NEIGHBORHOOD BEAT Stan Fullerton’s
April 2018
TRUE ART STORIES
* A DARKLY COMIC CAVALCADE OF CHARACTERS
*
as imagined by the artist during late night thoughts on listening to Mahler’s Beat Generation Symphony - The Song of the Coffee House Street Poets
Vintage Absurdity: The Palette of Stan Fullerton Stephen Kessler, Santa Cruz Express, August 16, 1984 By the time he was a child of five or six, learning to read as well as draw by copying the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” out of the daily funnies, Stan Fullerton knew he was an artist. The Santa Cruz painter, now just past 50 and celebrating a recent surge of work with a one-man show in San Francisco, faithfully maintains that original sense of playfulness and mischief in canvases bursting with brilliant colors and a richly irreverent vision of the human comedy. People and fish and birds and animals – and devils and popes and furniture – interact in his paintings in such a way as to make them all including artist and viewer, look and feel ridiculous. Everybody wants to be a shaman, says Stanley, and his contribution to the healing arts is laughter. By taking what might be disturbing themes – for example, the abduction of a bosomy pig by a horny demon (The Last Virgin, 1983) or the revolt of an uppity crab against its would-be diner (Memorable Soup, 1984) – and wringing them through his rambunctious imagination, Fullerton pulls the floor out from under our sense of decorum and gives us the chance to see ourselves as the silly resilient creatures we are. Genial and funny as his images are, there's also a barbed social critique, particularly where the church and its agents are concerned – a satirical slap at conventional notions of vice and virtue, as in the amazing study, The Devil at Home. Of this imaginary portrait, the artist says, “If high churchmen can burn heretics, it follows that demons tired of their offices can recline in soft chairs by the hell sides with cat in lap.”
Whether viewing his work in a clean, welllighted gallery, in the socially nutritious context of a cafe, or in the more intimate setting of his studio, one can't escape the feeling that one is witnessing a prodigious creative power grounded not only in its conscious links with Bosch and Goya and George Grosz but in the primary energy of an indestructible childhood. During our visit in his studio on the eve of his San Francisco opening, Fullerton reflected on the source of this energy and some of the forms it's taken. “Since my only interaction with my family was as sort of a cheap laborer, whenever I wasn't performing my cheap labor – like fishing or working on the rock pile we called a farm – I was making things out of paper and color, or clay and wood...my collection of playthings was not extensive. Besides, I really preferred the things that I dreamed up.” After a childhood on the coast of Oregon and a Michigan adolescence followed by a stint in the Marine Corps, Fullerton came to San Francisco in the 1950s where he connected with the earliest stirrings of the Beat scene and found himself linked aesthetically and socially with coffeehouse poets of the period. Even now, he says, he gravitates more toward writers and poets and small press printers than toward strictly visual artists, which may begin to explain the strongly narrative element in his paintings. “I come from an ethnic mix of people for whom oral history and stories told together at the appropriate time – the same stories over and over, as a matter of fact – constituted their whole relationship.” Ironically, he adds, “I'm still as tongue-tied trying to talk about art as I was - even as a small child - unless somebody has a specific question that has to do with the technical part
of somebody's work or his philosophical or psychological content.” In New York, where he spent a few years “drunk with museums” after the North Beach culture began to sour in San Francisco, Fullerton savored some time among painters like Franz Kline, Willem DeKooning, Robert Motherwell (and other “gods on Olympus” of that era) learning the craft. “Some things that I learned at the Art Students League, but mostly I learned in saloons or on long walks or in other people's studios. I listened, bought drinks when I had a buck. I wanted to hear what they had to say. The talk itself was intoxicating – not who sold what, but the strokes in Velazquez, the quality of the painting – nobody talks about that stuff anymore.” Returning to the West Coast: “In flight from the popular perception of success,” Stanley found the creative forces of San Francisco scattered and soon decided to head for Costa Rica on his motorcycle, a 350cc Yamaha - “the only brand new thing over $100 I ever had.” which broke down in Santa Cruz. “The serendipity of my falling into Santa Cruz was obviously meant to happen because it was the last small place by the ocean that I could afford. If I came here now I couldn't afford to stay here. “The thing I find most interesting about Santa Cruz is that practically everybody between 19 and 40 thinks or hopes or believes that they're an artist. When I came to town there were about six recognizable artists – two potters and maybe four painters – and to have it go from that to this recent call for an open show at this little museum downtown that brought in 1300, 1400 things, I just find it extraordinary to watch. That kind of energy can't be bad – I mean the joys and pains of
pregnancy – and even the poseurs are a kind of street theater...I love being underwhelmed by them. I've got books and books full of them. Chortling, he picks up steam. “There's something about Santa Cruz that no only geographically do I really .love, but the degree or the quality of of absurdity here is vintage. This is vintage absurdity. And some stuff comes out of it...some of these little tiny gems of book that people like Gary Young come out with. He brought me a book for my birthday, just a tiny thing of prayers, bu the book itself was a prayer, the paper used and the way he printed it. These people in their garages, making things that they're going to make about a cent-anda-half a copy on just pouring their heart into it...and they're going to go on.” One of the things that's interesting about art is that if you last long enough, if you don't take any of the other alternatives, you gradually, over the years, get a group of people who have absolute faith in you and every so often those folks come and buy something, no matter what it is you make. “I don't think there are any walls between the art forms. I don't think that a poet standing on a stage in a 1950s coffeehouse giving his heart to people on the end of his tongue was any different than me and I don't think that those kids who gather in hallways and wherever they can find a smooth place with a crowd to watch them, that are doing these kinds of dances and things, I find no real difference between these forms of creative energy and mine. Energy doesn't die. How can there be boundaries on anything that comes out of the mind? The energy in your head is the same as the energy of the sun. You heart and head are connected and your fingers have got to follow.”
