To All Artists, Known and Unknown
by Richard Berger,
I remember seeing a threadbare individual sitting in the cafe of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. He was very different from the rest of the students and staff personnel. He was old; old in hard years, not with the mellow patina of the well ensconced. He was in the cafe every day I came in, always sitting alone, always smoking and nursing a cup of coffee. Most striking in his appearance was the discrepancy between his physical, and what seemed to be his psychic, circumstances. He was worn, his physical being was worn, his clothes were fragile, almost brittle, garments different from the casually abused garments the students sometimes wore that said, "I don't care," clothing being low in the priority of the things they stood for, for reasons of social demarcation as well as economic urgency. His threadbare garments said, "I do care," not only about preserving the garment for economic reasons, but about the ritual of caring itself, a precious continuity, a ritual of anchorage expressed in the threadbare trousers worn at the seams, white at the line of the upturned cuff, perhaps pressed nightly beneath a mattress; his clothes and his bearing were a diagram of that caring. He was always clean-shaven and fastidious in his appearance.
His flesh was another matter. Too much sun, too much liquor, too many times the senses wide open taking in too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, the reddened eyes drawing another blank at dawn after a tumultuous night; too much life to ever be arrested in likeness. His visage reminded me of some of the portraits by Ivan LeLoraine Albright, an obsessive curmudgeon and astonishing painter who revealed mortality in his subjects by painting every molecule with such individuality that their coherence into a personage isolated the fragility of life by revealing accord in its complexity, evoking and then animating through an infinitely accurate diagramming of a membrane of competing tensions. His visage was just such a diagram.
The complexity produced a radiance about him abetted by the discrepancy between his clothes and his flesh. He seemed the temporary residence for an enduring elsewhere tangent to the worn, but radiant and frail man; and at times, he shone actively with the brilliance of that elsewhere. He was always looking elsewhere, as if he saw things that we didn't, and I experienced one indelible impression of him as he sat at the cafe table with a cigarette smoldering in his lips, warming himself in the morning sun. He suddenly gestured, still sitting at the table; it was a gesture that I imagine an only child would make toward an empty room populated by imaginary friends, a gesture exclaiming, "Look at all my wonderful boys and girls!" Within his gesture was the certainty that these boys and girls constituted a heavenly choir which he was conducting, they bearing him aloft with their song as he guided them. His gestures were the traceries to some paradise via his tattered being, a deliverance beyond comprehension. This went on for a very short time and then he became still, smiling and smoking.
The radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school, they found a number of sketchbooks in a backpack. He was an artist, a "street artist" as he had described himself to Greg, an employee of the school and one of the few people who had any conversation with him. An unknown artist thrust into our midst his own portable Lascaux, astounding images conceived and executed outside the channels of legitimacy and validation that so many of us need to sustain and guide us, challenging all our notions of the route to authenticity, indicating another depth of being in our midst.
The sketchbooks reveal in obsessive detail the sweetness and mystery of his elsewhere, a realm more compelling for him than our imperfect world, a realm of elsewhere we will only know through him, which seems to welcome us. The last fragment revealed to me in this puzzle that will never be complete was his name, which became known to me only after his death via his signature on a few of his many drawings: Wallace Allen Healey. Greg said that people called him "Wally."
Wally was cremated as John Doe because his family wouldn't or couldn't come from Oregon to verify his identity. Wally's identity, Wally the street artist. What I knew of Wally through his physical being, the posthumous discovery of fragments of his life via others, his images and lastly, his name, represent memorable components in an unusual order of encounter. They are fragments which cohere in spite of their spareness and intermittence, that which is not there being as potent as what is.
I have glimpsed a foreshortened version of such a coherence in several chance observations of how the rooms of people who have been around for a long time can become a summary of their lives. The pared down fragments of Wally's life had no final room in which to reside because he didn't have a home, and yet those surviving fragments of his images and his life cohere somehow to define in summary the sweet elsewhere that was in his images and his being.
I sometimes wonder if these events in their unusual sequence have compelled me to romanticize what might be only a wincing pathos, retroactively endowing it with a magic I hope exists because it is the only bearable reconciliation of Wally's pictures with what there is to know about him. A more remote memory returns in considering this question, by way of Famadou Don Moy, the percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performed solo at the Art Institute some years ago; he filled the stage with an enormous array of percussion instruments, big, small, formal, informal, Chinese gongs and hubcaps, a night clerk's bell and a trap drum set among many others. He came slowly to the stage from the back of the auditorium, playing a drum with maracas, the movement of every extremity expressed in sound, and he chanted: "To all great Black musicians, known and unknown."
