Wilfred A. Lang, painter (1915-1994)

in progress....

from the  The Wilfred A. Lang Gallery 

My growing collection of Wilfred A. Lang notes from my previous post, suggests another post entry is needed. So little information on him on the internet. Where to even begin, when my imperfect memories gathered in youth, imperfectly recollected and transposed now that I'm older that dirt, makes this more of an act of fiction than anything else.

A defunct Angelfire site was the only decent reference I could find on Wilfred. (No I'm not referring to the Shanghai artist, born in 1954, who cranks out dreadful urban landscapes and sailboats with a palate knife and a fan brush.) Wilfred A. Lang was a complex artist, a student of Robert Stackpole, who worked in complex layers, his imagery embellishing a mythos to ordinary subjects.

I knew Wilfred’s first wife Betty—who was like a second mother to me, and four of his children, and the infamous Sausalito Hoffmans.

Wilfred was always larger than life. As kids, we were terribly excited whenever he came to visit Pat & Betty Wall. I remember him, grizzled, and laden with massive turquoise and silver jewelry, and his haughty second wife, Marcia, in her long flowing skirts, and aquiline nose, who walked like a goddess. She very much resembled her portrait that hung above the daybed in the living room.

That colorful full-length abstract portrait that Wilfred gave to Betty mesmerized me. I always thought it odd that he gave Betty a painting of his next wife, who left him soon after. But the full-length portrait was gorgeous. As a child, I stared at it for hours on end, following the intricate ghost calligraphy embroidered on the painting.

I didn't know of Wilfred's Sonoma County presence until I began this post. I'm sitting here writing this blog post a stone's throw from where he built a house in Mays Canyon. Wilfred was friends with Bernard Zachaim, and also stayed at Marguerute Wiildenhain's Pond Farm, in Guerneville. So he also had Bauhaus connections as Walter Gropius was a frequent visitor to Pond Farm as well.

Sonoma County supported a thriving artist colony. After McCarthyism raised its ugly head, many artists, writers, and especially the Jewish movie industry folks fled the urban jungles for a country life, raising chickens. When the bottom of chicken nest fell out, and chicken farming couldn't compete with agribusiness, the fallow chickensheds morphed into artist studios. It was odd to see a portion of a movie backdrop incorporated into a chickenshed. 

Polish-born deep Leftist, Bernard Zacheim (1896-1985), a student of Diego Rivera, painted the Coit Tower murals in San Francisco. He co-founded the San Francisco Artists and Writers Union, which supported artists viafederally funded arts program during the Great Depression. The Public Works of Art Project, funded Zakheim's work on Coit Tower. Zacheim moved to Sonoma County, first to Mayes Canyon, a pocket canyon near Guerneville, and later, to a Sebastopol apple orchard. 

Several artists fleeing the confines city, joined him, Wilfred Lang, among them. I would love to know more about that era, Zacheim was always a presence at art openings, but both he and his daughter Masha, who documented the WPA mural movement are both gone now. Perhaps his son, Nathan, a mural restorer, might have some oral history of that era to share. Wilfred’s eldest son Pete, wrote a comprehensive biography, which I’ve posted below in the notes. At one point, I will weave them in with my notes.

NOT DONE

Giving back old photos

Scanning old photos and trying to date them always conjured up the most unlikely of memories. Like the photos I took of Pete Lang in Park City, near Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island in 1981. I never expected to find his daughters on Facebook when I posted some old photos on my friend Micaela Wall's page. It was such a magical time for me hanging out with Pete's family. I always adored Pete, I knew him since I was a child. Almost as long as I've known Micaela. She was called Miranda in those days. Pete was her step-brother. He mooned after her while she mooned after his handsome younger brother, Stan—a wild one with hair slicked back like James Dean. Those New Mexico boys by way of Sausalito, with their tall boots and tooled leather belts, seeking distant horizons, got under the skin like fine desert sand. I was always the one left out of the moon's capricious equations. Pete saw me as the little kid down the road. Sometimes he'd drop by to visit my granny and me in Forest Knolls after Micaela's dad, Pat Wall, sold the house moved north to Fort Bragg. Pete was living in a trailer on the headlands by the botanical garden. Paradise on earth. I've an early memory of Pete leaning against our sawhorse, by the woodpile, playing his Martin guitar. He left town, became a spy, joined the CIA, or was it the FBI? The Lang brothers went the way of lost cowboys in search of a one-horse townor a horizon that just wouldn't settle. Maybe it was the high desert winds spurring them on. But they couldn't stay still in any one place for long. We ran into each other in BC, by then Pete was married, with two daughters, but the wife was stepping out with the mayor on the side. It broke my heart. We lost touch. They moved to Florida where he built wooden boats, got divorced. Last I heard, he was in Galveston, Texas, working as a private eye, probably to be closer to his father, the Bohemian sculptor / painter Wilfred. Stan sailed off to the Virgin Islands became a carpenter, and met death by bottle on the old plank road. I eventually got a Martin guitar too, but I could never play it like that. Pete gave me some folk songbooks too—which I still have. Back copies of Sing Out!, a little Woody Guthrie, some Baez, but no Dylan. But I never could play those songs without remembering Pete bending over his guitar, head canted as if he were ciphering a story from those whispering guitar strings.

Port Alberni

Port Alberni, Vancouver Island – I overdrove my mark, a hitchhiker said she knew where I wanted to go, and we missed our turnoff, so I'm staying with her in a strange house. I know not where.

The moon is a rusted silver crescent hanging below Venus. Mountains fringe this place like shards of glass. Montgomery School Principal, Ken Lytle used to live here years ago, when he was a boy. The hills around Cazadero's Montgomery School are much like this place.

It is 50 miles away to Uclulet by water, it means safe harbor. Or, just water. A Nootka word. You ride the mail boat to get there – it's an eight hour trip. The road to Tofino is even longer. Uclulet looks like Point Reyes. I watch the same ocean here, as I would at home.

Ken Lytle spent some time in Port Alberni as a kid and hated it. I can see why. Port Alberni, Dante's Inferno of the Northwest is surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It has a gorgeous fjord that meanders 50 miles to the Pacific, it's a mile wide and a mile deep, but the brown oily water from the pulp mill, like flotsam. Paper pulp loosing from ships floats out to sea. The fish leaping to the surface gasping for air, ground from the pulpmill when it rains, it is an acid rain. Hell on earth.

I'm staying with friends in a rustic log cabin in Parksville. Pete Lang's wife Sarah is teaching me to belly dance. Downstep, thrust, downstep, thrust. Work down into the floor, not up into the sky. The outhouse has a blue plastic sky. I stepped on a slug, barefoot. I’m stuck to the earth now.

A friend of mine, Ken Lytle once threw a slug at his wife when they lived in Cazadero. And when I washed my jeans, there a slug was in the washing machine. There isn't any way to get slug glue off. Damned, those jeans are Calvin Kleins. I traded a pair of cowboy boots for them. The slug crawled through Ken’s wife’s hair. He said she washed her hair seven times. It never came out. But she washed that man right out of her hair. They are now divorced.

Sharon Doubiago said to write a story about your clothes. I think of Frida Kahlo. Sharon says that she still has the same clothes. From year-to-year, the stories about clothes stack up and accumulate like clothes in the closet. 

Once when we went out dancing in the town of Elk on the coast of Mendocino, the leotard I had scrounged from a trashcan, ripped down the back. I borrowed her special heart pin and then I lost it. It was found later on the dance floor, broken. We glued it back together – our friendship mended. Sort of.

Sharon will run away to Port Townsend to escape a broken heart. Did I trigger it when I lost her heart pin?