April 24, 2004

Who knew he could draw as well as he sang?
posted by Argh 20 years ago
  • Want.
  • The man was all talent. *head butt*
  • it makes me want to suck a camel's dick.
  • Once, I was eating in a cafe in denver. my friends and i had just paid the bill and were standing in the entrance when a large black man walked over and stood with us. after a moment of silence, he turned to my friend and said "hi, i'm wesley willis." my friend introduced himself. then wesley said, "nice to meet you." then he went and sat down.. no head butt. to this day i wonder if he expected us to know who he was, or if he was just being friendly.
  • Somewhat related: Daniel Johnston's art
  • more here
  • what's the reason for everyone's fascination with this guy? [earnest question]
  • I can't speak for everyone, but I like art, I like Chicago, I like Chicago architecture, I like the pop method of creating art based in part on personal experience with global brands, and Wesley Willis was a master at rendering all those things I like in intense, precise, beautifully wrought fashion.
  • Ditto sutureself -- never heard of this guy. Not a bad picture, tho.
  • what's the reason for everyone's fascination with this guy? Wesley Willis was something of a local celebrity, eventually gaining worldwide fame. Sort of. He lived on the streets of Chicago, schizophenic and homeless, selling his city landscape line drawings and playing music on his late 80's Casio keyboard from K-Mart. After saving for a while, he pulled together the money to cut a few albums, and suddenly his musical career took off. Willis was "discovered", and is now an artist under Dino Paredes and the major record label American Recordings. He has released at least 20 albums as a solo artist and with his punk rock band, the Wesley Willis Fiasco, and has over 400 songs in circulation. Sadly, Wesley passed away several months ago. He was a genuinely nice, friendly guy. However, much of his success was do to his novelty... it's hard not to listen to his music and not chuckle and feel sorry for him at the same time. (Tantamount to, maybe, William Hung... but black, 350 lbs, schizophrenic, and performing original music.) I'm sure you can find some tracks on your p2p.
  • i know a bit about him... the basic biography, and what most of his songs sound like. i'm more curious about the specifics of willis' seeming popularity though. is it simply that people find it amusing that a large black man does things as a child would? or is his art appreciated in separation from his image? (you seem to be suggesting the former, wedge... and juggernautco the latter) i find the guy quite endearing, but i don't really "get" him. obviously his songs are funny for a couple spins, and, as i've learned from this post, his drawings have the primitive appeal of art you see in the hallways of high schools, but people talk about him as if he were a brilliant artist. i'm not at all able to debate the veracity of that, since i'm not that well acquainted with his work, but willis' brilliance is not something that seems evident -- yet the view that it is widespread. i am wondering if people really do feel that way, or if people just think it's funny to prop up this somewhat pathetic figure for the sake of humour and irony alone. i hear what you say, juggernautco, but i can't help wondering if the giant black schizophrenic thing doesn't come into play in a large way. it's a troubling question to me. and i guess this thread is the place for it !!
  • I was never impressed with Wesley as a singer-- it was always a sideshow. He was an accomplished artist long before and long after his mid-90s music. So let's set that aside. Because, yes, the giant black schizophrenic thing was present there, definitely. The singing has germs of his art (the use of copyrighted brand names & taglines, scenes from every day life, etc.), & I don't mean to be completely dismissive of the Fiasco and people associated with his music. However, his art it the real thing. He created extremely accurate renderings of buildings and street scenes by sitting there and watching it. Perfect scale and relation. Completely free form, his ability to capture architectural details and living color with pens and markers is not juvenille at all. His fascination with motorized movement and the interaction between people and buildings is Futurist-like. So try--inside yourself, not just as a commentary on what pop culture says about Wesley Willis-- to set everything you know about him aside and see his work new. And if you still can't see brilliance, it may just be an indication that you're not crazy about Folk Art, and that's fine, too. But at least the mystery of his brilliance will have been solved.
  • Anyone know where I could go about purchasing a piece of Willis's art?
  • i like that second drawing a lot actually
  • Okay, I hate to be the guy who does this, but... These aren't that good. I don't know anything about the guy's music or bio, but these 3 pictures are what I'd expect to see hanging in the halls of a junior high school, maybe even primary school. I really don't understand the love-in nature of this thread. Please don't dump on me for this...it's my honest opinion. And I probably wouldn't express it if I wasn't on my 4th glass of Shiraz, but I suspect more than a few other monkeys are thinking the same thing.
