Daniel Johnston's Drawings of the Psyche

 

 

Daniel Johnston, the legendary outsider artist beloved by Beck, Wilco, and Kurt Cobain, is the subject of a new exhibition, Psychedelic Drawings, at New York’s Electric Lady Studios. While best known as a singer-songwriter, Johnston – who died in September 2019 of natural causes, after a forty year struggle with severe mental illness – always identified as an ‘artist’ across the board, with a reverence for comic books, cartoons, and drawing that predated his taste for music.
 
Running till 7th February and available to view online, Psychedelic Drawings is the headline of this year’s Outsider Art Fair, an annual event that celebrates artists from unconventional and neurodiverse backgrounds.
 
“The psychedelic experience is partially defined as ‘an apparent expansion of consciousness,’” says Lee Foster, the manager of New York’s Electric Lady Studios. “Daniel went places that most of us clearly never go to.”
 
“What I think is most fascinating about him is that he so compulsively documented what he saw – like an explorer drafting the first maps of an uncharted space.”
 
Gary Panter, an artist and the exhibit’s curator, describes Johnston as a “self-taught visionary artist”. Exhibited in galleries around the world, visual art was critical to Johnston’s appeal even from his earliest cassettes. Notably, the delicate, marker-drawn cover of Hi, How Are You?, when worn on a t-shirt by Kurt Cobain at the MTV Music Awards in 1992, is credited with first catapulting Johnston into popular awareness.
 
“I think Daniel was subject to an imagination turned up to eleven”, says Panter, who selected thirty drawings for the exhibit. “He saw the things he drew in some way similar to his drawings, but subject to the limits of drawing. It is hard for drawing to really match imagination.”
 
Johnston’s sketches, like his songs, are messy, untrained, DIY: constructions of felt-tip markers and bright, primary colours, which often cross outside the lines. Fans of Johnston will notice, too, the appearance of characters like Captain America, The Hulk, Frankenstein, and Casper The Friendly Ghost, who show a remarkable constancy in the artist’s work.
 
In this exhibit alone, Captain America features in pieces from as early as 1978 and well up to the 2000s, in a style that’s remained broadly similar. “I forgot to grow up, I guess”, Johnston told Rolling Stone. “I’m a simple kind of guy, just like a child, drawing pictures and making up songs, playing around all the time.”
 
For Johnston, however, these characters are more than nostalgic nods. In his visionary schema – much like William Blake’s self-created mythology of fairies, holy spirits, and goddesses – the characters hold a deeply symbolic status, resonating on fundamental questions and grand tensions. In works like ‘I Dream of Good Versus Evil’ and ‘Faith Is Belief’, Captain America personifies good and wisdom itself, holding the airs of a mystic with short Zen-like snippets.
 
Equally, Casper The Friendly Ghost seems to stand in for God (or Satan, it’s not clear) in ‘You’ll Wait For Eternal Punishment’, where he flies over a quartet of demons burning in hellfire. He explores hell again in 2001’s ‘Pain and Pleasure’, a technically-striking depiction of deformed and neon-coloured ghouls.
 
Indeed, Johnston’s fascination with demons is well-known. As told in 2006’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston, he refused a contract with a major label because they’d signed Metallica, a band Johnston took as the work of Satan. Raised in the fundamentalist Church of Christ, it seems that Johnston’s inner landscape was wont to mix fiction, fantasy, spirituality, and biography from an early age.

 
Separating truth from fiction was precisely Johnston’s problem, though. While a careful, symbolic balance could be drawn in his artwork, the same characters would emerge in Johnston’s most florid psychoses, and in ways that put paid to any romantic view of mental illness. It was his manic delusion of being Casper The Friendly Ghost, for example, that once led him to crash-land his father’s plane; episodes of devil obsession ended in grievous assaults of an old lady and his manager. The ‘psychedelic’ component of the exhibit at all, in fact, produces a certain unease, being that Johnston’s major breakdown was triggered by the abuse of psychedelic drugs.
 
It doesn’t help that our culture tends to mythologise the link of mental illness to creativity. Studies suggest that there is no greater likelihood for creative types like musicians and writers to be mentally ill at all. It was at Johnston’s times of more severe mental illness, in fact, when his creative energies were most sapped. Prescribed psychiatric drugs, while essential for preventing a relapse, would further dull the mind.
 
