theater work in New York. I hope you’ll handle this delicately because the man who put me there is a big shot in New York--William S. Paley. One day a man came up to me after seeing me perform in a play and said, ‘You did a good job boy. You ever think about going to Hollywood?’ I said are you crazy? I wanna’ go fishing! But shortly after that I fell on hard times in New York, and wound up going West after all.

“Hollywood was great then. Bogart, Spencer Tracy and I all arrived at the same time. They stuck to acting, but I was incorrigible. I’d be in the middle of a job and just up and leave. I’d go to Beaumont and pick cherries, or down to a meadow where there were crawdads. Clark Gable went with me to catch crawdads once when he was in the middle of making ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ”

A waitress stops by and interrupts Serl’s monologue when she sees his untouched plate. “Come on daddy, you’ve got to eat,” she scolds.

“I don’t do it on purpose,” he whispers after she disappears, “but everywhere I go I attract attention. Maybe it’s because I’m nuts.

“Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Hollywood. In 1934 the unions came in and I started to want out of movies because things changed. Then one day I witnessed an accident on a set and that was it for me and movies. There was a coach with a team of six horses and one of the horses stumbled over a rock and the tongue of the wagon pierced the horse’s stomach. All of us got sick and they had to shoot the horse, but everyone went back to work that night.

“I couldn’t take it, though. We were shooting on the Kern River so I walked down to the river and sat down under a palm tree. The tree was singing and I began to feel better, and I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until the next day. The next morning I walked to the fork in the road that led to the hotel where the movie crew was in one direction, and away, to I knew not what, in the other direction. I looked up at the sky and thought with this kind of weather I don’t have to worry--I can get a job. So, with makeup still on my face from the day before, I walked away and never thought about working in movies again.

“I left Hollywood and moved to a beautiful place in Capistrano--I lived in an old adobe house there that predated the mission. Hedda Hopper and the gang used to come visit and I’d make them go get their drinking done at the bar, then leave their Cadillacs in town and walk to my house across the railroad tracks.

“I wanted a painting for a big wall in that house, but I didn’t have any money, so I got a board and painted my own. I didn’t think it was any good, but then a man who’d traveled around the world saw it and said, ‘Where’d ya’ get that Rousseau?’ And you see what happened? Man--pat him on the back and watch him purr. From that point on, painting took over my life. I don’t own a radio or watch television--all I do is paint.

“In 1971 I moved to this town because I woke up one morning in Capistrano and realized I don’t like ocean weather. So I threw some clothes in a bag, maybe a ham sandwich and I wound up here.”

Serl has a highly developed sense of theater and he delivers his monologue--which has been drastically condensed here--with considerable flair. In recounting the facts of his life, he often veers off on philosophical tangents that mirror the central themes in his paintings; sexuality, self-reliance and rugged individualism, the progressive rape of the land that he’s witnessed over the course of his life, the erosion of the American dream, cruelty between human beings, and always, the unfathomable mystery and absurdity of life.

Usually described either as a folk, visionary or primitive artist, Serl’s style combines the repressed psychic violence of Edvard Munch, the muted mysticism of Arthur Dove and the unfettered sensuality of Matisse. His earliest paintings, dating from the late ‘40s, are fairly straightforward landscapes reminiscent of Cezanne, but it wasn’t long before his work exploded in wildly diverse directions. He’s gone through at least 10 distinct stylistic periods since he began painting.

Ignoring rules of draftsmanship, perspective and anatomy, Serl favors an elongated, ethereal interpretation of the human figure and a shallow picture plane--there’s rarely any sense of deep space in his compositions. Subject matter includes scenes based on memories from his days in theater, animals, visions of apocalypse, group portraiture of figures gathered for funerals, parades or celebrations and self-portraiture (he once painted a picture of himself napping next to his own grave). The imagery in his paintings tends to be rather cryptic and everyone who follows his work seems to interpret it differently.

