Don Van Vliet

He was born Don Glen Vliet and not Don Van Vliet. The latter was an affectation that soon got forgotten as his Captain Beefheart persona took centre stage in his career. Van Vliet remembered, or so he said, being born. This fact, or not, describes him best – he was a one off in every sense of the word. However, this article is not about the good Captain but rather his real life, if such a thing exists in such a creative soul, self. He was born in Glendale, California on 15th January 1941 the son of Glen Alonzo and Sue Vliet. By the age of three he was already painting. By the age of nine he was winning awards for his sculpture. Oddly his parents did not encourage his precocious talent in fact they positively discouraged it. The only men the Vliet’s knew who painted were homosexual or deviant. They were right, perhaps, on one count.

When he retired from music in 1982 he returned to painting. It was the best move he ever made even if thousands of Beefheart fans thought otherwise. He never made much money with his wayward musical genius but his painting was another thing altogether. Crude perhaps, raw for sure the paintings looked, and still do, as though an alien intelligence had arrived on planet earth, seen the variety of life that was to be found here then captured not only the look but more importantly the very spirit of what they observed - Primal, feral, elemental, beautiful and cruel. They then daubed these images onto cave walls only for mankind to discover them later. Fortunately for Don Van Vliet they didn’t have to. For once his art had appeal and it sold at good prices; good for Van Vliet that is.

Broadly speaking Van Vliet’s art was abstract expressionism but not in the same way as of Willem De Kooning or Barnett Newman’s, nor is it in anyway remotely like Jackson Pollack: reminiscent perhaps of Franz Kline but still individual enough, if not unique, to be obviously by Van Vliet: more raw, primitive even and so indebted to his close proximity to the Mojave Desert where he lived. In 1997 Dr. John Lane, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had this to say of Don Van Vleit’s work “(it) "has that same kind of edge the music has." Lane also went on to say, to underscore my point, that he (Van Vliet) contrasted with the bohemian New York urbanised abstract artists as he used a rural environment for inspiration one which added a distinctly naturalistic view point. This ‘angle, if that is best to describe it, was the fundamental difference between him and those that came before. His contribution to contemporary art, and I am speaking or his paintings here, matched that of his music. He took the blues and mutated it to another, new and exciting form; he did the same thing with his paintings. Even more Yo Yo Stuff.

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aNOtHEr dIp INtO ThE mAGpIE mEMOrY pOOoL.