That said, art therapy, where patients are encouraged to externalise their emotional stress in pictures, has shown application in treating schizophrenia. It seems that Johnston was doing much the same, albeit in a non-clinical setting. It’s worth remembering that Johnston’s illness wasn’t always ‘cosmic’, either, in the Blakean sense of grand visions and inner worlds. It was often classically depressive.
 
‘Hulk Will Smash’, sketched in 2000 at age 39, shows Hulk as an instrument for Johnston’s own anger and self-doubt, especially over his inability to find lasting romance. Or consider 1980’s ‘My Nightmares’, which depicts an intimidation at the hands of a cyclops and a knife-wielding jack-in-the-box. ‘Hello Daniel. You’re nervous, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’, he asks.
 
“Daniel's dealings with his illness was surely something that he channeled into his art and music. But, we can't view his entire body of work in one single context”, says Lee Foster of Electric Lady. “Each piece tells the story of how he was feeling at a given moment, even minute-by-minute at times -- and then sometimes years apart.

 
“I think it was very much a mixture of his winning and losing battles with the forces around him. The major themes focused on the fight itself and the always underlying idea of hope.”
 
This year’s Outsider Art Fair features a whole gamut of alternative voices. Panter, Psychedelic Drawings’ curator, compares Johnston’s exhibit to those of Henry Darger and Susan Te Kahurangi King, other “self-taught visionary artists” who suffer(ed) respectively from bipolar disorder and a non-verbal form of autism.
 
With its leading voices already drawn from the margins, though, some fear that ‘outsider art’ itself can risk further slides away from popular acceptance. Those with mental illness especially are defined into ‘outside’ - and therefore victimised, stigmatised, and deprived - status.
 
They may exhibit at major studios, but are ‘outsider artists’ being listed for the right reasons? Andrew Edlin, the curator of this year’s Outsider Art Fair, gives his take.
 
“Well, any artist can be exploited regardless of their academic pedigree or state of mental health. Any serious viewer of art first will be compelled by an artwork itself, and then knowing about the conditions behind the creation, insofar as the life story of the artist informs the artwork, will then glean a deeper understanding.

“The concept of the ‘outsider’ is appealing because it connotes non-conformity, which is almost always good when it comes to art. We make sure that we treat our artists or artist estates with the same professionalism and respect as in any other sector of the art world. I feel that by recognising the talent of people who have been dismissed or marginalised by society is the exact opposite of exploitation. It’s an elevation and granting of respect and admiration.”
 
Steering the lines of “admiration” and risky exploitation can be a delicate game. Those most keen to link Johnston’s creativity to his illness, it seems, should accept the burdens of such an assignment. A famous press release by Johnston’s management team, for example, once called on journalists to avoid describing him as a ‘genius’, given how it may affect his precarious sense of self. Johnston himself was reportedly resentful of billing as a novelty act.
 
‘Frustrated artist, are you afraid of your own reflection?’, he sang in 2000. “It’s only you. Like I said, when you’re dead, you’ll be gone. It won’t take long till you’re through.”
 
Daniel Johnston’s Psychedelic Drawings: A Swirling Trip Through ‘Outsider Art’ By Ed Prideaux. The Quietus, February 6, 2021.

Before he garnered acclaim as a musician, Daniel Johnston was known in his West Virginia hometown as a visual artist. He was compulsively creative with a mischievous streak, drawing on any available surface and even veering into vandalism when he ran out of paper. His calling card back then was a free-floating eyeball he later referred to as a dead dog’s eye—an image sourced from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” and cemented in his psyche by a disturbing incident as a teenager, wherein he came upon a hanged dog. Eyes were an ever-evolving constant in Johnston’s drawings, either lying in a tangle of cartoon veins at the margins or staring down upon his hellacious scenes. In the dense personal mythology that grounds his work, eyes were symbols of innocence and paranoia. Jeremiah, the cartoon frog that famously covers his 1983 album Hi, How Are You, is the ultimate avatar of this: His two elongated eyes grew into six over time, as he evolved into Vile Corrupt, Johnston’s figure for ultimate evil.

 
Johnston’s all-seeing eyes feature prominently across a series of drawings currently on display at Electric Lady Studios in New York, as part of this year’s Outsider Art Fair. Curated by artist and comics legend Gary Panter, Daniel Johnston: Psychedelic Drawings is the first significant exhibition of Johnston’s work since his appearance in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, as well as the first since his passing in 2019. The show offers an opportunity to consider Johnston’s drawings not only in the context of his homespun musical universe but within the broader realm of American art. It is the most extensive collection of his visual work to date.
 