Known and unknown. It was an invocation to acknowledge ALL those who gave their lives in pursuit of the great human service, the service of the artist, transforming the sometimes unbearable discrepancy between the way things are and the way they ought to be, into something that makes us want to dance.
Share Your Comments and Reflections on this Conversation:
On Sep 8, 2019 Genie Earles wrote:
Just read Peter Kocal's post. Yes I am the Genie who Wally wheeled through the streets of San Francisco. We met at the Blue Unicorn. I was the ex girlfriend of Bob Stubbs the original owner of the Unicorn. Wally and I did a lot of roaming around the city. Sometimes he'd push me in my chair and sometimes if we wanted to go on the bus or trolley I would ride piggyback. Lots of adventures with Wally.On Jul 28, 2019 Amelia healey wrote:
Ok so I found this man on purpose looking for more info on my grandfather of which he is.. I have no proof for his son Hartley healey did not like to talk about him only a memory of his paintings lead me to here. He had a son who moved to England wear he had 3 children me and my siblings. We were only ever told he died and my dad is dead so to late to ask more question. However I can say that the artist line continued has my dad sketched all his life and tought me to draw.oh and we still all wear pentograms.. I wish I had more from his life but my dad just wasent that close.On Apr 21, 2018 peter kocal wrote:
I knew Wally quite well for a few years up until 1968 when I left San Francisco. I hung out with him around the Blue Unicorn, slept many nights in the garage attic behind his mother's house and stayed with Wally for awhile in an abandoned cabin in Big Sur. I believe he was only 53 or 54 when he died. He had the presence of some kind of zen monk and being around him always made me feel good. He kept some of his art work in a drawer in one of the tables at the Unicorn, one of which I remember was a haunting study of Billie Holiday. The life he lived in his last years as a street person may have been exactly the way Wally wanted it to be. I wonder if the Genie who writes here was the same one Wally and Tom Shields use to push around San Francisco in her wheel chair sometimes.On Jan 17, 2018 Anna wrote:
Yes I want to see the art - does anyone know where it is? I'm up for helping put on a show.On Jun 15, 2017 Wayne Terrain wrote:
Let's do a show of Wally's artWayneterrain@gmail.com
On Jun 15, 2017 Wayne TerrAin wrote:
Wally was the inventor of psychedelic art. I have the art work to prove itHe would draw in green note books. Sitting in the window of the Blue Unicorn
On Hays St. often dressed in a white robe.
The N Juda Street Car ( pen and ink) drawing aroun the poem by Patric
Hung on the wall of the Unicorn from 1967 till it closed. (?)
Wally was more than just a hippy artist. " He told me his pentagram.
Covered but not hidded
Lost never found
Nowhere not searching
A stone
To sharpen the knife of Jesus on"
Some day he will be found.
Wayne
On Jan 7, 2017 Gwyn wrote:
I knew Wally in the early 1970s in sf.he had a shack behind his elderly mothers house out by the beach.his sister was married to city cop.he was seen at Langley porter institute around this time or earlier he would remind he had stepped over jack keroauc's drunken body in north beach in the 1950sHe would make a daily walk in sf with his sketchbooks bartering for food and coffee.perhaps sf was easier in those days
On Nov 14, 2016 Annelies van Dommelen wrote:
My sister,born in Holland during the war, was what was called borderline retarded at that time. Gentle ,sensitive,and painfully confused, pretty and so abused by men, was an artist. She lives as an innocent all her life, when she was 56 she still was 12. Her artwork was childlike and telling and about her wants. The simple things she loved. "The happy tree" and ,"The beautiful flower"where drawn like a 6 year old with charm and simplicity. She was lucky to have family and a home however,still, life was too difficult on the outside so she lives within. I have been an artist for the last 40 years and also paint from within the conversation, a different one, based on my ability to advance, my sister was not able, but charm and truth she had.On Sep 20, 2016 Shanti wrote:
Inside, I weep.Having been and having known so many, many artists...
unsung, unknown and bleeding out their lives in poems, notes, paint and song...
bleeding,bleeding to bring a little light into the dark of the winding journey of soul.
