\ N hile rummaging through the shelves of used book stores, the dedicated peruser is sure to come upon some strange and curious volumes. Few discoveries are more curious than a book of color art reproductions and explanatory text entitled simply Mr. Otis. Published in 1958 by Macmillan and Company, Mr. Otis is the unexpected offspring of the nationally acclaimed writer and historian, Stewart Holbrook, who died in 1964. He was a long-time Portland resident and a crony of such literary luminaries as H.L. Mencken, Bernard De Voto and John Dos Passos. A gregarious sort who was as much at home in the smoky environs of Erickson's Bar and Card Room on Skid Road as in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and famous, Holbrook took up the brush in 1948 and began painting on weekends under the name of Mr. Calvin Otis. Although Holbrook clearly got considerable pleasure from making his paintings, it’s also evident that he received at least as much enjoyment from watching members of the art establishment squirm when they saw the<n. With pleasure, we present Stewart Holbrook's alter ego, the illustrious Mr. Otis. (AN EXCERPT) [ I STEWART H. HOUWOOK__J J t 5IF paintings in this book will speak for themselves and will, I believe, indicate a fresh approach in the field of natural expression, if not indeed herald the founding of a new school which more competent critics than I are already beginning to designate as the Primitive-Moderne. I am honored to have been asked to contribute a biographical sketch of the painter. Though it is difficult to speak of the man and ignore his work, I had the great good fortune to meet him many years before any recognition whatever came his way, and I shall attempt to give readers a notion of his somewhat elusive and not always engaging personality. It was during the long grim winter of 193-5—1934 that I gradually became conscious of the frail figure of a man whom veteran members of the Press Club addressed only as Mr. Otis. Though not a member, nor even a former newspaperman, he seemed to be always on the premises, and I came to learn that he was one of the company of non-paying guests permitted to occupy beds on the upper floors of the decaying Victorian mansion that was our clubhouse in Portland, at the western end of the Oregon Trail. Somebody or other at the club told me Otis was an artist down on his luck. Not until then did I identify the faint aroma of turpentine Otis emanated when he entered the malty confines of our main clubrooms on the ground floor. It seems a little odd now, looking back across full twenty-five years, that we newspapermen and writers paid so little heed to Mr. Otis, possibly a genius and surely the only artist who made his home and had his atelier in our clubhouse. Perhaps our failure to recognize his talent was due in some part to the fact that he didn’t look like an artist. He said merely, ever so meekly, that he was a »j painter. But he wore neither a beret nor a beard. I did see him once or twice in a dirty smock, yet he commonly worked in vest and shirt sleeves, not even removing the high celluloid collar and ready-tied cravat he invariably wore. There was no whit of Left Bank dash to Otis. About him, indeed, was something of the shabby gentility that pervaded our clubhouse. Probably by the sheer rank of long residence, Mr. Otis managed to hold down a spot in the bay-windowed room on the second floor; and here, too, he rated a fireplace in which he brewed his tea and, in chilly weather, warmed his everlasting sardines. The winter when I first met Mr. Otis was a Spartan time, not only in Oregon but elsewhere. A free bed was a thing to cherish. I doubt we had a vacancy in six months. Some few of our non-paying guests tried to make themselves useful around the club, and there was in truth much that needed doing. The many fireplaces were given to smoking. Our several water closets seemed always out of order and were of an era no living plumber could remember. The ceilings were so high that replacing a burned-out globe called for a crew of two or three men. 28 Clinton St. Quarterly I sbund The Pioneer Mother with Child and Late Hu In this bold historicalt h e p]a i n s in the Covered spirit of the noble of the Iighth earted note-struck Wagons. It was possi y b t h e never q u l t c bartered. ..The Mun L ^out Even the most knowing oHMslrty Otis. The quality, and possibly the is obtious. The compontion prismatic wonder of > S definition of space, (hows the artist to have accepted^ anything beyond^the^act that he wanted to paint pictures that are head - ful objects? Truth Crushed to Earth at Third & Burnside Painted desperate., if ^ .y m the hope of WPA Art Project of the 193 • t h c Social Conscience School, unght well have become noted in d U H e , even bad « not Uen for bis ‘ " f P " S “ M<i when documenting Evil in the district. FROM THE COLLECTION OF MR AND M R S . ROBERT HOLCOMB plus chair and a table to stand on. Doors sagged, windows w;ere cracked; the many decorative mirrors on the main floor were coated with dust. I recall that Mr. Otis, most grateful for free quarters, was helpful in many small ways. Wanting to do something to relieve the deep melancholy of the club’s appearance to passing Philistines, he took from the mantel the enormous and elegant Guy Bates Post Silver Cup, w'hich the famous actor had presented us, and placed it in the window nearest the street. I thought it added considerable tone. Otis also offered to paint landscapes, or still-life pictures on the dusty mirrors, but was turned down by the club’s board of directors, whose ideas of Art were the pretty Nell Brinkley Girls of the Sunday supplements. One member of the board, a brutal fellow when in his cups, went so far as to suggest, in the painter’s hearing, that Otis might, if he wished, go hang one of his “daubs” in the main water closet on the ground floor. At this cruel remark, the mild and apologetic Mr. Otis winced as if from the lash of a whip. The poor fellow was so obviously wounded that the better natured members of the board