Jon Serl

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Portrait

About the artist

1894–1993, lived and worked in Southern California

A peripatetic female impersonator and vaudeville performer known by the stage name “Slats,” Jerry Palmer, a voice-over artist for early Hollywood talkies; Ned Palmer, the migrant fruit picker; two-time television guest of Johnny Carson; and onetime friend to Clark Gable, Hedda Hopper, and Howard Hughes: Jon Serl lived many lives under a number of names, but he is perhaps best remembered today for his later work as a painter. Born Joseph Searles in Oleans, New York, he grew up in poverty, drifting out West with his family’s vaudeville show and eventually settling in California. There he pursued his motley career as a minor actor and well-regarded voice-over surrogate for less articulate silent-film players making the awkward transition to speaking roles. Never content with a single guise, he also worked as a screenwriter, dancer, waiter, and cherry-picker when Hollywood grew tiresome. After WWII, he moved to the California desert and established an eccentric presence there as a kind of prophetic flea-market forager, turning to painting in 1949 when he couldn’t afford the fifty-dollar price of a painting to hang in his adobe home. By the 1960’s, he was dressing in a Catholic priest’s robes, taking in runaways, heavily involved in gardening, painting, and poetry, and crafting an ever more elaborate self-mythology.

      Serl refused to exhibit his work until the 1970s, gradually earning a reputation as one of America’s most important self-taught painters. Ranging from banal to magical, the work reflects his patchwork personality as the consummate performer, often memorializing episodes and characters from his Hollywood days and other travels. Usually painted on found boards, in oils or sometimes in homemade pigments, Serl’s pictures are figurative and narrative. The expressionistic brushwork and deep earth-tones describe a secret dimension of masked wraiths, occasionally abstract metaphorical or mystical elements, and lanky, elongated people at play. Reminiscent in its darker moments of James Ensor and formally similar at times to artists as disparate as El Greco, Soutine, and Modigliani, Serl’s artistic vision was as liquid and mutable as his identity, but his own idiosyncratic style is easily recognizable. A local celebrity, Serl died at age 99 in 1993 in his home in Lake Elsinore, California, after cooking a roast for his friend, the painter Sam Messer. His work resides in the collections of the American Folk Art Museum; the National Museum of American Art; and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among many others.

—Brendan Greaves

Bibliography

American Folk Art from the Collection of Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. Oceanville, NJ: The Noyes Museum, 1988.

 

American Mysteries: The Rediscovery of Outsider Art. San Francisco: Art Commission Gallery, 1987.

 

Cat and Ball on a Waterfall: 200 Years of California Folk Painting and Sculpture. Oakland, CA: The Oakland Museum, 1986.

 

Collecting Folk Art Behind the Redwood Curtain: Selections from the Ted Kimmer Collection. Eureka, CA: Humboldt State University, 1985.

 

Collecting Folk Art: A View from the Outside. Boca Raton, FL: Adolph & Rose Lewis Community Center, 1995.

 

Flying Free: Twentieth Century Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Ellin and Baron Gordon. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997.

 

Folk Art Then and Now. Stamford, CT: Stamford Museum and Nature Center, 1984.

 

Hartigan, Lynda. Made with Passion: The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

 

Inner Focus/Contemporary Visionary Art. Santa Fe: Challenge New Mexico, 1997.

 

Inside the World of the Outsider: The Charmaine and Maurice Kaplan Collection of Self-Taught Art. San Diego, CA: University Art Gallery, 1999.

 

Jon Serl. Portland, OK: Jamison-Thomas Gallery, 1988.

 

Jon Serl: Painter. Mahwah, NJ: Art Galleries of Ramapo College, 1986.

 

Larson, Susan C. “Jon Serl in Person,” Folk Art 22, no. 4 (Winter 1997/1998): 52-59.

 

Maresca, Frank, and Roger Ricco. American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

 

Muffled Voices: Folk Artists in Contemporary America. New York: Museum of American Folk Art, 1986.

 

National Museum of American Art. Boston: Bullfinch Press/Little, Brown, 1995.

 

Ollman, Leah. “Jon Serl,” ArtNews 88, no. 4 (April 1989): 218-219.

 

Personal Voice: Outsider Art and Signature Style. Chicago: American Center for Design, 1991.

 

Personal Voice: The Ruth and Robert Vogele Collection of Self-Taught Art. Urbana-Champaign, Il: University of Illinois, 1997.

 

Pictured in My Mind: Contemporary American Self-Taught Art from the Collection of Kurt Gitter and Alice Rae Yelen. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1995.

 

Prince, Dan. “A Good Likeness: Techniques in Self-Taught Portraiture,” American Art Review (October-November 1994): 90-95, 159.

 

Psychological Paintings: The Personal Vision of Jon Serl. Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Museum, 1981.

 

Russell, Charles, ed. Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

 

Spirits: Selections from the Collection Geoffrey and Carmen de Lavallade. Katonah, NY: Katonah Museum of Art, 1991.

 

A Time to Reap: Late-Blooming Folk Artists. South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University/Museum of American Folk Art, 1985.

 

Unsigned, Unsung . . . Whereabouts Unknown. Tallahassee: Florida State University, 1993.

 

Visionaries, Outsiders and Spiritualists: American Self-Taught Artists. Horsham, PA: Entourage Exhibitions, 1993.

 

Visions of the Left Coast: California Self-Taught Artists. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, 1995.

 

West Coast Folk Artists. Eureka, CA: Humboldt Cultural Center, 1985.

Artwork


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