“Artists are the gnats on the peach of this society. We're the third rail of this train. We're the training wheels for the world's biggest tricycle – can you imagine a tricycle with training wheels. We're here to make sure that the compass points somewhere.” As far as local culture is concerned, Fullerton says he sees “the famous town/gown split” as a false dichotomy. “That University has brought dozens of times more good stuff than it's brought bad stuff. I mean it's brought some really schmuck kids, but those are our kids. The thing that having an institution like that here brings – besides the concerts and libraries and the people who are in the University and on the faculty – is an atmosphere for people who are peripheral to the University, people who came to this community to kind of feed off this energy from that University and find themselves lifelong students at Cabrillo...and the people who have been students or professors up there who didn't get tenure and have all these social theories that they're putting into practice downtown.” “There's all this talk about battles between the old orders and the new orders. I see many layers of order. For someone who is drawing and painting about the human condition, I find a lot of it silly but in the silliness and poignancy of people's wants and needs I find genuine things and I find what I call ingenious things. I feel like I'm on this long train running from the cave drawers who recorded their magnificent hunts to these kids with their sketchbooks in the cafes.” What about the artist's traditional struggle for recognition, fame, success? Fullerton says, “I've seen the kind of painting that I do go out of favor and come into favor and go out of favor and come into
favor. It's like feminine fashion, the brokers go for and publicize what the other guys on the street don't have. It's success to me to have spent all the hours I can be awake making the images and being sometimes pleased to meet them, always surprised at how they have conjured themselves out of my imperfect knowledge of the myth of human kind. The studio is success. Staying in it is success.” “I get by on a modest amount of input in terms of appreciation. In New York I had a considerable amount of appreciation and I found out that a lot of praise was the same as a lot of the opposite – that being patted on the back was the same as having shit thrown in your face. I take my praise from the odd amount of light that comes into somebody's face when they look at something. When you come into the studio, I can tell by your breathing whether you genuinely like something or don't.” Until a few years ago, when health considerations forced him to give it up, Fullerton worked as a commercial fisherman, spreading his nets in Monterrey Bay from a boat he built by hand. “The reason why I would go up and go fishing out of this miserable port every morning for almost 10 years was that when I pulled my nets up I never knew what was going to be there – flounders, octopus, sharks, whatever – you never knew, you just never knew.” “In the studio it's the same thing, you never know - when you walk out of here at two o'clock in the morning and come back in at four - what you're going to find.” Stan Fullerton's work can be seen through August 31, 1984 at the Bruce Velick Gallery, 55 Grant Avenue, San Francisco and in the “Fish Art” show at the Hoeger Thompson Gallery, Santa Cruz, CA
I was in my studio office, minding my own business, looking out the window, and checking out the cat serenading the green dog when the monkeys suddenly joined the red-hatted dancers in the street. Strange I thought to myself; but then again, maybe not, at least not for this neighborhood … my neighborhood. Who am I? Stan’s the name.
Art’s my game.
And this is my beat.
My neighborhood.
There are eight million stories in the Fullerton neighborhood; These are just a few of them. What do I do? I deal in lead, friend – lead pencils, colored pencils, pastels, paint, pen & ink, charcoal, collage, metal, and wood and the perpetual human comedy of memorable characters just outside my door (or is it in my imagination?) … and turn them into 2/3-D visual narratives, awkward pairings, bad segues, and cheap metaphors. Oh yeah, one more thing: No titles. You think I’m going to hand you the key to the meaning of life’s soap opera on parade? No way, pal. You get to work it out for yourself. Because it’s whatever you want it to be. And your title or your insight is just as good as mine. It’s a visual feast out there. Bon appétit.
Welcome Wagon
Stan Fullerton’s
NEIGHBORHOOD BEAT True Art Stories April 2018
Table of Contents Street Scene................................................................... 2 Artist Stan Fullerton was a Bay Area artist and iconoclast whose colorful expressionist paintings frequently targeted favorite foils including religious and political authorities. Fullerton resided in the North Beach district of San Francisco following his service during the Korean War. He moved throughout the Bay Area and eventually met and married Gail Putney Fullerton in Santa Cruz in the mid-1960’s. They relocated to Oregon in the 1990’s.
