Basil KingBasil King happened on a Jackson Pollock exhibition in Detroit when he was 14 and, he says, it was like being hit by lightning. His art teacher dismissed the work as a passing fancy but King intuitively went on to Black Mountain College where a clearinghouse of the truly underground artists of Europe and America—Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson, et al—were opening eyes. Finding that folks there were familiar with Pollock, a relieved King knew he'd reached the right place. After training at Black Mountain as an abstract painter, he moved on to the center of abstract painting, Manhattan, where he assisted the heavies, Gottleib, Motherwell, Newman and Kline. But he became dissatisfied. Abstraction, as he saw it, was becoming academic. He could no longer resist the intrigues of surrealism. "Everything became flesh for me. You let the same dreams come through and that becomes the thing." A passion for card playing led Basil to start reshuffling the images for the deck. "There's a certain magic from the geometry," he says. In a King landscape, figures arise like specters and peer back at us as if they know our secrets. Created with a swooshing brushstroke that divides them from the neutral background, the sensuous humanoid shapes are in synthesis, appendages transforming into the otherworldly perfection of numbers. They're symbols of interior products. Each canvas is a flag of a particular mood. There's a warmth, a peacefulness in these serene fantasies. They're not the hardened prophecy of sci-fi but the dreamed inspirations of poetry. "I paint," he mentions, "after the struggle." He explains, "Since 1982–83, I've been playing baseball, the cards, poets, writers, and people connected with the arts." His friendship with a crowd of younger poets led to this exhibition at Granary Books. It was his first show in 20 years and a long way from the brooding energy of his mentors. It was a delight. And, Tom Seaver likes his baseball paintings. (Cover, November 1989) |