The exhibition is the product of Panter’s discerning eye as much as it is the enthusiasm of Lee Foster, Electric Lady co-owner. After purchasing a sketch of Johnston’s off eBay in 2019, Foster began a correspondence with Johnston’s brother and executor of his estate, Dick, as well as his former manager, Jeff Tartakov. The resulting friendship led to a business relationship between Electric Lady and The Daniel Johnston Trust, wherein the studio will assist with the sales and licensing of his work.
 
Psychedelic Drawings continues the estate’s strategy of amplifying Johnston’s art through mainstream commercial projects, which included a short film and a comic book during his last years, and capsule collections with Vans and Supreme more recently. While these endeavors arguably help fuel the ongoing reappreciation of Johnston’s music, they sit at odds with the elite art world’s preference to hoard work from public view, save for a fawning crowd of cognoscenti. The show, which runs physically and digitally through February 7, is pitched by Foster as a more inclusive cross-pollination between art and music that could nonetheless facilitate a critical reappraisal of Johnston’s visual work.
 
Johnston, who battled schizophrenia and bipolar disorder during his lifetime, has always been tricky to categorize in strict art terms. He was too pop to be true “outsider art”—a contentious genre used to group work by marginalized artists (whether incarcerated, mentally ill, or self-taught)—but too “outsider” to be fully pop. And yet he is the rare figure, “outsider” or otherwise, to have been celebrated during his own lifetime and to have reached a cult audience more mass than most established contemporary artists could ever imagine reaching. For many, Johnston’s visual art is inextricable from discovering his music, whether via Jeff Feuerzeig’s classic 2006 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, or the well-loved Hi, How Are You T-shirt worn by Kurt Cobain in the early ’90s.
 
Regardless of how he’s positioned, Johnston was indisputably working well outside the bounds of conventional art knowledge, honing a singular style of drawing that melded comic book illustration with feverish sketching. He worshipped at the altar of John Lennon and Jack Kirby, using their twin examples to forge his own kind of psychedelic art. “There are a lot of clichés we think of relative to ’60s and ’70s hippie expressions; Daniel’s work is not full of those clichés,” Gary Panter tells me via email. “He invented his own colorful route through the angels and demons of his inner life.”

 
Like the silent, self-taught artist Susan Te Kahurangi King and the janitor-by-day, visionary painter-by-night Henry Darger, Johnston took familiar iconography from pop culture and imbued it with his own passions, anxieties, and deep wells of religious feeling. Recognizable characters like the Hulk, the Beatles, and Casper the Friendly Ghost run up against imagined creatures in confrontations that range from bizarrely funny to deeply disturbing. “Oh Lord Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” (2002) finds Captain America on the run from a scourge of winged eyeballs, while “Eternal Punishment!” (1985) depicts Casper flying over the tormented in hell, vengefully exclaiming “it is here, you’ll wait for eternal punishment!”
 
Many drawings are zany and packed with flashes of imaginative color. But when the currents of Johnston’s anxiety crossed wires with his sexuality, the results could be downright ominous. “My Nightmares” (1980) features a screaming demon head with a curiously phallic body looming over a sleeping Johnston, while “Untitled Torsos & Devils” (1995) depicts an impish Satan watching an army of women’s torsos on parade. Even in these instances, though, his descents into hell are offset by goofy comic touches. The sinister-looking “Great King Rat” (1980) gets knocked down a peg when you notice his skinny legs and flip-flops, and Casper eventually flies up to heaven in the sweetly triumphant “Here We Go, Mary!” (1982).
 
As a curator, Panter’s process was fairly straightforward: “I chose my favorites from a whole lot of drawings and then tried to choose drawings that were compatible with each other, and also drawings that as a group showed the range of returning characters and motifs he used.” This approach succeeds in highlighting the hallmarks of Johnston’s style and his major emotional themes, but it also underscores the show’s minor weakness. Without offering more context for some of Johnston’s recurrent images (including the complex symbolism of his eyeballs), it might be difficult for the casual viewer to unpack all of this art’s riches, its coded meanings and evolutions.
 
