Ed Larson

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

— Bob Dylan

Every picture tells a story, don’t it?

— Rod Stewart

Let’s not speculate over why a certain talking palomino starring in his own television sitcom for five seasons came to be called “The Famous Mr. Ed.” Perhaps it was the theme song. Perhaps it was from dispensing all that sage advice to his hapless owner and saving Wilbur’s bacon in each and every episode. Whatever the case, one thing is for certain — Ed Larson’s nickname, “Wonder Ed,” can only be the result of an immense creativity that for over six decades continues to be demonstrated and displayed both within and without his most authentic of Canyon Road galleries.

For there can be no doubt as to its authenticity, located as it is in an historic compound nestled down by the river at the corner of Canyon and Palace. Perhaps a living time capsule of how the fabled road served as an artistic incubator all those years ago, Larson and the half-dozen fellow artists sharing the gaggle of old adobes can only be grateful to the Vigil family estate for a less-than-inflated rent that allows them the selling of their art reasonably to a sometimes erratic stream of out-of-town visitors — visitors who, even in the face of uncertain economies, continue on a semi-regular basis to flash their credit cards for a genuine piece of Santa Fe.

…scattered among the depictions of old adobes and mesa-filled landscapes are lively paintings reminiscing his years of drinking, whoring, and brawling with his Navy buddies.

WARNING! In honoring the character of a character, we’ve decided to keep some salty language.

Larson’s paintings, wind toys, and sculpture literally spill out the doors and onto the patio, his working studio-gallery representing a throwback to what the Canyon Road scene must have been like before the slicker, tonier art emporiums of today began to predominate. Not that Larson ignores the powers of merchandising and celebrity endorsement — on a bright yellow, hand-carved wooden sign hanging over his gallery entrance, Larson unabashedly quotes Jesus himself admonishing his flock to “Buy Folk Art.” When asked where the quote came from, Larson answers straight-faced: “Ephesians.” And, who can say whether a very cagey Larson is or isn’t consciously creating the universal appeal of flea-market funk simply to distinguish his gallery from his more Guccied-up neighbors.

From his youthful days in Joplin, Missouri, Larson, who has made a living as an artist in one form or another his entire working life, was one of those rare individuals who knew early on what destiny awaited him. “I knew that right away,” Larson recounts. “I was down at the pool hall in Joplin, Missouri, and I had two buddies. We all did cartoons, and we knew exactly that we were going to be artists, and that’s what we did. Everybody around us didn’t know what to do. But we did know, and they resented us.

“I didn’t know whether we were going to be good or not, but that wasn’t the question. We drew pictures all the time right there on the edges of our books. You’d turn your book like that, and the little guy you’d drawn would run — that kind of stuff. I wasn’t a very good athlete, so I drew.”

Larson’s lack of athletic ability was not the only determining factor in his prancing down the artist’s way. Ironically, his very poor eyesight may have contributed as much as anything to his life of creation. He explains:

“Here’s the key — I’m in the first grade, and I’m not getting along very well. I’m picking on people, not answering questions, not paying attention to the teacher. They check me out and I go down to see this doctor, and he tells my mother that I’m going blind. So they put me into a special class in this little grade school. It’s called a sight-saving class, and it’s filled with about 16 people of varying degrees of disability. There’s a guy with a hydro head and an epileptic and a bunch of others. A gal from a local family, who went to Columbia College in New York, comes back and winds up teaching this nutty class. She introduces me to a whole bunch of stuff, like clay. This is so I’ll be tactful.

“Then she gives me a great big book with little dots beneath the letters, and I’m supposed to feel those dots. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in the second grade, but I do this for a year or whatever and then my eyesight gets better and I get put back into my original class. My eyes don’t get great, but they get better. With glasses I can see 20/20, and I have all my life. So I get a pair of glasses and that arrests my stigmatism. But what they really thought originally was that I was slowly going blind.

“I never learned about this till later on. This was a dramatic thing for a kid. So they’re thinking I’ve got about 12 months before I go blind, so this teacher is teaching me about color and a whole load of crap. They want me to know what color is, and to touch and feel things.

Crazy quilts have all of these snippets of stuff that people put together.

“I do remember getting the glasses, and coming out of this big building from the doctor’s office. I come out and put my glasses on. My God, the building isn’t just red, it has bricks. Trees aren’t just green, they have leaves. My eyes are pretty bad, so that’s why I wasn’t paying attention in school.”

Larson’s four-year hitch in the Navy during the Korean War had its own unique influence on him as well. Although his gallery is filled with nostalgic, romantic scenes of cowboys and the Southwest, scattered among the depictions of old adobes and mesa-filled landscapes are lively paintings reminiscing his years of drinking, whoring, and brawling with his Navy buddies. Larson freely admits that his raucous and debauched sailor scenes represent his typical naval experiences. 

“I’m on an aviation fuel tanker, and the first thing ya know, we’re off to Korea and Alaska. We do this and we do that, then we come back. It’s kind of exciting, because we go different places. We go ashore, everybody gets drunk, everybody gets laid if they can, and someone has to take them back to the ship. Somebody might deck the executive officer in the liberty launch. People are screaming, ‘I’m in love again.’ Really violent stuff.”

Still, between his besotted shore leaves, Larson managed to get in a little creative work.

“I finally wound up in Tokyo, where I spent three months, putting out a cruise book for a cruiser I was on. It was like a high-school yearbook, basically. I laid the book out and selected the photographs and sometimes wrote the captions and did cartoons all the way through the book to make fun, or just to give a flow to it.”

Larson had already spent a couple of years studying art in a junior college and at the University of Okalahoma before his Navy experience. It was afterward, however, when he got his “real” art education.

