Things to Build

Images from The Family Fallout Shelter June 1959 Collection Jim Linderman

Look Up

Chalk Drawing by William A. Bixler 1933
See also old time religion

Time to Bring in the Big Guns (Meet the Press)

Original Glossy Press Photograph 1953 Collection Jim Linderman

Bazooka Joe and the Tijuana Bible Eight Pagers (You're kidding, right?) NOPE

Wesley Morse created Bazooka Joe. Joe and his gang started about the same year I started, and every one of the bonus fortunes came true! But, as so often happens here at Dull Tool Dim Bulb, Morse had a hidden agenda. Morse also drew those "8-pagers" or Tijuana Bibles which showed prominent figures of the day hitting on gangster molls, waitresses and starlets! I guess Mr. Morse liked to work small and let Dad have a little fun too! Some half-dozen have been identified, Morse holds the distinction of being one of only two artists working in the tiny dirty genre to have been identified.

In the 1990's after Morse passed away, Joe got "wigger" pants.

Group of Bazooka Joe comics Collection the Neighbor Kid

NOTE: KIRK TAYLOR sent the following link to his GREAT site on the artist.
http://www.taylormorsecollection.com/

The Eccentric, Eerie, Erotic Outsider Art of D.H.

Often the artistic quality of an artist means less than the story. This is an example, though I find the paintings, of which there are hundreds and hundreds, charming and accomplished in a perverted way. Yes, they are severely cropped here. I've learned my blog provider has a different idea of appropriate than I do, so all I'm showing is the heads (when I can isolate them among the morass of limbs, hands and other body parts, most rendered WAY out of proportion) Trust they are, well...creative. All are unsigned. The best have a chalky white quality which looks like shoe polish, but I am afraid you won't be able to tell from these details.

D.H. produced huge stacks of these watercolors in his summer cottage. I suppose the family thought he was fishing, but when he passed away well into his 90's they were found hidden among a big box of Life magazines in the attic. An old story for fans of outsider art, but it never gets tired for me. A fevered brow, a driven eccentricity and a paintbrush gets me every time. Something about a family happening upon a huge body of unknown work is fascinating...and when it reveals Great-Gramp's secret obsession, all the better. Some of the work was destroyed. I don't want to know why. At the least, he had a delicate and consistent vision, you can tell his work from across the room...and all are marked with a playful, well-rendered eroticism. In some the participants are sprawled over poorly drawn modern furniture. They aren't primitive, but he certainly followed the adage most primitives do, that is that the most important part of a painting is made the largest. I am hiding the artist's name as that's the way the family wants it.

They seem to have been done in the early 1970's for the most part...but one of mine has a hand written tally sheet on the reverse tracking the results of the Mondale election. Fritz lost. All and every manner of partnering up you can imagine is there. The artist made no distinction between gender in the least, and if there is a personal preference, I sure can't find it.

So there you go. Another tale of a reclusive artist, painting for his own pleasure and piling up the work without a single sale or concern that it will. My kind of art. I did do a little research...the last line of his obit reads "he loved to carve and draw."

Group of watercolors by "D.H." c. 1970. Collection Jim Linderman

The Wonderful Whittling Exhibit of World's Greatest Whittler

My second post with the work of Gust Pufohl, so we know he loved his work enough to have had it documented with at least three real photo post cards (as if we didn't already know by the title of his exhibit scratched into the emulsion as a caption)

See wonderful whittling exhibit of world's greatest whittler Gust Pufohl Monona IA Real Photo Post Card c. 1923

Mid Century Modest Ranch Style House Design

Ranch. The Greatest Generation, AKA "squares"...had one thing right. Low, sleek, not much adornment and cheap as can be. A style which looks best with virtually nothing expensive inside or out. In the 1950's, ranch accounted for 9 out of 10 houses being built. After the mid-1960's houses started getting taller, but not better. They also started having manufactured materials rather than organic, staples rather than nails, dry-wall rather than plaster and were being built to last as long as the rat-ass shag carpet. There are millions upon millions of small, cheap, solid, simple ranch houses out there waiting to be fixed up without "elevated rooflines" to heat. And since there are no jobs left and none coming, I'm afraid...they make good places to hunker through the sundown on the union. These images are from a 1956 National Plan Service brochure. NPS printed the catalogs and let individual builders and lumberyards stamp them with their imprint. Most are a modest 1,000 square feet. Two cool sources. Atomic Ranch Magazine and Mid Century Home Style.

Modern Ranch Homes Brochure 1956 34 Pages Collection Jim Linderman