  • rocket88. I think the art is pretty damn good, much better in many regards, then anything that I could make. I think your post represents the feelings of a lot of people out there. It's very hard to simply look at a piece of art and say "I like that" without someone else to back you up by saying that the art is serious or good. I think that this is a perfect "eye of the beholder" type of situation. Where you may see crap others may see beauty. I personally think that he was a more gifted artist then a keyboard player (his music I believe was appreciated more as a backlash, maybe alt-alternative?). Rocket88 check out this picture on juggernautco's link. The perspective and shapes are precise, but there is an open, kind of breathless feel to the drawing- the clouds and blue sky. The perspective is intense, it's almost like looking a scene reflected in one of those round, convex, antitheft mirrors. It's disorientating, and yet crystal clear. It's remarkable. Just the control over the emotion in a painting such as this puts him in a different league compared to the vast majority of Junior High schoolers. Look at how the building in the center soars above the rest. It's idyllic and manic, it's complex. And look at the strokes, I will second juggernautco in saying that the fact that this is all free form is amazing. You should try just sitting down and working on some perspectives and see how expansive a picture you can draw, I certainly can't acomplish anything like that. The other thing that sets him apart from your average middle schooler is his experience. Having downloaded and watched "Wesly Willis: Grand daddy of Rock and Roll" a documentary on his life, I can say that he lived and experienced more then most people ever will. What I think is really cool is that despite hipster kids latching onto his music as a sort of ironical view of their world, he *still* trancends them. In short, he fucking rocks. I know I am rambling at this point but, like anything, be it music - art - theatre, the more complex it is and the more intrepretations that can be drawn from it, the more lifelike and real the art becomes. His art is connected with who he is, an honest man with a startling view of the world.
  • kuatto, do you think your admiration of the man has an effect on your interpretation of his art? I mean, if you were shown one of these drawings without being told it was his, you might say it was crap. (Assuming, of course that you didn't figure it out by being familiar with his style) And yes, it is better than anything I could create, but then, I'm not an artist. My six year old son, however, makes art that I like.
  • Can I speak as someone who has never heard of Wesley Willis? I first tried to see defects on his work, and tried to see everything as high-school drawings as rocket88 sugested. Willis obviously lacks drawing skills (he lacks finesse in his strokes and it's obviously not on purpose), has no painting skills (he uses only coloring crayons for what I see). But I can see what the others say, the persepective, the complexity in details, the vast array of colors used. Man, if this is highschool art it's the best highschool art I have ever seen. Even the way he draws the sky is amazing. I think his schizophrenia has a lot to do with the overall quality of his work but a lot of masterpieces are due to mental illneses or drug experimentation. You can't see fault in that. Heck, if I can see fractal art as art even if the artist just pulled some equations and colored it then I see no problem with this being art. That said, if this were really the work of a high schooler then it would have been more amazing, still.
  • Just a quick correction, Wesley Willis was never homeless. Most poeple think he was though, I guess he just gave off homeless vibes.
  • kuatto, do you think your admiration of the man has an effect on your interpretation of his art? rocket88, in a word: yes. My perception and experence cannot be seperated from my judgment of his work. if you were shown one of these drawings without being told it was his, you might say it was crap. Maybe. It would pain *me* to say that it was crap, and I hope that this, other, hypothetical self would have enough sense so that when he sat down and evaluated the work he would see it as I do, even without the prism of experience and opinion clouding his judgement. I feel that this is somewhat circular, remember the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and to be completely and totally unfair and twist your words around just to make a point: /rocket88/, do you think your admiration of /your child/ has an effect on your interpretation of his art? Just to hazard a guess, I would say the answer is probably yes. So yes, I am completely biased.
  • I'm curious to know how long, on average, it would take him to do one of these drawings. I checked these out before I read anything about him and my first impression was one of being slightly disturbed by them. Part of it seemed to be from the color choices, part from the line work and part from the differences in his line work, ie; what he would put much detail into versus what he chose not to put detail into. In other words, for me, it was a little hard to understand. I could definately see his skill in drawing, that was obvious, but honestly, schizophrenia or no, I would not want to own this art. It is somewhat disconcerting to view.
  • I used to design cover art at the place Wesley used to come to get his CDs pressed. Just for the record, I found him stinky and annoying in person. The novelty tended to wear off after the first 10 minutes or so. That particular piece is quite a bit better than most of the stuff I saw, which tended to be blue ink pen line drawings on newsprint. He gets props from me for the distance he went to circumvent his limitations, but I doubt most of you would have enjoyed his company if you had to interact with him on a regular basis.