No Pets Allowed............................................................ 8 Rhodes Park Near Highland.................................. 18 Supper Club.................................................................... 24 Peeping Pete.................................................................. 35 Sibler’s Pharmacy....................................................... 38 Dance Tonight............................................................... 44 Mr. Fullerton................................................................ 51
Staff Fullerton was widely known in the Bay Area cultural circles. According to journalist and former “Merry Prankster,” Lee Quarnstrom, who accompanied author Ken Kesey on psychedelic adventures and whose name appears in the nonfiction book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” by Tom Wolfe, Fullerton, of Native American origins, inspired both the stoic American Indian character, “Chief” Bromden, and recidivist criminal, Randle McMurphy, in Kesey’s novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Actor Jack Nicholson portrayed McMurphy in the film version. Quarnstrom told friends in the Santa Cruz area that he related Fullerton’s escapades to Kesey, who incorporated them in his story. It is not known if Fullerton and Kesey ever met.
Editor-in-Chief - DeWayne Lumpkin
Art Director - Duane Megyesi
Words/Copy Editor - Thomas Glassman
Contributing Editor - Fred Vassar
Stringer - Mark Marinovich
Arts & Culture - Stephen Kessler
Neighborhood Beat April 2018
Copyright © 2018 All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission of Untitled 2.0. Untitled 2.0 a gallery on the corner of 6th & g 119 se 6th street, grants pass, or 97526
All artwork by Stan Fullerton. Exhibited as “Larger than Life,” June 2017 & “Neighborhood Beat,” April 2018 @ Untitled 2.0. “The Fantastic World of Stan Fullerton,” March 2016 & “Heads Up: The Satirical Art of Stan Fullerton,” November 2017 @ Coos Art Museum. untitled2gallery.com
My street? Nothing special. It’s like a lot of other streets … only more so. Most mornings it looks like it got left out all night. Even on a good day, Sunset Boulevard … it’s not. More like the asphalt jungle – on parade. Especially with those dancing monkeys. Like I said … it’s like a lot of other streets.
stan’s muses
Above the fray of the sidewalk kerfuffle ...
Jump Street Monkey Shines They wanted to be gorillas for the mob but they didn’t have the simian muscle. Now they work for just a few simoleons – chimp change. But if you need someone to cut a rug, then fill out their dance card.
Coq au Van Gogh The Maltese chicken that knew too much … and heard too much … and sang like a canary. So they cut off his ear first. You know the rest. Tastes like stool pigeon. Best served cold.
Serenade in Blue Green He used to be blue. Now he’s green. He used to answer to Lucky. (Now he’s deaf.)
On the street where you live … Home is where you raise your flag. Ex-suffragette/flapper/ feminist and former flag-bearer from Dough Girls on Parade from the Ziegfeld Follies.
I was in my studio reading the bible and penciling in corrections when she walked in. The kind of gal you give up Lent for. She said she had a problem. I said we all do. She said her dog was getting an earful of religion. Something about the story of Canine and Able. As a rule, I steer clear of other people’s religious dogma, but I needed rent money and nobody was passing the collection plate for me. Relax Angel, I said. Your prayers are answered. But I’m no choirboy.
snail train
“Who’s a good boy? Who’s going to heaven?”
They Juggle by Night When it’s all about to go horribly wrong. The moral of the story: Bad Choices = Bad Outcomes Fatal Assumption – When in doubt, go for the juggler.
This Bear For Hire Most people keep a bear like that on a pretty short leash. Her bear wasn’t even attached.
Four Fly Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ... and find a new pigeon.
Lord Luv A Duck “Other guys get a girl. I get a duck.”
Fraidy Cat Paw Print of Fear: 7 lives down, 2 to go ‌ or, The Big Catnap. Desperate House Cats No hard felines, my lovely.
The Gabardine Rabbit Tough neighborhood. No Velveteen rabbit here. Just working class fabric and a mean rabbit punch.
Best in Show A real charmer … with the Hissss of Death. I smell a rat … on your pet friend’s breath.
Man in the Blue Flannel Suit … with Cat The Cat and I – They Sleep by Night; Nap by Day: A mellow drama.
“Spot” – The Striped Cat [Because a Leopard Can’t Change His Stripes] Wore stripes for 5-to-10 years in solitary in the Big Cat House – until they kind of grew on him. Nicknames: Cujo, Fang, The Spotted Death, That Damn Cat, Always lands on his feet – even in jail.
Rent Due … or Else Greek Chorus – The jig is up when the fat lady signs.
out of work politician flogging culture
A little bird told me: I wasn’t the only one she had eating out of her hand.
The Joy Luck Horseshoe Club in Action Waiting for the Other Horseshoe to Drop Horseshoes:
The New Blood Sport
No way to win, but you can try to lose more slowly. Where do you think the term “Dead Ringer” came from?
