Velvet Reigns as Proper Setting for The King

Just days after the 25th anniversary of The King’s alleged death--how else to explain all those posthumous “sightings” in laundromats and 7-Elevens?--I must make a confession.

I own three large paintings of Elvis on velvet.

“Velvises,” I call them.

And I cherish each interpretation of His Presleyness: full-length, in a studded, white jumpsuit that glimmers like plastic and clings like sausage casing; in profile, with double-wide sideburns vanishing below a rakishly upturned collar; and--my favorite--head-on, a carpet of chest hair visible under a jean jacket open to the waist and trailing buckskin laces.

In the interest of accuracy, however, none is on genuine velvet but rather some indeterminate cheesy, low-pile fabric. Moreover, at least one image appears to be silk-screened, not hand-painted, presumably in the service of speed and uniformity.

Although clearly created by different artists, my three portraits have several things in common. None is signed. All cost less than $25 at flea markets. And all are framed in crudely carved wood of the sort found in Tijuana art marts that specialize in paintings of voluptuous naked babes and high-wattage cultural icons such as JFK, Bob Marley and Princess Di.

While velvet (velveteen, velour, suede cloth) becomes each of these personages, it is an especially splendid medium for Presley portraiture, says Gary Vikan, director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum and self-described scholar of Byzantine art and Elvis.

“Black velvet has a baroque pathos. The figure kind of disappears in the darkness behind it or comes out of shadow,” says Vikan, likening luminous Elvii to Caravaggio’s 16th and 17th century paintings of saints.

Vikan, in fact, once taught a course at Johns Hopkins University called “Holy Through the Ages: Early Christian Saints Through Elvis.” And at term’s end, students and prof repaired to Miss Bonnie’s Elvis Shrine Bar and Literary Salon in Baltimore, which had boasted two Velvises amid assorted Presleyana until it closed in 1993.

“There is no better way to create a powerful emotional message,” says Vikan, because black velvet produces “a kind of immediate Vegas lighting quality for those who knew him from that theatrical aspect--the after-dark Elvis. He is a blue-collar guy, and this is a blue-collar art idiom. It’s a match.”

Although it may seem a stretch to compare obscure Mexican artists with a master such as Caravaggio, painting on velvet has a long artistic tradition. The luxuriant fabric appeared as far back as 9th century France, although it might have been invented in Italy or Persia, says Doris Hendershot, a library assistant at the Textile Museum in Washington. Velvet came to China--possibly from Persia via Central Asia--during the Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368).

Marco Polo found examples of velvet painting in the 14th century during his travels to Kashmir, notes Cristina Ochoa, director of the Galeria Otra Vez in Los Angeles, which last spring celebrated the art form with an exhibit of 10 artists, titled “Black Velvet Kruise.” (One enormous contemporary work by Peter Alexander is valued at $75,000, she says.)

Apparently brought to this country after the Revolutionary War, the paintings featured fruit, flowers, romantic landscapes and biblical scenes done in a mixture of water colors and gum, she says.

In the mid-20th century, a number of artists took it up. But the man considered the father of modern velvet painting-- and dubbed by admirers “the American Gauguin”--was Edgar Leeteg. A sign painter who settled in Papeete, Tahiti, in the 1930s, he began doing portraits on monk’s cloth. When the local store ran out, the clerk sold him a bolt of velvet, says Ochoa. And the rest is art history.

During the next two decades, Leeteg turned out some 1,000 velvet paintings, many depicting manly warriors or bare-breasted Tahitian women. He sold the works directly to tourists (or traded them for booze) and through a dealer in Hawaii until his death in 1953. Today an original Leeteg velvet can fetch $10,000, said Ochoa.

By the 1950s, velvet paintings, which also were being made in the Philippines, graced the walls of countless tiki-themed American rec rooms and restaurants, brought home by tourists and GIs.

Sailors based in San Diego sometimes took their exotic art into Mexico for replication, says Ochoa. It didn’t take long for local painters in other tourist towns such as Acapulco and Ciudad Juarez to see the possibilities of velvet.

“There were a lot of people who worked in that medium in the ‘60s, ‘70s and early ‘80s” says Cecelia Navarro Garcia, coordinator of plastic arts at the Instituto de la Cultura de Baja California in Tijuana. “People came from the States and asked for paintings in that medium. Some wanted women with no clothes, which was a taboo. Others said, ‘I like black people, or Marilyn Monroe or Elvis Presley.’ The good thing was that there were about 300 painters, and everybody had different things to paint,” says Navarro, who recently organized a monthlong exhibition of Mexican and American velvet artists.

One of them was self-taught painter Daniel P. Marquez, 47, who lives in Whittier, Calif., but who nearly three decades ago sat in a Ciudad Juarez tourist shop window creating up to 10 Velvises a day for $3 each. “You really cannot draw with pencil on black velvet, so I used soap that I sharpened. I always put the white suit with rhinestones, and I did all the details, the texture, with a razor knife,” says Marquez.

Today’s demand for Velvises has inspired several U.S. entrepreneurs to mine the genre. Presley fan Helmut Kerling, better known as San Diego deejay Gary Cocker, runs a thriving side business at www.velvetelvis.com, which began five years ago as a class project in Web site design.

Kerling offers fans several images. When he has enough orders, he picks them up in Tijuana. “I am looking for quality here,” he says. “I didn’t want any bum velvet Elvises. So I went for the silk-screen ones because they are more consistent.”

But, he confesses: “I just think they are about as tacky as everybody else does.”