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It was music, in retrospect, that was particularly befitting of the 1960s, the decade to which it was born. Like the time, it was young and ambitious and overpoweringly energetic. And it was without precedent; absolutely nothing that had come before sounded quite like it. It sent many a music critic running to a dictionary in search of adjectives with which to denounce it. Trivial, nonsensical, primitive and atonal were some of the kinder ones they chose. At the same time, the music saddled Don Van Vliet with an obsessive band of fans who believed that his alter ego, Captain Beefheart, was an oracle whoRead More →

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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 asRead More →

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Ice Cream for Crow. On the Relationship between Music and Painting in Captain Beefheart’s Work Those who, over the last twenty years, have loved the music of Captain Beefheart cannot forget that he decided to abandon the music scene (it would seem definitively) to devote himself full-time to painting. Specialist rock critics, who were left the sad task of a retrospective tribute to his career, each time have boldly tried to establish correlations bet-ween yesterday’s music and today’s painting, acting in a way that is markedly ‘reparative’ and which, implicitly placing diachronic continuity to his basis, has no logical or cultural justification in the CalifornianRead More →

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This month Brighton Museum is staging two of the most exciting exhibitions seen in the town for years. Underground London and Stand Up To Be Discontinued bring the photos of Robert Whitaker and the art of Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart) to the museum at the same time. You lucky people. BRIGHTON Museum celebrates the work of one of rock’s most extraordinary and enduring artists, Captain Beefheart, from September 2. Alongside the rock memorabilia will be the first ever UK exhibition of his paintings which have established him as one of the finest of contemporary expressionist artists. Jonathan Morris reports DON van Vliet, aka CaptainRead More →

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Captain Beefheart was a music legend; now he’s Don Van Vliet, genius of paint. `You can physically drown in paint, you can mentally drown in music,’ declares Don Van Vliet, pronouncing one of his less obscure aphorisms. Cult rocker turned successful painter (but still better known to the world as Captain Beefheart) Van Vliet can claim intimate knowledge of both mediums. While a devoted public continues to mourn his absence from the music scene, which he abandoned in 1982, Van Vliet’s status as a fine artist has risen steadily over the last decade. These days a canvas by the Captain will set you back betweenRead More →

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Don Van Vliet is probably the only full-time painter who used to be a mythical figure in music. Once Captain Beefheart, he is soon to exhibit in Brighton. Ben Thompson sent him a fax. DON VAN VLIET lives in the small and beautifully named town of Trinidad in Northern California, up by the Oregon border, 135 ft from the ocean. He paints there. He is a painter of note – “Stand Up to Be Discontinued”, the second British exhibition of his work, arrives in Brighton in September to confound anyone who doubts this – but he used to be a painter of notes. Until theRead More →

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Don Van Vliet at Fred Hoffman Gallery Fans from Don Van Vliet’s (a.k.a. Captain Beefheart’s) rock ‘n’ roll past will no doubt be curious to see what kind of paintings and drawings have resulted from Van Vliet’s last few years of working in these media. Given Captain Beefheart’s zany antics and his usually enigmatic, eclectic and sometimes provocative music, there could be no telling what he might come up with unless you hazarded a guess based on the cover art he has produced for his albums. Van Vliet still composes music, but painting and drawing capture his attention now and have since 1982, the yearRead More →

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The terse, succinct, even programmatic formula enunciated by Don Van Vliet alias Captain Beefheart, is both peremptory and cryptic: “Stand up to be discontinued!” When a person makes an utterance, [s]he also gives something of [her/]himself- a fact that makes every statement into a miniature sample of a personality. When a person says something, [s]he usually also wants to make something happen. Don Van Vliet is said to be no lover of straight-line thinking, but a creative conversationalist, who makes unexpected conceptual leaps, and who possesses a wide mental horizon, a wild sense of humor, and a good memory. “Don Van Vliet is happiest talkingRead More →

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Published by Cantz Paperback £21.95 1993 ISBN 3-9801320-2-1 Hardback Limited Edition (1500) with CD £32.50 1993 ISBN 3-9801320-3-X Deluxe Slip Cased Limited Edition (120) with original etching £180.00 1994 136 pages with 70 colour plates Contents: Don van Vliet in Bielefeld: Andreas Beaugrand Animals and Black Ladies: Karsten Ohrt Don van Vliet – The Painting: Jessica Rutherford “Stand Up To Be Discontinued”. On Don van Vliet as Painter and Musician: Paolo Bianchi Pearls before Swine. Ice Cream for Crow. On the Relationship between Music and Painting in Captain Beefheart’s Work: Luca Ferrari Captain Beefheart: Diedrich Diedrichsen Don van Vliet: Roberto Ohrt Fur Don van Vliet:Read More →

