KENNETH BONAR WALSH, 1960-1980 Undiscovered Artist in an Undiscovered Land
When I got to the top step and reached up, however, I couldn’t quite reach the switch so, still reaching, I stepped forward and up to the landing, which resulted in my tilting, then tumbling. It was one of those moments that I recall easily today because of its magical quality: somehow, I didn’t have any sensation of touching the steps during my backward somersault—though that surely must have happened—nor of hearing any sound. I probably wouldn’t have remembered slamming into the concrete floor of the cellar, either, despite the sound and tactile sensation this would have produced but, instead, I was painlessly scooped into his arms and chest, sitting upright. “O-ho,” he quietly exhaled and, after a second, I stood, we walked up the stairs together, and that was it—no lecture.
Looking back, some 37 years after his passing in 1980, when I was 16 and unable to appreciate the character required to act as he did on that and other occasions, I’ve come to know him better.
During my first seven years, when we lived in Manhattan and he owned the Bonart Corporation, initially at 16 East 23rd Street, near our Gramercy Park apartment, he not only designed vinyl album covers, signage, magazine ads, packaging, etc., but also developed as an artist. Over time, the soft realism of his self-portraits and paintings of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, the Old Hook Mill in East Hampton, the Montauk Lighthouse, and many seascapes, evolved into stylized, impressionist portraits of self, a boy on the Central Park Carousel, and fishermen at Gosman’s Dock; the realistic wooden sculptures of flounder and fluke gave way to stylized whales; and the collages went from obvious to abstract.
He loved to fish and beachcomb, and some of my early favorite works were made from driftwood and other items washed ashore by the Atlantic, a 10-minute walk from our house in Hither Hills, where the beach stretches to the horizon in both directions. Small and large pieces he would bring home from any of several beaches, accessed with a c.1960 Nissan 4W65 “Patrol” jeep outfitted with balloon tires. Some driftwood he would hang in mobiles of abstract fish that swam circles in the air, and others would be carved and polished. A piece that epitomizes the evolution of his work, and my favorite of his sculptures, is a driftwood whale, the head and jaw of which had already been shaped by the sea when he found it—after carving the tail, all that was required was sanding, polishing, and the insertion of an eye.
A collage that, unlike the abstract ones, I could kind of understand was “War,” a square frame of sea-rotted wood with rusty bars protruding upward from its base. Inside the frame, along the top is a faded sepia graduation photograph of his Air Corps regiment. A red “1943” is stenciled vertically along its left side. Under this, on the left, is part of an American flag; on the right, “BERLIN” in blue and, under that, “DRESDEN” in black. Along the bottom, in blue again, “95 BOMB” (the 95th Bombardment Group). A naked doll covers part of the photograph and the words under it, a nail through its right wrist into Berlin, and one through its left wrist into Dresden. It’s dirty and bruised; the face and hair are scorched dark red, as are the airmen in the photo behind it.
Aside from a very old, bolt-action rifle that hung above the fireplace and was never used, the only war memorabilia in the house was the 95th Bombardment Group’s commemorative book, Contrails, which had one photo of him with other airmen, just standing around, and a montage of nose art that included one of the planes he co-piloted, the Kimmie Kar. In the early 2000s, I looked up the 95th Bombardment Group online and, based on the information in Contrails, was able to contact the navigator of the Kimmie Kar, then a retired colonel, who wrote that the crew had often relied on my father when the pilot was “under the weather.” I assumed the expression was a euphemism for “drunk,” though I couldn’t imagine how anyone could prefer piloting a plane through enemy fire in any condition other than sober.
Revisiting this memory, I wonder if the pilot, a first lieutenant, was the senior officer simply by virtue of being older, thus having enlisted earlier, thus having seen some of the horrors of 1943-44 and, by late 1944 (when my father began flying missions), requiring alcohol to calm his nerves enough to fly.
Perhaps “under the weather” meant jittery, or even physically ill, due to the stress everyone must have felt on mission days, after so many of the people with whom he had flown had died.
I remember a passage from Now and Then, the memoir of Joseph Heller, a 19-year-old bombardier in 1944-45, describing the war as being like an exciting game, until someone in his plane was maimed by shrapnel, after which he “was in a state close to panic as we took off from the landing strip at the start of every one of those subsequent missions remaining . . . even the certified milk runs.” Though he never spoke of it to us, our father did write something on a blank page in Contrails about having to get over the death of “Paul” who had been his buddy all through flight training, only to be blown out of the sky on one of their first missions. My mother said that speaking of Paul was the only thing that had ever brought him to tears.
I wonder how it would have felt, flying through exploding flak and what was left of the Luftwaffe, to reach a target, then flying home again, with bullets and shrapnel tearing through one’s plane. There was another time when I was four or five, and he and I were driving along the ocean at Hither Hills, probably in search of driftwood. He spied a very narrow, uneven path up to the Old Montauk Highway, and decided to take it. Halfway up, the jeep dipped suddenly, as the right front tire went into a deep ditch in the path, then righted itself, then began teetering side to side as the rear tire did the same, while the other tires spun in the sand. The engine revving furiously, I could barely hear myself scream “Dad!” standing at a 45-degree angle behind him, gripping his seat with my left hand and, with my right, the frame of the window. Outside the window was a gully, which we seemed about to roll into.
