Gerald Durrell, the English naturalist, wrote an exquisite memoir, My Family and Other Animals, about his childhood years on the Greek island of Corfu from 1935 to 1939. He describes wandering alone through the dry hills in search of adventure, and especially insects, birds and animals for the zoo in his bedroom. In one of the most magical moments in the book, Durrell spies an itinerant peddler approaching in the distance. Durrell describes the gradual appearance through heat waves of an extremely eccentric peasant, walking along with a cloud of dozens of flying, colorful beetles tied to strings around his waist, and pockets full of wondrous specimens and oddities. These experiences shaped Durrell’s lifelong passion for animals and a career as one of the creators of the progressive movement in zoos.
John Bankston, the San Francisco painter, has spent the last twenty years describing an equally formative, magical world. In his, a character very suggestive of the artist has found himself, Dorothy-like, stranded as a stranger in an exotic land named Rainbow Forest. Over the decades this character, Mr. M, has had many slapstick, erotic and strange encounters in this largely African, largely homoerotic setting. In the current exhibition a new character, which the artist has named The Abstracticator, makes an appearance. Like Durrell’s peddler, The Abstracticator is a shape-shifting vision of magic and art that appears in several works; he is a mirror but also a kind of interpreter of whomever looks at him. He’s kind of the wise fool, the jester and truth teller, of this realm.
Conventional wisdom holds that America is where immigrants come to reinvent themselves, free of the class restrictions or personal failings encountered elsewhere. Like Russian nesting dolls, California as a state and San Francisco as a city serve as smaller and smaller geographical refuges for those ready to shuck their upbringing and start over, but needing just the right set of circumstances to feel completely safe, at home. For Bankston, San Francisco is the enchanted land portrayed in his paintings, a refuge where he has found himself at ease as a man and as an artist, for most of his adult life. He is also extending this notion of reinvention into the realm of fantasy: not only can we make up a persona, but also it can spring from our deepest repressed desires. So the forested, exotic land of the paintings, full of rough trade and heroic saviors, is a projection of erotic desire on the blank slate of a San Francisco unrecognizable geographically but clearly present psychographically, and demographically.
Reinforcing this content is a form taken from childhood, that of the coloring book, which is Bankston’s signature style. In the early 90s Bankston was painting free-floating images—a businessman’s head, a cartoon animal, a set of crutches—against monochrome backgrounds. The breakthrough in his practice came when he discovered the possibilities inherent in authoritative heavy black lines and filled-in coloration in the late 90s. Inclusion in two major shows, the Bay Area Now 2 regional survey at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and the legendary Freestyle show at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York, and representation with his long-term dealers, Rena Bransten in San Francisco and Jack Shainman in New York, followed soon after.
The Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez is credited with the line, “If they give you lined paper, write sideways.” In coloring books children are usually praised for following the rules and coloring within the lines. There is a parallel between form and content in the metaphor of coloring (or living) outside the prescribed societal lines. The childlike associations of the genre form a tension with Bankston’s adult themes, while at the same time the fantasy behavior of his characters rhymes with the imagination inherent in children’s games.
The works for the current exhibition at Beta Pictoris Gallery are in acrylic, oil and other mediums on linen, panels and handmade paper. The emphasis is on the characters; the landscapes behind them range from suggested, barely existent, to just a touch beyond perfunctory; they’re never elaborate, consistent with the simple illustrations in coloring books. Mr. M usually has a long hat on, a kind of cross between an Arabic head scarf and an English legal wig, but with an African, leopard-style print; the rest of his clothes are in a range of synesthesia-stimulating fruit shades. A new character appears in this universe: a kind of giant, hairy, fierce-looking lap bunny, from a dream by the artist. For Bankston, the outsize (halfway to being a pooka) and ridiculous rabbits add a bit of comic relief and overall strangeness to the world, perhaps balancing out the sweetness of M’s bluebird on his shoulder (coincidentally mentioned in Disney’s Song of the South lyrics).
Bankston’s entire body of work is predicated on the viability of narrative in art without accompanying literary text, or put differently, with faith in art-as-text. It also subverts the frequently held prejudice against illustration, as secondary to the words of a book—a “merely” practical, functional, commercial art form—by removing the text altogether. The ellipsis is in the lack of traditional language-based storytelling. It’s a silent movie with most of the frames missing, a game of charades in which neither the guessers nor the actor know the solution. What we get instead is a more contemporary, fractured, nonlinear unfolding of a tale, dependent on the viewer’s projections as much as any final authoritative truth.
Artists residing outside of the centers of the marketplace are inevitably under pressure to consider location as part of a career strategy. To build a successful career while remaining in the community of one’s choice is an ideal few are fortunate enough to achieve. For John Bankston this is particularly fortunate and appropriate, as San Francisco, including Golden Gate Park/Rainbow Forest, is the source and lifeblood of his alternative vision and its inherently political resistance to imposed values.