Diagnosis: Accident Prone
I had just cracked the case of the twice-murdered corpse in the Old Crypt Mausoleum so I had a little spending money. That’s why I was in the corner booth at Poncho and DeLuca’s Chinese Delicatessen about to order the hot & sour won ton matzah ball soup. That’s when she came over to my table. I said, you’re not my usual waitress. She said, this isn’t my usual line of work; so what’ll you have? I said, the usual. Let me guess, she said. The snappy patter breakfast platter? Oh, and I almost forgot, how do you want the egg on your face, copper? The usual, I said: hardboiled. And I’m not a copper. I’m a PI. Tell it to the DA, she snapped. Then she turned and yelled to the kitchen: Number 2 breakfast cereal killer, pigs in a cement blanket – over dead, cup a Joe, hold the poison. I smiled and thought, I’ve been coming here for years and I’ve still never been able to order the hot & sour won ton matzah ball soup.
the man who thot [sic] carrots
Sushi for Bonzo Even though the restaurant was extremely crowded with a long waiting line, no one wanted the empty table in the back by The Monkey Bar. Now he knew why.
A Passion for Pasta
Chicken Dinner with Marc Chagall
Guilty Pleasure or Just Deserts – Both Bittersweet
Escargot on the Go
A Dish with A-Peel
When your pasta dish gets the cold shoulder …
Bait & Switch
Masterpiece Done to Death: Very Still Life with Fruit
Usually men have different taste in shoes than women.`
Soup du Jour – Thai Lemon Grass
any audience will do...
Pay dirt! Enoch gets an eyeful!
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – Local Chapter
Venus
Zenobia
Eunice
Stan’s flowers are a surprising departure from his figurative work. In the 1960’s, Stan moved throughout the Bay Area, eventually meeting and marrying Gail Putney Fullerton. Academic, author of three books and the first female President of San Jose State University (1978-1991), Living a big and full life, the couple moved to Coos Bay, Oregon after Gail’s retirement. Stan continued painting and printmaking, Gail lovingly tended her flower garden. Gail’s health began to fail over the last decade, ultimately leaving her bedridden. While she slept, Stan would take the path to her garden. There, he painted Gail’s flowers, as gifts for her eyes when she woke. Each canvas is a tender, intimate “I love you” from one heart to another. Stan and Gail were happily married for 50 years, sadly she passed away January, 2016. As Paul Harvey used to say. . . . And now, you know the rest of the story. - Fred Vassar, August 2017
s
l u b
b
b
e
always another step
another stylish hero takes a whack at love...
“Tell him to quit worrying, put the cream on the rash, take two of these, and call me in the morning if it doesn’t grow back.”
“I put the damn suppository in my ear by mistake.”
“Look, I can explain. Sure we were married, but I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
No Sacred Cows My Mentor: Half man, half bull artist, advocating from the middle of his labyrinth
Dance Macabre The Rock ‘em, sock ‘em, laugh-a-minute, screwball Whodunit, scratch-your-head, murder mystery of the Caper of the Man in Blue and the Missing Ballet Ruse.
celebration
Slow day. I was in my office killing time with a couple of close pals: Samuel Colt and Jim Beam when she waltzed in packing a pair of the biggest, largest, hugest, most oversized feet I’d ever seen. They were gunboats. And that’s not all about her that was oversized. She had a big heart, too. Stay in this racket long enough and you can tell these things just by looking. I stood up, and immediately felt myself falling … hard. You might want to retract those dancing slippers I said to her. I nearly tripped and killed myself. I can’t she said. That’s my problem. Look! So I looked. And then picked my jaw up off the floor. She either had one foot on backwards or the worst case of two left feet I’d ever seen. And I’ve been in more than a few dance halls in my time. I thought about sitting this one out, but one look at her big heart and I knew she needed a helping hand.
leg warmers, ankle warmers
Everybody Polka! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner: Blue Ribbon Couple - this is how it’s done.
The Multiple Choice Dance-off: a) Post-Impressionist Jitterbug b) German Expressionist Samba c) Ballet BrĂźt d) All [or none] of the Above
Dime a Dance Care to Conga ... Cowboy?
The Displaced Partner Impatiently waiting his turn to cut in.
Strictly Ballroom
Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot
stan the man, the man himself ... a self-portrait.
Vintage Absurdity: The Palette of Stan Fullerton Stephen Kessler, Santa Cruz Express, August 16, 1984 By the time he was a child of five or six, learning to read as well as draw by copying the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” out of the daily funnies, Stan Fullerton knew he was an artist. The Santa Cruz painter, now just past 50 and celebrating a recent surge of work with a one-man show in San Francisco, faithfully maintains that original sense of playfulness and mischief in canvases bursting with brilliant colors and a richly irreverent vision of the human comedy. People and fish and birds and animals – and devils and popes and furniture – interact in his paintings in such a way as to make them all including artist and viewer, look and feel ridiculous. Everybody wants to be a shaman, says Stanley, and his contribution to the healing arts is laughter. By taking what might be disturbing themes – for example, the abduction of a bosomy pig by a horny demon (The Last Virgin, 1983) or the revolt of an uppity crab against its wouldbe diner (Memorable Soup, 1984) – and wringing them through his rambunctious imagination, Fullerton pulls the floor out from under our sense of decorum and gives us the chance to see ourselves as the silly resilient creatures we are.
