Living on a cliff overlooking the Pacific since the early eighties amid the
redwood forests and wildlife, Don Van Vliet has embraced painting with the same
controlled passion that made him, as the avant-garde rock composer and performer
Captain Beefheart, a cult figure of conspicuous influence and one of the genuine
musical geniuses of the past twenty years. Self-trained as a painter and knowing
relatively little about the history of art or the current scene, he is a modernist
primitive but also an artist whose remarkable intuitive gifts and love of nature
have combined to create highly charged paintings that are at once jolting as well
as lyrical.