Thank you for remembering an unknown artist.
Peace.
On Aug 30, 2016 Sheila Lewis wrote:
This poignant and astonishing tribute reveals so much about the observed but unknown artist, Wally. It also reminds us to step up just a bit more in our lives to connect with others, even strangers in their own worlds in the common cafes we share. Thanks for sharing this story and art.On Aug 25, 2016 Cindy wrote:
Some of the best writing I've ever read, a wonderful tribute. Would have been nice to get more of a taste of Wally's art. But thanks for sharing this story.On Aug 25, 2016 Lynda wrote:
Can we see some more of Wally's drawings pleaseOn Aug 25, 2016 Phyllis J. Lutjeans wrote:
As in in Gray's Eulogy how many artists; visual artists, writers, poets, musicians go unnoticed with a blink of the eye; a myriad. Everywhere we look we find stories like this. Thank you. I am a former Curator of Education and Performance Art at the Orange County Museum of Art formerly the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach,California.
On Aug 25, 2016 Cyndi wrote:
I would love to see some of his art. Some of what Wally saw.On Aug 25, 2016 Diane wrote:
I am sitting here early morning with my coffee and thinking of Wally, and this beautiful haunting piece of writing. Thank you for letting us reflect on those that we pass by every day. Perhaps that is Wally's legacy to those that read this...Let's not walk by the marginal ones. A muffin, a cup of coffee, a kind word and a smile, and maybe a dollar could be all that keeps someone going. Bless Richard Berger for writing this piece.On Aug 25, 2016 Susan Day wrote:
The Australian soldiers who died in the World Wars, and weren't identified, have, "Known to none save God" on their tombstones. Wally's memory lives on.On Apr 29, 2014 Genie Cowan Earles wrote:
I knew Wally in the early to middle 60s. He lived off and on with me at my various little apartments in the Haight and Fillmore districts. He also had a room above the carriage house behind his parents' home. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was a teenager and had spent some time in hospital for that condition. He was a very kind and gentle person for the most part, but was haunted by disturbing thoughts at times. Some of these thoughts were manifest in his early art work, but for the most part his work was filled with exuberance and joy of spirit. One of my favorite pieces was a depiction of immigrants arriving from europe on a boat and departing down the gangplank. One man was in the forefront wearing a brightly colored suit with a big red spotted tie, his arms outstretched with the words trailing from his mouth "Dis is one fucking goot country!" He was a very prolific artist. He would draw on just about any kind of paper he could find, but unfortunately most of his work was lost or destroyed in his travels. I lost touch with him for many years, then I received a phone call from him in about 1972 when I was living in Southern Calif. He sounded very fearful and confused and wanted to come and stay with me. I didn't have the means to help him at that time, so I never heard from him again. I was shocked and greatly saddened to hear that he had died homeless and alone. I wish I could have helped him more. He was a truly unique and gifted artist.On Aug 23, 2013 emok wrote:
It's the second time I've read this piece and I'm left wondering how it sits in Oregon.On Jan 21, 2011 Ken Magri wrote:
Beautifully written and beautifully remembered. It was an honor to have met Wally. Thank you for sharing your memories and his artworks.On Aug 3, 2009 Hartley P. Healey (son) wrote:
Thank you.. Your words touched me. They are a fitting epitaph written where more can read than any mausoleum or head stone. I think Wallace would have liked that.On May 27, 2009 Trisha Church wrote:
To capture that bitter-sweetness in your art, be it literary or visual, is to move the reader or the viewer into a middle state, a place of stillness and non-attachment, yet still, a place of compassionate oneness.On Apr 14, 2009 Louise wrote:
How wonderful that a relative stranger can evoke such a poetic response. I don't see this as a sad evalution of humanity at all but rather an illustration of our connectedness. To be so deeply touched without touching is pure magic.On Jan 27, 2009 Ralph wrote:
Beautiful inded the writing of ones life through the eyes of another, but yes a sad evaluation of us all. Do we weep or just look forward past the horizon?On Jan 14, 2009 patti wrote:
Beautiful writing and yet... tragic. The entire situation is a very sad evaluation of all of us, myself included, and what we are willing to see and turn away from.