Genial and funny as his images are, there’s also a barbed social critique, particularly where the church and its agents are concerned – a satirical slap at conventional notions of vice and virtue, as in the amazing study, The Devil at Home. Of this imaginary portrait, the artist says,
“If high churchmen can burn heretics, it follows that demons tired of their offices can recline in soft chairs by the hell sides with cat in lap.” Whether viewing his work in a clean, well-lighted gallery, in the socially nutritious context of a cafe, or in the more intimate setting of his studio, one can’t escape the feeling that one is witnessing a prodigious creative power grounded not only in its conscious links with Bosch and Goya and George Grosz but in the primary energy of an indestructible childhood.
During our visit in his studio on the eve of his San Francisco opening, Fullerton reflected on the source of this energy and some of the forms it’s taken. “Since my only interaction with my family was as sort of a cheap laborer, whenever I wasn’t performing my cheap labor – like fishing or working on the rock pile we called a farm – I was making things out of paper and color, or clay and wood...my collection of playthings was not extensive. Besides, I really preferred the things that I dreamed up.” After a childhood on the coast of Oregon and a Michigan adolescence followed by a stint in the Marine Corps, Fullerton came to San Francisco in the 1950s where he connected with the earliest stirrings of the Beat scene and found himself linked aesthetically and socially with coffeehouse poets of the period. Even now, he says, he gravitates more toward writers and poets and small press printers than toward strictly visual artists, which may begin to explain the strongly narrative element in his paintings. “I come from an ethnic mix of people for whom oral history and stories told together at the appropriate time – the same stories over and over, as a matter of fact – constituted their whole relationship.” Ironically, he adds, “I’m still as tongue-tied trying to talk about art as I was - even as a small child - unless somebody has a specific question that has to do with the technical part of somebody’s work or his philosophical or psychological content.”
In New York, where he spent a few years “drunk with museums” after the North Beach culture began to sour in San Francisco, Fullerton savored some time among painters like Franz Kline, Willem DeKooning, Robert Motherwell (and other “gods on Olympus” of that era) learning the craft. “Some things I learned at the Art Students League, but mostly I learned in saloons or on long walks or in other people’s studios. I listened, bought drinks when I had a buck. I wanted to hear what they had to say. The talk itself was intoxicating – not who sold what, but the strokes in Velazquez, the quality of the painting – nobody talks about that stuff anymore.”
Returning to the West Coast: “In flight from the popular perception of success,” Stanley found the creative forces of San Francisco scattered and soon decided to head for Costa Rica on his motorcycle, a 350cc Yamaha - “the only brand new thing over $100 I ever had.” - which broke down in Santa Cruz. “The serendipity of my falling into Santa Cruz was obviously meant to happen because it was the last small place by the ocean that I could afford. If I came here now I couldn’t afford to stay here.
“The thing I find most interesting about Santa Cruz is that practically everybody between 19 and 40 thinks or hopes or believes that they’re an artist. When I came to town there were about six recognizable artists – two potters and maybe four painters – and to have it go from that to this recent call for an open show at this little museum downtown that brought in 1300, 1400 things, I just find it extraordinary to watch. That kind of energy can’t be bad – I mean the joys and pains of pregnancy – and even the poseurs are a kind of street theater...I love being underwhelmed by them. I’ve got books and books full of them. Chortling, he picks up steam. “There’s something about Santa Cruz that not only geographically do I really love, but the degree or the quality of absurdity here is vintage. This is vintage absurdity. And some stuff comes out of it...some of these little tiny gems of books that people like Gary Young come out with. He brought me a book for my birthday, just a tiny thing of prayers, but the book itself was a prayer, the paper used and the way he printed it. These people in their garages, making things that they’re going to make about a cent-and-ahalf a copy on just pouring their heart into it...and they’re going to go on.” One of the things that’s interesting about art is that if you last long enough, if you don’t take any of the other alternatives, you gradually, over the years, get a group of people who have absolute faith in you and every so often those folks come and buy something, no matter what it is you make.
“I don’t think there are any walls between the art forms. I don’t think that a poet standing on a stage in a 1950s coffeehouse giving his heart to people on the end of his tongue was any different than me and I don’t think that those kids who gather in hallways and wherever they can find a smooth place with a crowd to watch them, that are doing these kinds of dances and things, I find no real difference between these forms of creative energy and mine. Energy doesn’t die. How can there be boundaries on anything that comes out of the mind? The energy in your head is the same as the energy of the sun. You heart and head are connected and your fingers have got to follow.” “Artists are the gnats on the peach of this society. We’re the third rail of this train. We’re the training wheels for the world’s biggest tricycle – can you imagine a tricycle with training wheels. We’re here to make sure that the compass points somewhere.”