“I got into the Art Center School in Los Angeles. Some friends of mine who I’d met in the Navy were going there, and I could go on the GI Bill. It was an expensive school at the time. I was about 22, and I went there for four years. They wouldn’t take any of my previous credits. They would let us do it in tri-semesters, and I did it all in 28 months. It was really exciting.

“It was more of a hands-on academic education. They taught you how to draw, and they taught you to understand color and mix paint. They had philosophies about it.”

After graduating, Larson got his first real paying gig as an artist.

“My first jobs were for advertising agencies in New York City and Philadelphia. I’d go so far, and then I’d get fired for stuff like being a smart ass.

“At this one Philadelphia agency, I’m making $85 a week. I’m married with two children. They give us our checks in envelopes with little windows in them. One day I get my check and I think, ‘This is bullshit!’ and I add a ‘1’ with a charcoal pencil and make it $185. I put it back in my pocket so that the $185 is showing in the little window. I go over to my friend and say, ‘Can I borrow your art gum eraser?’ and I stick the check in his face. He goes nuts and stabs the table with his pencil and runs in to start complaining. After a while they get rid of you for stuff like that.”

Larson’s childhood interest in wind toys, and his acquired skill of making them, led him to break into the toy-designing business on the dime of a Mafia-indebted, iconoclastic toy-design shop of the day.

“I saw this promo piece in The Saturday Evening Post for a guy named Marvin Glass who was in Chicago. He was king of the toy makers. That was whom I wanted to work for. So I got a job in a Chicago agency and went to see him with all of my toy ideas. Eventually I got to work for him, making toys in his factory. There were about 40 people: about 25 model makers and 15 designers.

“I was a designer, and I designed some neat toys. We made them, took them to New York, and sold them to the major people in the industry.

“Marvin was really a nut. He seriously told me -- and I came to believe it -- that he’d sold his soul to the devil to do this sort of thing. He had sold a lot of financing to the Mafia.

“I lasted about two years. I wanted to get out of there, but he wouldn’t let me quit. He said the only way you leave is in a box. Finally, I got a job at the art institute, and he said that in that case, it was all right. Then he kind of gave me a going-away deal at the Kingsholme, a real great Swedish restaurant in Chicago, sort of like Geronimo’s. Marvin died shortly after; he was such a wound-up guy.”

It was also in Chicago, when he was out on a lunch break from another advertising agency, that Larson bumped into an old friend. This friend told him about a visit to the South, where he had seen an antique quilt rendering of  a slave-master sitting on a horse, lording over his slaves. In what may be as big an irony as any in Larson’s bevy of ironies that have fueled and directed his creative passion for the visual image, it was these invisible words describing an old folk-art piece that caused him to add yet another wing to the lifelong Ed Larson collection. And so, without ever having seen one, Larson immediately dove into designing a picture quilt. Now, hundreds of Ed Larson-designed picture quilts reside in private homes or hang on museum walls. Then there is the entire Ed Larson School of Picture Quilts, resulting from the many quilt-design workshops he’s conducted around the country.

“To me, quilts represent memories. I might have a piece of your fabric, and you’re my son, and I sew some of the shirt I remember you wearing. That’s all in that quilt. It has strings that are intangible. Some real old pictorial quilts -- pattern quilts -- have a GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) ribbon stitched into them, or election banners stitched into them. Crazy quilts have all of these snippets of stuff that people put together. The point is to show how much you know about stitching them together.

“The fabric is part of it. You have a beautiful piece of velvet next to corduroy or something else, and it’s quite an experience. I like quilts; I’ve been around a lot of people who do them, and they’re mostly really lovely people.”

Larson’s years of living in Chicago came to a rather abrupt, bittersweet end through the fortunate insurance coverage of a not-insignificant amount of his art consumed in the flames of the Chicago gallery representing him. With his tidy sum from the payout, Santa Fe seemed like the logical choice to get out of Dodge, buy a little homestead, and put down roots in his autumn years. He had already fallen in love with Santa Fe during one visit in his youth, when he and two friends had come through our little village different, bound for Disneyland to meet with the Man himself in order to join Mighty Walt’s legion of cartoonists employed at the nascent entertainment empire.

When pressed to talk about the difference between folk art and just plain old art, Larson replied by citing the works of those who are famous to people who paid attention in art school.

“There’s an expression inside folk art, like the stuff that Lee Godie did. She passed away about 15 years ago; she was around the Art Institute in the sixties. She drew pictures of somebody she called the Prince of Chicago; they were profile drawings of somebody she may have wanted to have a relationship with -- maybe an imaginary Prince Charming. Maybe she was a little nuts; that’s possible. But she was also expressing something very real. She could identify with the better side of things that she was experiencing in life.

“But if you ask me how I know that one thing is art and the other is folk art, I think of the justice on the Supreme Court who, when asked to define pornography, said he couldn’t, but he knew it when he saw it. You know folk art when you see it. I think that’s true.”

Larson and his buddies never did get an audience with Disney himself. However, that didn’t stop Larson from achieving his own greatness or, in this particular case, “wonderfulness.” But as for being famous, well, try punching in “Ed Larson folk artist” in Google’s search engine. He may not have as many “hits” as the talking horse gets, but Ed Larson is no one-trick-pony — that’s for sure.

There is much in Larson’s various mediums and huge body of work that conveys “folk.” However, in this one unedified, untrained opinion, there is also much in Larson’s gallery that seems downright “fine.” And if there’s any irony in that, well, that’s wonderful, too.

Feel free to e-mail Gershon Siegel at permpress@aol.com.