In another of those moments that become etched into memory, I could see his wild-eyed, hyper-alert expression—manic, one could call it. I think, now, that for him this was about the closest he could reasonably get (with passengers in the jeep) to flying a B-17 at its limits. He must have taken that path before, or he wouldn’t have done so with me there but, to me, it seemed miraculous that we made it up the rest of the way.
That must have been in 1969 or ‘70, a few years after he’d had a gallery at Gosman’s Dock, and was painting mainly seascapes and portraits of fishermen, either posed or at work. His style then, which I would call expressionist, or “curvaceous” soft realism, accentuated the muscular hands and forearms fishermen developed after years of hauling nets, unloading their catch, and gutting fish. A prime example of this style is a portrait of the late Montauk icon, Dick Halliday (also known as Shipwreck Halliday), massive arms folded across his chest. Another watercolor, based on a photograph I’ve seen, is of Dick Halliday leaning down to gut a fish on the dock. In retrospect, one can see how the curvaceous quality of his work during this period presaged the abstract style he developed from 1974.
Although he never talked to me about Edward Hopper, I see a Hopper-esque quality in the painting I call “Winter Seascape” and the lithographs of the lighthouse, the windmill, and St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery. One artist he did mention was van Gogh, and it’s easy to see his emulation in at least one of his self-portraits, as well as the painting of the boy on the Central Park Carousel. He also praised Picasso, and probably had him in mind when he made his metal-on-wood “Jesus” and most of his abstract paintings.
I never really “got” many of his collages, because they are so abstract. I don’t know if they had names but, looking at the photographs of them now, I see how the collages that include fishermen’s gloves, sometimes a rubber boot, the netting, and the cans and bottles could be titled “Ode to Dick Halliday 1,” “Ode to Dick Halliday 2,” etc. Dad must have been very taken with the man’s impressive size and bearing. The collages made only of driftwood, or driftwood and shells, I’ll call “A Day at the Beach 1,” “A Day at the Beach 2” . . . but look at the tiny seashell-lady, dancing atop a tower of shells, under a driftwood sky! That one deserves a better title, like “Neptune’s Daughter.”
For the tourists, he produced classy, if gimmicky, works such as an antique-style map of Montauk and nearby islands and, as a companion relic, a small booklet by a fictional ancestor about a 1699 voyage with Captain Kidd and the location of treasure he buried. Another “objet d’art” is the sealed jar of Montauk salt-sea air. So I guess half of the story of Kenneth B. Walsh the artist is also the story of Montauk and the Hamptons, which he discovered soon after he moved to Manhattan, sometime after World War II, and established his commercial art studio.
During “Nixon’s War” of 1969-70, disaffected Vietnam veterans were flooding back into the cities, and domestic turmoil peaked. There were mass discharges (“de-institutionalization”) from state mental hospitals—to make room, I surmise, for the up-to-50-percent of veterans displaying symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. On May 8, 1970, four days after National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of student protesters at Kent State University, New York police stood by while construction workers converged from four directions on a group of mostly high school and college students rallying in commemoration of the Kent State dead—the “Hard Hat Riot” of lower Manhattan.
In this atmosphere of mass-psychological stress, which sensitive people like artists and musicians would have felt more acutely than others, Dad became increasingly manic, angry and frightening my mother to the point that she had him committed to Bellevue Hospital, where the treatment for mania was thorazine and electroshock “therapy.” Meanwhile, the Bonart Corporation was shuttered and the family moved to what had hitherto been our summer house in Montauk.
Released from the hospital in early 1971, he produced no paintings for the next few years, though he did design the poster for the second-ever jazz concert at Gosman’s Dock, and on trips to the beach, he gathered the raw materials for many collages and sculptures that began to appear in the house or on the half-acre of lawn in front of it.
When he emerged further from what I later overheard was near-suicidal depression, he began painting with acrylics, in an expressionist style, in which nearly all the lines were curves that ran the breadth of one or more figures, defining several features of a figure, as well as the boundaries between and interpenetrations of figures, often in a yin-yang symmetry of opposites. One sees many Picasso-esque faces and figures that are at once frontal and profile views. It’s not minimalist, but it very definitely does more with less. His earlier emphasis on the arms and hands as symbols of Man’s power carried over into his expressionist works, seen in “Man,” “The Warrior,” and “Jonathan,” to name a few. Women, meanwhile, are always represented with small hands, if not arms that taper to points (as are men, when the theme of the painting supersedes the motif of male-female polarity). It reminds me of the dynastic Chinese obsession with bound feet as emphasizing feminine grace and beauty. Some paintings in his expressionist period exaggerate male-female differences, while others combine the two opposites into a symmetric whole.
These paintings are also implied or explicit psychological studies, distilled almost into infographics. Obvious examples include “Remembrance of Things Past,” “All is Vanity,” and “Modern American Gothic." My personal favorites are the ones that (like the collage “War”) deal with psycho-socio-historical themes, such as “Africa,” “Death of Colonialism,” and, of course, “American Trinity,” more relevant today than when it was painted, in or around 1976. All of these point out how our psychological states and predispositions are part and parcel of our worldly conditions, and mutually reinforcing.
I find these paintings uncommonly perceptive and educational. Perhaps growing up in a household where such work was produced predisposed me to appreciate the Tibetan Wheel of Life which, to me, is the ultimate infographic. So I am indebted to my father not only for my birth and gentle upbringing, but also—thanks to his exploration and representation of deep themes—the life of contemplation that I have chosen.
Jonathan Walsh | Dharamsala, India | May 2017