As far as local culture is concerned, Fullerton says he sees “the famous town/gown split” as a false dichotomy. “That University has brought dozens of times more good stuff than it’s brought bad stuff. I mean it’s brought some really schmuck kids, but those are our kids. The thing that having an institution like that here brings – besides the concerts and libraries and the people who are in the University and on the faculty – is an atmosphere for people who are peripheral to the University, people who came to this community to kind of feed off this energy from that University and find themselves lifelong students at Cabrillo...and the people who have been students or professors up there who didn’t get tenure and have all these social theories that they’re putting into practice downtown.” “There’s all this talk about battles between the old orders and the new orders. I see many layers of order. For someone who is drawing and painting about the human condition, I find a lot of it silly but in the silliness and poignancy of people’s wants and needs I find genuine things and I find what I call ingenious things. I feel like I’m on this long train running from the cave drawers who recorded their magnificent hunts to these kids with their sketchbooks in the cafes.” What about the artist’s traditional struggle for recognition, fame, success? Fullerton says, “I’ve seen the kind of painting that I do go out of favor and come into favor and go out of favor and come into favor. It’s like feminine fashion, the brokers go for and publicize what the other guys on the street don’t have.
It’s success to me to have spent all the hours I can be awake making the images and being sometimes pleased to meet them, always surprised at how they have conjured themselves out of my imperfect knowledge of the myth of human kind. The studio is success. Staying in it is success.” “I get by on a modest amount of input in terms of appreciation. In New York I had a considerable amount of appreciation and I found out that a lot of praise was the same as a lot of the opposite – that being patted on the back was the same as having shit thrown in your face. I take my praise from the odd amount of light that comes into somebody’s face when they look at something. When you come into the studio, I can tell by your breathing whether you genuinely like something or don’t.” Until a few years ago, when health considerations forced him to give it up, Fullerton worked as a commercial fisherman, spreading his nets in Monterrey Bay from a boat he built by hand. “The reason why I would go up and go fishing out of this miserable port every morning for almost 10 years was that when I pulled my nets up I never knew what was going to be there – flounders, octopus, sharks, whatever – you never knew, you just never knew.” “In the studio it’s the same thing, you never know - when you walk out of here at two o’clock in the morning and come back in at four - what you’re going to find.” Stan Fullerton - August, 1984 at the Bruce Velick Gallery, San Francisco and the Hoeger Thompson Gallery, Santa Cruz Art Center.
“Artists are the gnats pregnancy – and even of somebody's work or Whether viewing his favor. It's like feminine on the peach of this the poseurs are a kind his philosophical or work in a clean, wellfashion, the brokers go society. We're the third of street theater...I love psychological content.” lighted gallery, in the for and publicize what rail of this train. We're being underwhelmed by In New York, where he socially nutritious the other guys on the the training wheels for them. I've got books spent a few years context of a cafe, or in street don't have. It's the world's biggest and books full of them. “drunk with museums” the more intimate success to me to have tricycle – can you after the North Beach setting of his studio, one spent all the hours I can imagine a tricycle with Chortling, he picks up culture began to sour in can't escape the feeling be awake making the By the time he was a training wheels. We're steam. “There's San Francisco, that one is witnessing a images and being child of five or six, here to make sure that something about Santa Fullerton savored some prodigious creative sometimes pleased to learning to read as well the compass points Cruz that no only time among painters power grounded not meet them, always as draw by copyingBiography: the Stan Fullerton somewhere.” geographically do I like Franz Kline, only in its conscious surprised at how they comic strip “The Born in Portland, Oregon 19, 1935. After a childhood the really .love,spent but thein Oregon and Michigan, he moved Willem DeKooning, links with Bosch and on January havetoconjured Katzenjammer Kids” As far as local culture is degree or the quality of Robert Motherwell Goya and George Grosz themselves out of the daily funnies, San Francisco Bay area. While exploring human folly through the figure in painting, printmaking, sculpture and out of my concerned, Fullerton of absurdity here is (and other “gods on but in the primary imperfect knowledge of Stan Fullerton knew he collage; his expressionist works tend to be large, bright and colorful. His first exhibit was in 1958 at the City says he sees “the vintage. This is vintage Olympus” of that era) energy of an the myth of human was an artist. The Santa Bookstore in San Francisco, a favorite meeting place of theAnd Beat Generation poets. famous town/gown absurdity. some learning the craft. indestructible kind. The studio is Cruz painter, now Lights just split” as a false stuff comes out of childhood. success. Staying in it is past 50 and celebrating Moving to New York in 1959, Fullerton befriended notedit...some expressionist artist anddichotomy. political “That cartoonist George of these little “Some things that I success.” a recent surge of work Grosz studied at the Art Students League. While in New York, was two one-man Exhibits. has