Larsen sees it as “a response to an America going soft and losing its deep connection to the land. America’s embrace of mass consumerism--which began shortly after World War II--led to the central emotional and philosophical crisis of Jon’s life. And his paintings are how he expresses why he finds our materially abundant world impoverished, and his own vanishing world so tenderly beautiful.”

Serl’s dealer Randall Morris, of the Cavin Morris Inc., takes a different view.

“Jon’s done quite a few paintings about the glory of America between the wars, but I’d say that the different roles of men and women is ultimately the central theme in his work. He’s constantly questioning the meaning of male and female.

“Jon himself has had an extremely complex sexual history,” he adds. “Growing up in a family of traveling vaudevillians he performed as a female impersonator--he played ‘Little Eva’ in ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and dressed as a squaw in another skit. He once told me that his parents always encouraged him to stay thin so he could continue to have a feminine body and play the female roles and that sort of became a complex with him. He came of an age in era that was quite repressive, and I think sexuality became the grand sublimation of Jon’s life. Painting has been very important to him as a means of dealing with that.”

Breakfast over, Serl shoves his cold bacon in a pocket to take home for his dogs and we return to his house to look at his work.

“I paint all day, every day,” he says as he squints at a work in progress, then pokes through his supplies in search of a particular tube of paint. “The most difficult part of it is when you have to sign a painting and admit it’s yours. Then you have to rake up everything in you and ask yourself: Is this what I wanted? I paint on wood now because when I was painting on canvas, I wound up putting a knife through most of my work. I no longer do that, but lately I’ve been burning quite a few.

“Sometimes I’ll finish a painting and know I was guided by a spirit that was good,” he continues. “It’s not something in me, it’s something out in the air and it has no physical form. There are probably some great people who’ve put a name to it, but I haven’t. All I know is that it’s wonderful.

“I’m a very religious man, yet I believe in nothing but myself,” he adds. “I don’t believe in Christianity--that was the biggest lie that was ever told, but that’s fine. People are not so bright and they need to have something. I go a little further.”

Living for nearly a century on the edge of poverty, without the comfort of religious ideology or human contact, one wonders what has sustained Serl for so long.

“I feel lonely most of the time,” he admits, “but I know I have to live alone. I’m a cripple, I’m incapable and I’ve learned how to fake things--at 96 I should be pretty good at it. Marriage isn’t for me because I don’t know how to share. Sure, I share my paintings but what the hell else can I do with them? Is that generous? No. The whore has to give.”

Asked if the money that he’s now able to make with his work means anything to him, he replies “I have no interest in money because it hurts so many people. I have a few dollars now but there’ve been many times when I had no money and nothing to eat. People are fools to place their faith in money the way they do today. It would be good to go back and live like Jon lived. Go hungry, get cold, see if you can cope with hunger and cold. People say there’s no need to experience those things in the modern world, but I think we’re heading for something so wicked and bad. I’ve seen the world grow less and less refined in the course of my life, and the way we’re headed is no good. I always know what’s gonna happen and I can tell you, we’re in for a hell. Everyone’s gonna’ be crying mine! Mine! That’s always been part of human nature, but people are gonna’ start acting on those feelings with guns and knives.

“But don’t misunderstand me--I’m not an unhappy man,” he concludes. “I’ve had bad spells in my life, but the whole thing’s been pretty good. The body is made for happiness and I think everything’s funny. This town I live in is a circus and Jon Serl is a clown. Life is funny. When you think of the words ‘darling, I love you.’ What does that mean? These questions go on and on.”

Preparing to depart, the visitor asks a final question: to what does Serl attribute his exceptionally long life?

“I don’t know why I’ve lived so long, because everyone in my family died young,” he says. “Everybody’s dead now and I wonder why I’m still living. I’m tired and I’m not glad to be alive because it’s very hard. I’d like to be free and if it weren’t for my paintings, I probably would’ve died long ago.”