Even from this distance, a long city block away on the courthouse square in Waxahachie, you can tell something's not quite right with Perry Murphy. The sight of him, half-shuffling across Franklin Street, grabs the attention of the dozen people gathered early this evening for Stephen Anderson's art opening at the Webb Gallery. Murphy is heading straight for them, his not-quite-right blue eyes making contact, his sloppy brown shirt accessorized with shiny, heavy jewelry that he displays to the onlookers. "I made these," he says simply, showing off more than a dozen coin-encircled bracelets and necklaces. "I use car glue."
Peter Calvin
Self-taught artist Stephen Anderson is fixated on classic movies, and he paints with the same sewing needles he uses to make his vintage Hollywood wardrobe.
Details
Through November 7
Saturdays and Sundays:
1 to 5 p.m.,
Or by appointment
(972) 938-8085
Featuring Stephen Anderson's paintings and drawings by French artist Chomo
Webb Gallery
209-211 W. Franklin, Waxahachie
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Oddballs at art openings are nothing new, but Murphy isn't so odd to the Waxahachie natives who accept the local lore that his lot in life, and those of his eight siblings, is the result of parents who were close relatives before they married. Too close. Locals accept Murphy wandering their streets, harmlessly looking for things he can pile in the yard or use to make coin art. Gallery owner Julie Webb is used to him and says the coin jewelry appeared around Murphy's neck and wrists a few months after the gallery showed the work of homeless Fort Worth artist Carl Nash. To the delight of the Webb Gallery, with its commitment to "outsider art," Nash seemed to flaunt his penniless existence by collecting pennies and gluing them to found objects. Nash, and maybe even Murphy, are quintessential examples of naive, self-taught art-makers whose challenged-by-fate search for self-expression can take the form of unusual, soulful, primitive art prized for its lack of self-consciousness.
Murphy is an outsider to these gallery-goers who have come from Dallas and Fort Worth to see Stephen Anderson's "outsider art." He doesn't enter the gallery, seemingly content with the attention he attracts on the sidewalk. Eventually, he wanders away.
Those patrons who return to the gallery are treated to an outsider artist quite different from Murphy, yet in many ways the same. Anderson registers fairly high on the kook-ometer himself. Barely five feet tall, with thinning hair and thick, horn-rimmed glasses, Anderson converses more easily than Murphy. For his opening, Anderson wears his trademark silk ascot with one of the natty, English-style hunting jackets he designs and sews by hand. Rather than embrace the "eccentric" label given to him, he says, "I'm individualistic, I think. And things I like, I like intensely."
Anderson quickly reveals an almost limitless mental capacity for art appreciation; over 15 years, he has taught himself to paint with media and techniques uniquely his own. His inner drive is to create art, to learn about it, and to pursue it to the point of obsession.
He paints his intricate portraits with dried tempera, reconstituted with his own saliva. He uses brushes for his unique medium, but also favors sewing needles to apply the paint in a tedious, speck-by-speck method he's perfected over years of experimentation. The saliva, he says, was one such experiment. "I found if I added water or some other liquid, the paint was too thin. I just tried spitting in it, and the consistency was perfect." He often applies colored pencil over the paint and uses the needle with re-liquefied paint for a tessellated effect, working on the surface rather than layering. "The faces need to convey something of the texture of the skin," he says. And his faces do, with the fine lines and subtle irregularities of an eggshell held up to the light. He uses plastic tools to create striation in still-wet paint, and his obsession with the techniques he invented himself shows in intricate sections of his work. He makes all his own frames from the moldings he collects and stores in his basement.
Anderson's genuine creativity seems like a symptom of his quirky life. At 46, he lives with his mother, brother, and sister in Rockford, Illinois, and the bedroom in which he grew up is his studio. He seems to prefer his own private world to the blue-collar tedium of the town around him. The world he's created for himself is orderly, regimented, and logical, in contrast to the early-Hollywood glamour he craves in his handmade clothes and on the TV screen. "I'm organized, and a creature of habit and routine," he says. He keeps his illustration board in the closet, and his paints in a dresser drawer, and, for inspiration, he occasionally consults his unique collection of pinup girls, tacked to the wall, next to windows covered with red curtains. His pinup choices are quirky too; not the movie stars you'd expect, but Mona Lisa, Gainesborough's "Honourable Mrs. Graham," and Mme. Vigee-LeBrun's self-portrait.
He doesn't get out much, he says, preferring the solitude of his room, which is sparsely furnished with a twin bed, a dresser, a large TV, and a VCR. Besides his family, Anderson's companions are the old movie stars he's gotten to know through cable television. He loves the classic movie channel and has a vast collection of its work on video. He is completely obsessed with film noir and, from his rarefied wardrobe alone, could easily be a stand-in for Cecil B. DeMille or Rudolph Valentino from the neck down.