brought tiny gems of he book thatgiven University learned at the Art During our visit in his with a one-man show in and dozens of more times more like Gary Young Students studio on the his Marines, “I gethe by on a modest San Francisco, Following a stint in eve theofU.S. heLeague, settledbut down in people the Monterey Bay in 1964. For than 20 years, good stuff than it's come out with. He mostly I learned in San Francisco opening, amount of input in faithfully maintains exhibited throughout the Bay Area, with one-man Exhibits in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Pacific Grove and Los brought bad stuff. I brought me a book for saloons or on long Fullerton reflected on terms of appreciation. that original sense of mean it's brought some my birthday, just a tiny walks or in other In New York I had a playfulness and Gatos. the source of this really schmuck kids, thing of prayers, bu the people's studios. I energy and some of the considerable amount of mischief in canvases Solo & Group Exhibits were heldlistened, in New York,drinks San Francisco, Berkeley, Carmelbut andthose Pacific Grove. are our kids. Recent book itself was a bought forms it's taken. “Since appreciation and I bursting with brilliant soloonly exhibits in Coos Bay andI had Grants Pass, have as individual segments in a longfound and out that a lot of The thing that having prayer, the served paper used when a buck. I Oregon interaction colors and a richlymultiple my institution like that and the way he printed wanted to hear what with my familyviewing was as of Stan praise was the same as irreverent vision ofstoried the retrospective Fullerton's art. He currently resides in CoosanBay, Oregon. here brings – besides it. These people in their they had to say. The sort of a cheap laborer, a lot of the opposite – human comedy. People the concerts and garages, making things talk itself was whenever I wasn't that being patted on the and fish and birds Education: and libraries and the people that they're going to intoxicating – not who performing my cheap back was the same as animals – and devils Various Elementary Schools and who are in the make about a cent-andsold what, butMichigan the labor – like fishing or in Oregon having shit thrown in and popes and University and on the a-half a copy on just strokes in Velazquez, working on the rock your face. I take my furniture – interact in Standish-Sterling High School, Arenac, Michigan - Graduated 1952 faculty – is an pouringin their heart into the quality of the pile we called a farm –I praise from the odd his paintings in such a atmosphere for people it...and they're going to painting – nobody talks was making things out amount of light that way as to make them all Studied at Students New 1959-1960 go on.” who are peripheral to about York that stuff of Art paper and color,League, or comes into somebody's including artist and the University, people anymore.” clay and wood...my face when they look at viewer, look and feel Studied with George Grosz in New York 1959 who came to this One of the things that's collection of playthings something. When you ridiculous. community to kind of interesting about art is Returning to the West was not extensive. World Travel: Korea, Japan (as a U.S. Marine) Japan, Mexico, Spain, France, Germany (as a civilian) come into the studio, I feed off this energy that if you last long Coast: “In flight from Besides, I really can tell by your Everybody wants to be from that University enough, if you don't the popular perception preferred the things breathing whether you a shaman, says Stanley, Exhibitions: and find themselves take any of the other of success,” Stanley that I dreamed up.” genuinely like and his contribution to lifelong students at alternatives, you found the creative something or don't.” the healing arts is 1958 City Lights Book Store, San Francisco, California (Group Exhibit) Cabrillo...and the gradually, over the forces of San Francisco After a childhood on laughter. By taking 1958 Telegraph Gallery, Ave.,and Sansoon Francisco, California (SoloofExhibit)people who have been years, get a group scattered the coast Hill of Oregon and Grant Until a few years ago, what might be students or professors people who have decided to head for a Michigan adolescence when health disturbing themes – for 1959 European Grove Street, NewonYork, Exhibit) up there who didn't get absolute faith in you Costa Rica his NY (Solo followedGallery, by a stint in considerations forced example, the abduction tenure and have all and every so often those motorcycle, a 350cc the Marine Corps, him to give it up, of a bosomy pig by a Carmel Gallery, Street (Solo these social theories folks comeExhibit) and buy Yamaha - “theNew only York, NY Fullerton came to San E. Tenth Fullerton worked as a horny demon (The1960 Last Hilda that they're putting into something, no matter brand new thing over Francisco in the 1950s commercial fisherman, Virgin, 1983) or the 1966 Thewhere Cupola Gallery, Santa Cruz, California (Solo Exhibit) practice downtown.” what it is you make. $100 I ever had.” he connected spreading his nets in revolt of an uppity crab which broke down in (Group Exhibit) withI,the earliest Place, Berkeley, Monterrey Bay from a against its would-be 1969 Nova Channing California “There's all this talk “I don't think there are Santa Cruz. “The stirrings of the Beat boat he built by hand. diner (Memorable about battles between anyExhibit) walls between the serendipity of my and foundGallery, himself Los “The reason why I Soup, 1984) – and 1970 Thescene Downstairs Gatos, California (Solo the old orders and the art forms. I don't think falling into Santa Cruz linked aesthetically and would go up and go wringing them through new orders. I see many that a poet standing obviously meant to fishing out of this his rambunctious 1970 Thesocially Greatwith Montgrove Craftwas Guild, Pacific