SCENE In memory of David Sisk, a reprint of a classic feature on the longtime Chico artist David Sisk, aka Sisko.
Chico has lost a giant in the local arts scene. David Sisk, better known as Sisko, died suddenly on March 21 while hiking in Upper Bidwell Park. He was 75. There’s no better overview of the man and his work than a 2013 article in this newspaper by former Chico News & Review editor and longtime writer Robert Speer. What follows is an abbreviated version of that feature, beginning with the story of a piece of Sisko’s guerrilla art (a.k.a. “chimp art”) that was left on display in a vacant lot for nearly four years.
PHOTO BY DENNIS WICKES
“Judge and release” as one of his truisms. If you recognize David Sisk’s work,
Istreets empty lot at First and Main in Chico, you may have
f you’ve walked past the long-
noticed a metal pole, about 8 inches wide and 12 feet high. by Specifically, Robert Speer you may have r ober ts peer@ noticed that newsrev i ew.c om perched on the top of this pole The rest of is a cartoonish the story: figure reminisTo read the full version of this feature, search cent of a Smurf “World according to or a character out Sisko” at newsreview. of an R. Crumb com/chico. comic. He’s a funny little man cut from plywood and sitting cross-legged among the tree branches as if meditating, like some comical bodhisattva or Burmese forest monk. People familiar with the art of David Sisk will recognize it as one of his whimsical “Sisko” figures, those odd little round and nearly featureless characters that seem to pop up everywhere in his eclectic work—on billboards, T-shirts and bolo ties, on cutout wall pieces and posters, and on furniture, paintings, postcards, pins and photographic assemblages. They are Sisk’s signature image, the imaginary alter ego of Sisko the artist, and they are emblematic of what makes his otherwise politically charged and spiritually challenging art so accessible and enjoyable. His friend and fellow artist Bruce Ertle calls it “sort of an activist guerrilla type of art, but one he makes lots of fun, which enables him to slip in his message. It’s so 26
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APRIL 8, 2021
The world according to harmless and appealing you don’t realize you’re being told something—to stop and think and reconsider. … This Sisko character, an example of his “chimp art,” sits atop that pole at the corner of First and Main streets downtown. “I’m not an art scholar, and there’s a lot I don’t know,” Ertle continued, “but with him I think we have an original.” David Sisk got much of his artistic
talent from his father, Marcus Sisk, who loved to draw cartoon figures. Indeed, Sisk has incorporated into his own work some of the styles and images he got from his father’s sketchbooks, which date from the 1930s and ’40s. His father died young, at just 53, after working his entire adult life for PG&E. This convinced Sisk that he “didn’t want a career that sucked the life from me. … I didn’t want to wait to make art.”
And he has no desire to leave the area where his family has lived since the 1870s and where he grew up and went to school (Chico High, Chico State), and where he and his sister, Claudia, care for their 95-yearold mother. His son Jeb’s daughter, Olive Ayres Sisk, represents the fifth generation of Sisks in Chico, and on her mother’s side is also a descendent of the late John Ayres, the longtime chairman of the Chico State Art Department after whom Ayres Hall is named. The Sisk roots go deep. On the other hand, he would very much like to see some of his billboard art reach other cities, even if it’s only virtually. Using photos of big-city sites that he downloaded from the Internet, he’s cut in his billboard images, juxtaposing them with the hyperactive city life pictured in the photos, to create large prints that suggest what his bill-
boards would look like in a big city. A photograph taken in New York, for example, includes a Sisko billboard above a Red Lobster restaurant, with a blurred Yellow cab passing on the street. The billboard reiterates one of Sisk’s favorite truisms by showing a man holding a bucket of (very large) worms and claiming, “Everybody’s got their own bucket of worms.” Sisk is fond of such homemade maxims and often builds his art around them. “Anything is possible” is another, as are “Nothing isn’t sacred” and “Judge and release.” The last, he says, was suggested by his friend Ken Naas, a counselor in the Chico State Career Center. It’s impossible for people not to judge others, Naas once told him. The important thing is to let go of that judgment as soon as possible. To Sisk that sounded like fishing’s “catch and release,” and he adopted
it’s probably because you’ve seen one or more of the 40 or so art billboards he’s painted over the years. He started working for the Jay B. Stott Co. in the mid-1970s, painting commercial billboards, but it was never comfortable for him. He’s afraid of heights, for one thing, and eventually, in 2000, he became sick from breathing paint fumes and had to quit. Some years later, the man who bought the company from Stott, Jim Moravec, saw some of Sisk’s artwork and got the notion that his unused billboards would make a good venue for it. Sisk’s artistic billboards began appearing soon after. At the time, Sisk was operating the now-closed Drive-by Gallery on Seventh Street between Broadway and Main. While exhibiting artwork in the gallery’s large windows, he and other artists—including, at times, his son and daughter—were using the rest of the gallery as studio space. By nature, Sisk says, he’s an introvert. He once described himself to a reporter as a “sociophobic exhibitionist,” a phrase that describes him fairly accurately. He says his wife, who is a massage therapist, is the extrovert in the family, the one who really enjoys engaging with people. “She gets me out of the house,” he said. They’ve been together nearly 40 years, have hit some rough spots along the way, but now fit each other “like old shoes.” Ertle said he thought one of the reasons Sisk’s art is so accessible is because “he’s not an egocentric guy,” and there’s a childlike quality to his work, but “David is a very sophisticated guy in his thinking. … He’s a very honest, open guy living every moment.” Sisk is acutely aware that, as he put it, “the world is a gnarly place.” He wants to call attention to that truth, but he doesn’t want to make things worse. Why add to the suffering? he asks. “Sisko,” he said, speaking of both his alter ego and himself, the artist, “is light-hearted. He’s a respite.” Ω