The exhibition is, however, loaded with Easter eggs for fans of his music. “Speeding Motorcycle” (1984), which shares its title with a track from Yip/Jump Music that plays on loop in Electric Lady, looks like his music sounds, triggering a latent synesthesia that throws the rest of his work into sharp relief. The nursery simplicity and relentlessness of his recording has a clear counterpart in his drawing hand, where pens, markers, and expressionistic shading are deployed to similarly immediate, strangely beautiful effect.

 
If Daniel Johnston’s music is gripping for how achingly direct it feels, the revelations contained in his drawings stem from his willingness to dramatize the contradictions that many of us have repressed or forcefully resolved to more easily navigate the world. The quiet certainties of a conventional life find a counterpoint in Johnston’s fiery, boundless imagination, the engine that allowed him to create so prolifically. The lack of irony or knowingness feels like generosity rather than frailty, a disarming reminder of what is most meaningful about art, music, and life.
 

What Daniel Johnston’s Drawings Mean Now. By Harry Tafoya. Pitchfork,  February 3, 2021.

When Daniel Johnston passed away in late 2019, his absence was felt not just by music fans, but also those in the visual arts. He had been garnering a following for his cartoon-like vibrant drawings—mostly made with markers and pencil on standard printer paper—since he began his music career in Austin, Texas in the 1980s. He was as prolific with his drawings as he was writing his haunting, unfeigned music, eventually taking part in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This year, Johnston’s drawings are getting their own dedicated show at Electric Lady Studios, on view from January 28 through February 7, as part of the Outsider Art Fair in New York City. GARAGE reached out to Gary Panter, who curated the show and whose own work is similarly rooted in the comic book-superhero-aesthetic, to learn more about how Johnston’s work fits into the outsider art oeuvre.
 
So tell me about your relationship to Daniel Johnston and to his work. How did he become a part of your life?
 
I only know Daniel’s work through media. I have friends who worked with him—Kramer, Jad Fair, and others who had brushes with him or his work. It was hard to miss his work  when it surfaced in rock magazines and LP covers. It is very energetic, compelling and colorful work with a strong psychic charge.
 
Did he ever influence your work?
 
No. I am older than Daniel. I admire his work  as a drawer and colorist and storyteller. There are people like Darger, Susan King and Daniel whose work I see in media and feel a closeness to—that we were working on related issues as drawers and image experiencers. So I recognize them as some kind of comrades at a remove.
 
Was it a powerful experience to see all of this work grouped together? 
 
I was trying to cover the repeating themes to show a kind of hieroglyphic aspect of his work.
 
So I wanted to get Captain America and Thor, Jesus, and Satan, the reoccurring ducks, nudes, and monsters all in and the ones with the nicest shapes on the page.
 
I would say that Daniel’s work is very confident, emphatic, colorful. Obsessive, loosely organized, pleasing, somewhat distressing. That it seems to try to clarity confusions but maybe only produces psychic explosions. Like his music it combined innocent hopefulness and melancholy. At first glance one might not sense mental distress because the work was produced in an energetic manic mode.

 
It seems like you and Daniel had several experiences in common—especially as they relate to Christianity and acid trips. Does that make you feel a special connection to him?
 
We are both from the Church of Christ and subjected to the consequence of that. And both subjected ourselves to psychedelic drug experiences. Both of those things are pretty heavy. I am somewhat damaged from fundamentalist church in Texas and poison LSD, but I guess that adversity is a kind of gift, as artists seem to need a puzzle, or compelling problem, irritant, or emotional hunger of some kind to work with. Texas is a thing in itself, as an issue of a state of mind where there is great pressure to conform. Daniel had other issues that hurt and inspired him. I am happy to not do Darger, or King or Daniel Johnson’s, work. My insight into their work, if I have any, is from being a life long art-obsessed person who must make things. And from the temporary psychosis I experienced on difficult trips. The concepts, conundrums, vicious circles, rhetorical devices, and traditions pretzeling the assertions of the historians and institutionalists of primitive Christianity are enough to drive one crazy or at least get you out of Texas. As bad as bad acid. I do love Texas. It is a cauldron of primal forces.

Of Satan, Captain America, and Daniel Johnston. By Annie Armstrong. Garage , January 22, 2021. 

If you don’t know Daniel Johnston’s  music :

Far Out Magazine made a choice of his best songs.

His obituary in Rolling Stone

On Daily Motion is Jeff Feuerzeig's award-winning 2005 documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. With Spanish subtitles.