Grove, California (GrouponExhibit) layers of order. For a stage in a 1950s happen because it was coffeehouse poets of the miserable port every imagination, Fullerton 1971- 1973 TheEven Forge Carmel California (Group Exhibit) someone who is coffeehouse giving his the last small place by period. now,inhethe Forest, morning for almost 10 pulls the floor out from drawing and painting heart to people on the the ocean that I could says, he gravitates more years was that when I under our sense of Corn Roast, Davenport, California Exhibit)end of his tongue was about the human afford. If I(Group came here toward writers and pulled my nets up I decorum and gives1972 us condition, I find a lot of any different than me now I couldn't afford to poets and small press never knew what was the chance to see 1982 Pacific Grove Art Center, Pacific Grove, California (Solo Exhibit) it silly but in the and I don't think that stay here. printers than toward going to be there – ourselves as the silly silliness and poignancy those kids who gather strictly visual artists, flounders, octopus, resilient creatures we 1984 Bruce Velick Gallery, San Francisco, California (Solo Exhibit) of people's wants and in hallways and “The thing I find most which may begin to sharks, whatever – you are. needs I find genuine wherever they can find interesting about Santa (Group explain the strongly never knew, you just 1987 Bruce Velick Gallery, San Francisco, California Exhibit) things and I find what I a smooth place with a Cruz is that practically narrative element in his never knew.” Genial and funny as his call ingenious things. I crowd to(Solo watchExhibit) them, 19 paintings. “I come fromCity everybody images are, there's2016 also Southwestern Oregon College, between North Bend, Oregon feel like I'm on this long that are doing these and 40 thinks or hopes an ethnic mix of people “In the studio it's the a barbed social critique, train running from the believes that they're for whomCourt, oral history same thing, you never particularly where2016 the Evergreen Coos Bay,orOregon, (Solo Exhibit)kinds of dances and cave drawers who things, I find no real an artist. When I came and stories told know - when you walk church and its agents Art Museum, “The Fantastic World Coos Bay, Oregon (Solo recorded theirExhibit) difference between to town there wereof Stan Fullerton,” together at the out of here at two are concerned – a 2016 Coos magnificent hunts to these forms of creative about six recognizable appropriate time – the o'clock in the morning satirical slap at 2017 2.0, “Larger Life,”–Grants Pass, Oregon (Solo Exhibit) these kids with their energy and mine. two potters same stories over and Than artists and come back in at conventional notions of Untitled Energy doesn't die. and maybe four over, as a matter of fact four - what you're going vice and virtue, as in sketchbooks in the 2017 Coos Art Museum, “Heads Up: The Satirical Art of S. Fullerton,” Coos Bay, Oregon (Solo Exhibit) How can there be painters – and to have – constituted their to find.” the amazing study, The cafes.” boundaries on anything it go from that to this whole relationship.” Devil at Home. Of 2018 this Untitled 2.0, “Neighborhood Beat,” Grants Pass, Oregon (Solo Exhibit) that comes out of the recent call for an open Stan Fullerton's work imaginary portrait, the What about the artist's mind? The energy in show at this little Ironically, he adds, can be seen through artist says, “If high traditional struggle for your head is the same museum downtown that “I'm still as tongue-tied August 31, 1984 at the churchmen can burn recognition, fame, as the energy of the sun. brought in 1300, 1400 trying to talk about art Bruce Velick Gallery, 55 heretics, it follows that success? Fullerton says, You heart and head are things, I just find it as I was - even as a Grant Avenue, San demons tired of their “I've seen the kind of connected and your extraordinary to watch. small child - unless Francisco and in the offices can recline in painting that I do go fingers have got to That kind of energy somebody has a specific “Fish Art” show at the soft chairs by the hell out of favor and come follow.” can't be bad – I mean question that has to do Hoeger Thompson sides with cat in lap.” into favor and go out of the joys and pains of with the technical part Gallery, Santa Cruz, CA favor and come into Vintage Absurdity: The Palette of Stan Fullerton Stephen Kessler, Santa Cruz Express, August 16, 1984
THEY LAUGHED WHEN I SAT DOWN AT THE PIANO BUT WHEN I STARTED TO JUGGLE THE BEAGLES!~ Arthur had just played “Chopsticks.” The room rang with applause. I decided that this would be a dramatic moment for me to make my debut. To the amazement of all my friends, I strode confidently over to the piano.
Then I Started To Juggle Instantly a tense silence fell on the guests. The laughter died on their lips and all you could hear in the room was dead silence and the occasional sound of a beagle hitting the floor and a swooshing sound as I scooped the hapless canine up and propelled it back into its former parabolic trajectory. I heard gasps of amazement. My friends sat breathless – spellbound.
A Complete Triumph As I gathered in the last beagle and returned it to the recently vacated lap of its anxious dowager owner, the room resounded with a sudden roar of applause. I found myself surrounded by excited faces. How my friends carried on! Men shook my hand – wildly congratulated me – pounded me on the back in their enthusiasm.
Ladies swooned. Dignitaries pinned medals on me. Everybody was exclaiming with delight – plying me with rapid questions… “Stan! Why didn’t you tell us you could juggle like that? How long have you studied? Who was your teacher?” “I have never even teacher,” I replied.
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“Quit your kidding,” they said.
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