A ghost of Hermosa Beach’s past has reappeared with a multitude of faces.
Once upon a more bohemian time, painter Wilfred Sarr was Hermosa’s homegrown Van Gogh. Back when jazz blew hot from the Lighthouse, poesy emanated the Either/Or bookstore, and philosophy fairly spewed from the long-gone Insomniac cafe, Sarr partook of Hermosa’s many-hued moods. He painted the town.
As the culture changed and rents rose, Sarr ran for the hills – Big Sur, specifically, where he lived a hermit-like existence in a mountainside shack a rough two hour ride from anything resembling civilization and where he got to know several California Condors on a first name basis (numbers, actually – condors are so few in number now that almost every one has been tagged by biologists for study).
Sarr has come down from the mountains. The artist, who now resides in Santa Cruz, will have his first exhibit in Hermosa Beach since 1985, beginning with an artist’s reception Friday night from 4 to 9 p.m. at the Easy Reader offices (832 Hermosa Ave.). The show, titled “All New Work,” features several Impressionistic landscapes of the sort that have frequently drawn comparisons to Van Gogh’s for their vivid colors and spiritually afire exuberance.
But Sarr’s recent work is not dominated by landscapes, nor does it include the pointillist, Eastern-inspired mandala’s that featured largely in his occasional shows at Redondo’s Cannery Row Studios in years past. He has been painting people, and “All New Work” includes more than two dozen portraits.
His focus, Sarr said, turned to portraits because the complexity of a human face is more challenging to capture on canvass than any other subject.
“A vase of flowers has no opinion,” he said in an interview this week. “It has no wishful thinking…Portrait painting is much more dynamic, more exciting, and more scary.”
A long time ago, a Buddhist teacher told Sarr that painting could be his practice, but only if he was honest. Painting portraits stringently tests this honesty. Sarr, who is now 70, said he vowed to himself that the subject’s opinions and feelings would not affect the painting. Then he took that challenge a step further. Since June, Sarr has completed 20 self-portraits, most of which are in the new show.
His inspiration came from Van Gogh.
“The portraits Van Gogh did of himself were so varied,” Sarr said. “I’m convinced he was a pretty honest guy, so there must have been something he saw in each one of those portraits that was real…So I got a mirror out.”
The results were a little surprising.
“Wait a minute here,” a friend told him. “That’s you, but you are smiling in all of them. You are never smiling.”
It was a far cry from the portraits he had done years ago in Hermosa, which used to shock their subjects by showing the future ravages of hard living. “I’d tell them, that’s the way you’ll look if you don’t change your ways,” Sarr recalled. “I didn’t have too many takers on those paintings.”
But now Sarr senses some other truth at work in his portraits.
“I have a feeling that the closer it is to joy, the closer it is to real,” he said. “I think joy is the natural state of the human being….We seldom express real joy, or so it seems. Or maybe everyone is shit happy and my negative mind is so fucked up I don’t see the joy.”
Sarr has long used Hermosa as his laboratory for the study of human mysteries. When he arrived here in 1962, by his own count he was one of three bearded men in town. One was former mayor Mike Bigo (perhaps more importantly the founder of the Pitcher House). The other was artist Willie Maloney, who did the original Tim Kelly surf sculpture and eventually left in drugged haze with Sarr’s first wife.
“I’ve had a respectable number of failed marriages, collapsing under the weight of art and drugs…enough to be respectable in any art market in the world. Forget the fucking formal education,” Sarr said.
Sarr was self-taught, and much of his education as an artist he received on the streets of Hermosa. In 1968, he lived on the top floor of what is now Club Sushi, at the corner of Pier and Hermosa avenues, where he would frequently stay awake for 24 hours, staring out the window and watching town life unfold: the pre-dawn “hide and seek” between cops and speed freaks, the surfers heading to the ocean at first light, the mid-morning bikini parade, the bustling arrival of the lunch crowd, the human market of the Strand, the first pangs of the night people at dusk, the midnight limousines disembarking jazz musicians outside the Lighthouse, and the beginning of the hide and seek game all over again.
Later, he rented the old press room of the Hermosa Review, a large, high-ceilinged studio for a dozen years (ending in 1992) for $150 a month. The city’s parking garage is where the studio used to be. “Hermosa Beach was really good to me,” Sarr said. “I loved this little town. But boy, has it sure changed.”
Sarr, however, couldn’t be happier to be showing once again in his former haunts. “Everything in my life says the fat lady hasn’t sung yet,” he said. “This could be really fun.”
A reception for Sarr will be held tomorrow beginning at 4 p.m. at Easy Reader, 832 Hermosa Ave., Hermosa Beach. For more information call (310) 372-4611. ER