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Don Van Vliet; poet, musician, composer, anti-rockstar, aka the legendary Captain Beefheart, has been off in the wilderness making pictures since the early seventies. Exhibiting his paintings under his own name since the early eighties, his most recent work was shown this winter at Knoedler & Company, in association with the Michael Werner Gallery. What has been said in the past about his work as a musician and poet, namely that it is visionary and apocalyptic, is also true about his work as painter. Poet John Yau writes “In this time [where] it falls to artists, writers, and musicians to reveal the myriad ways inRead More →

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After having followed Don Van Vliet’s work for sometime, it is now appropriate to salute the artist on his arrival as a significant force in the arena of picture making. What initially drew me to his work and what I continue to find compelling, is the artist’s intense personal exploration of the deeper, non-material realms of individual and collective consciousness. How rare such a vision is in today’s world. Don Van Vliet’s art separates itself from the conditions guiding today’s art world in which too many of today’s creators are aligned with the world of communication, promotion and distribution. The content of their art makingRead More →

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In the early 1970s the voice of Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, was a signal and a proof that something else is possible -that nothing has to stay the way it is. His music came out of a space in which the power of existing laws was broken. It expanded the framework of the imaginable, for the members of a generation whose own attitudes and ideas embodied a radical aspiration, but who had let their own lives be defined by a set of descriptions and signs over which they had virtually no control. The music of Don Van Vliet revealed how far that generationRead More →

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A painter whose first one-man show in New York runs through Saturday at the Mary Boone Gallery, 417 West Broadway, may be better known to music-lovers than to the art world. The prestigious gallery, which has represented David Salle and Julian Schnabel, has a show of eight large, boldly colored canvases by Don Van Vliet, the composer, saxophonist and harmonica player who has been making records since the 1960’s as Captain Beefheart. The style of such paintings as ”Eye Whine” and ”Gum at the Bottom of the Grocery” will be familiar to owners of the albums ”Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller),” ”Ice Cream for Crow”Read More →

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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture – Frank Zappa Indeed, and I would suspect that Frank Zappa might have similar opinions on the subject of writing about paintings, at least those of his long-time protege Don Van Vliet (more popualarly known by his stage name of Captain Beefheart). Seven of Van Vliet’s recent oil-on-linen efforts are currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the ongoing series of small-scale exhibitions titled New Work. Now you might ask, “Why is the museum devoting exhibition space to the essentially naive paintings of a man whose primary metier is a peculiar kindRead More →

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Gary Lucas has sent us some previously unseen drawings by Don. These were drawn in a large notebook (8.5 x 11 inches) which Gary carried everywhere during 1980 to 1984 and used for Beefheart related business — “dictated lyrics, poems, observations he wanted me to write down, business contacts etc.” (click on the image for a larger version) #1  “Untitled Abstract “ Don drew this in November 1980 towards the back of the notebook using a black marking pen. #2 “Growlin Poeé” (dated 11 / 11 / 82) #3 “Early Phoe Faux Thump” (11-11-82) The last two drawings Don drew in NYC during a periodRead More →

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Don Van Vliet Knoedler & Company 19 East 70th Street Through Dec. 5 Known in an earlier incarnation as the rock musician Captain Beefheart, Don Van Vliet left the music world in the late 1970s to concentrate on painting. Self-taught, he works in a primitive style, deploying crude animal and more abstract shapes in black and various colours on snowy white grounds. For a rock musician, he knows how to keep his decibels down, using white space like musical rests. In his best work, the shapes establish lyrical relationships that make for catchy compositions. In “Dreams in the Daytime Colored With Sunshine” (1995-96), a black,Read More →

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Don Van Vliet was born in Glendale, California, on January 15, 1941, the only child of Glenn and Sue Van Vliet. Don began showing artistic talent at a very young age but Glenn and Sue were none too keen on having an artist in the family. “Cause you know, all artists are faggots,” Don explains. When he was young, the family moved to the Mojave Desert, an isolated, brutal environment that they hoped would bleach the creative juice out of their son. But Van Vliet’s drive to translate the world around him into art only intensified; in 1966 he introduced himself to the world asRead More →