Still one charismatic guy after all these years, Futzie Nutzle recently worked his way through 40 years and two lattés reflecting upon his new show at the Cabrillo Gallery, which opens March 18 and runs through April 11, with a reception this Saturday.
Even sitting still, Nutzle is a restless bundle of hippie tropes, from his long white hair and off-center pyramidal goatee to his agitated eyebrows and sly smile. Loaded with colorful opinions, Nutzle backed into analysis of his current paintings by observing that “art is the most cliché-driven business in the world.” Cliché and bullshit, he added. “If a piece of art needs a paragraph to explain itself,” he snorted, “it’s bullshit.”
And as any Nutzle fan knows, the Ohio native’s famed illustrations are spare visual puns punctuated by terse, seemingly casual captions. Emerging in sync with the hippie flowering of the 1970s and ’80s, Nutzle’s work resonated with amusing clarity, immediately winning him a righteous anti-mainstream fan base. Born Bruce Kleinsmith in an Ohio hamlet of 16,000 souls, Nutzle burst into the national alternative spotlight when his witty, graphic commentaries appeared on the letters page of Rolling Stone Magazine in 1975. They remained in that coveted spot until 1980, and even when the gig ended, Nutzle’s posters, graphic haikus and paintings found niches in counterculture venues all over the Bay Area, and for another decade in Tokyo’s Japan Times. His drawings ran in several Santa Cruz alternative papers, including, most recently, Santa Cruz Weekly.
“Futzie Nutzle: Paintings and Works on Paper” is the first major exhibition of work by this elusive artist in more than a decade. Fans of his line drawings may be surprised by the brilliant works in oil that appear on the gallery walls. Careful constructions intensified by rich fields of bold color, these recent paintings are fueled by what Nutzle calls big emotions. “And then there’s the Dad thing,” he adds, looking sideways at nothing in particular. Nutzle’s father was killed on May 18, 1945 in the Battle of The Bulge. “Huge emotion,” he says of paintings such as a canvas depicting a huge angry green shape filling the sky above a tiny house, entitled Dads Not Coming Home. The cultural critiques of his lean drawings have given way to the psychological eruptions of the paintings, yet all the work could be read as a caption to the artist’s life.
Santa Cruz Bound
From the resorts of Florida to the casinos of Lake Tahoe, the man who was to become Nutzle was both avoiding and seeking adventure beyond the indigo collars of the Rust Belt. “I worked in cemeteries, dug ditches—I’ve always been a blue collar worker,” he reveals with a crooked smile. “I was really a loner, and I couldn’t stand to be confined.”
No desk for him. Nutzle tried New York for a few minutes. “It scared the shit out of me—it was claustrophobic,” he says, adding a bit ruefully, “if I had just played the game and kissed everybody’s ass, I know I could have been a blue chip artist.” His lips work their way into a thin fragment of a smile. “In Lake Tahoe I got to know the drunks—they knew how to have fun—and besides, all the beautiful women were there.” But the job was another dead-end burnout for him. “I didn’t want to end up counting coins and wiping down tables in my old age,” he says.
It was fall of 1964 and Santa Cruz beckoned. “My two buddies—henry humble and Spinny Walker—and I rented an old funky house across the street from where Dominican Hospital is now. My share was $25 a month.” Necessity was the mother of re-invention, and with nothing to lose Kleinsmith became Futzie Nutzle.
It was the dawning of the psychedelic persona. California, and Santa Cruz in particular, filled up with maverick graphic artists like A. West, R. Crumb and Karl Vidstrand as well as the acid poster kings Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse and Rick Griffin, whose publicity images for rock shows became legendary. But Nutzle and his graphic pals considered all those “poster guys” to be too commercial. “We were working in a different direction. It was all about a drawing, a single drawing, with a caption,” he recalls. “Just like the New York correspondence school.” The caption was “the trigger,” Nutzle says, brows twitching like tesla coils, “for the interpreter’s story. If the image gets into their subconscious, then it’s successful. It’s always up for interpretation—and it’s so satisfying if there’s a response at all.” He sits back and considers the horror that is, in his opinion, conceptual art. “We’re so saturated with crap.”
Nutzle admits that his early foray into the artist’s life was “so naive and undeveloped. Back then it was just a single panel. So crude. So we started writing and drawing with our left hands,” just to give each drawing more edge and eccentricity.
Fame For A Time
“At the time it was almost a living,” Nutzle contends about the Rolling Stone years. “I thought that something would come of it.” But in 1980 the contract ended. Nutzle is still fuming over that one. A spot of luck hit when he went to Japan and fell in love with the beauty of images printed on rice paper. “I loved their aesthetic,” he says. And suddenly he got a call from the Japan Times: they wanted his drawings. “It was the first time in my life that my work was solicited. I’d send them a dozen drawings and they’d select what they wanted. It was so easy. They were fantastic—and they paid on time.”
But that too ended, and Nutzle dropped out of sight with “no money, no job, no future. I had nothing except my will to survive.” The artist took odd jobs, married a second time and moved from rural Aromas to the backwoods of San Juan Bautista, where he now enjoys a huge old garage studio for the first time in his life.
The upcoming Cabrillo show came about through a chance collaboration with gallery director Tobin Keller. “I’ve never been concerned about showing my paintings. It’s really a pain in the ass,” he complains happily. “You have to have mats and decent frames. It takes an enormous amount of time to get together a body of work, plus framing and shipping.” Eyebrows, knitting at a manic pace, punctuate each word. “It’s tough coming up with a good enough idea in an artwork that it will keep you interested in finishing it.”
Insisting that there is no particular theme uniting the show’s 20-plus works, Nutzle admits that his output seems self-directed toward an unknown end. “You don’t know where it’s going,” he grins,” but you know when it’s finished.” Immediately contradicting his last pronouncement, he continues. “It’s always about the Path, always about going, moving on to the next thing. I never get to the destination.”
And he clearly doesn’t want to. “I feel blessed just to be interested in life. I’m always seeking, always grabbing each day. I don’t have to have stuff.” He does admit that if some paintings sold he would “buy a better car.”
When asked about his notorious reputation for enigma—he never allows himself to be photographed—Nutzle laughs. “I never had any money for promotion. So mystique worked.” Admitting to a certain degree of maturity as he heads toward his 70th birthday, Nutzle agrees that while painting isn’t as spontaneous as drawing, “It’s still spontaneous. But now I’m more careful—I’m recognizing what needs to be done.
“It’s kind of a fantasy to be a real artist,” he confesses suddenly. “Painting is phenomenal. I think a painter is a pinnacle of society. They step away from all that exists, with attachment and detachment.” And they make something out of thin air.
Any regrets? “Oh, sure. I had opportunities that I passed up because I just had to ‘be myself.’ But being in Santa Cruz in the ’60s—I mean, it was so great.” And besides, says Nutzle of the larger world beyond his rural eden, “I don’t think there’s anything going on out there that I need.” He cocks his baseball cap and struggles to look serious.
FUTZIE NUTZLE: PAINTINGS AND WORKS ON PAPER
March 18-April 11
Reception Saturday, March 19, 5-7pm
Artist’s talk Thursday, March 24, 6:30pm
Cabrillo Gallery
6500 Soquel Dr, Library Rm 1002, Aptos
Free