immediately proposed and passed a resolution that our artist-in-residence be invited to hang several of his works in the rear or servants’ stairwell, and at least one picture on the landing of the main or grand staircase that led up from the front hall. All of us members of the Press Club knew, of course, that our clubhouse had long since been marked for destruction. The thirty dollars a month wc paid as rent did not even meet the Multnomah County taxes on the ancient structure, lire blow fell in 1935. We were directed in a curt note to be gone; and given a churlish ten days to vacate. Before we had found new quarters in a downtown hotel of sporty, or possibly dubious repute, the wreckers were in the very yard, attacking the porches, shouting obscenities at one another, making high holiday of this demolition of our seedy temple that was dedicated, in a manner of speaking, to Literature. And the Arts, if you counted Mr. Otis. It was a tragic hour for Otis and the other and less talented characters who had been our non-paying guests. There was no room for them in our new quarters. What became of them I never knew. I even lost track of Otis for some two years. It was the summer of 1938 before I saw him again. It was a chance meeting on West Burnside Street in the heart of Portland’s rough-and-ready Skidroad district. Otis was wearing the same nondescript suit of his Press Club days. The tall celluloid collar was as immaculate as ever. But he now presented a more positive exterior, due in some part to the neat derby hat that sat squarely on the very top of his head, and a tightly rolled umbrella which he swung in an almost jaunty manner. When I remarked on his prosperous appearance, he was pleased, and said yes, he had been getting along just fine. He had picked up both derby and umbrella for fifty cents at the Good Will Industries store; and the fifty cents was the cash portion of a barter deal by which he had also received two dozen tins of sardines for a painting on a classical theme, which he had entitled The Fatal Draught of Socrates. The party of the second part in the deal was the proprietor of a small grocery, a Greek who thought so much of the picture film RS From Miss Marion Lawrence, in charge of the Art Room at the Portland Public Library, came word that Mr. Otis was spending his spare hours there, looking at reproductions of the Masters, old and new, and reading voraciously in the history of painting. Had it not been for Miss Lawrence’s letter I should have been at a loss later, when I met Otis again, to account for the knowledge he displayed with such easy assurance. “We never had a more courteous, or more constant visitor in our department,” Miss Lawrence wrote, addiqg, “It is tragic that so nice a man should have become unhinged. He still thinks he is an artist. . . —artmen t. It is man should have He still thinks he I ■row The 1940s wore on. Mr. Otis painted on, tirelessly. But recognition, as he aptly remarked, “remains a fata morgana, the mirage of artists—that is, of many of us.” Yet he was not embittered, but merely confused that fame was as to place and keep it in his show window amidst the olive oil, the sunflower seeds, the St. John’s Bread and other exotics. I asked Otis where he had his studio. “In the cellar under Tod Freeman’s watch-repair place,” he replied, adding, “No rent.” I might have guessed it. For forty years Tod Freeman’s Time Shop had been a fixture in the same block that houses Aug Erickson’s gigantic saloon, with its “Longest Bar in the World.” And for forty years, too, the large basement of Tod’s shop had been a popular hangout for Socialists, Wobblies, Single-Taxers, and other apostles of protest. I had spent many an hour in that basement, listening to plans for a better world. It was as pitch dark a place as ever I encountered. Compared to the old Press Club, it was as a tallow candle to limelight. I knew then that Mr. Otis was still painting in Chaos and old Night, and naturally wondered if his palette was as bright as before. “Got any new paints lately?” I asked. “Oh. yes,” he said, almost with enthusiasm. “I got a viridine as bright as that stuff we used to spray potatoes with when I was a boy. And I picked up a dandy big fat tube of cadmium orange at the Salvation Army store. I’m doing fine, fine! Lots to eat too.” Several years passed before we met again, though meanwhile I heard often from Mr. Otis himself and also from the few people who knew him. "It’s got so I can barter almost every picture,” he wrote cheerfully. His diet had expanded notably, even if much of the bartered food came in cans. I recall how pleased he was when a small painting, 37x9 inch entitled The Frightened- Chameleon, brought him a full case of tomatoes, gallon size; and another, a 16x20 “historical” as he termed it, was exchanged for a hundredweight of rice. He remarked with satisfaction that with these two new items he was enjoying “a well balanced diet.” passing him by. Twice, so he told me, he had approached the director of Port land’s fine new Art Museum, to suggest that a Mr. Otis show might attract new visitors, especially if hung in the Ayer Wing of the building on the ground floor. “They wouldn’t have to walk upstairs,” he had pointed out hopefully. But Otis was rebuffed. (“Politely,” he remembered.) “But when I complained to one of the Museum guards at the refusal,” Otis told me, “the fellow- said maybe if I’d cut off an ear I might make the grade.” Otis thought the reference to a great if deranged painter was in poor taste. Then, in 1949, just before his third decade of struggle and failure was all but past, events conspired happily to bring some measure of recognition to the now almost desperate founder of a new school of painting—the Primitive- Moderne.* Early in that year Miss Florence Millsaps of the Oregon Journal was exposed to an Otis painting. Portrait of an Aspiring Saint, which had been retrieved many years before, when the wreckers were demolishing the old Press Club mansion, by Mr. Roderick Lull, short-story writer and novelist • The final e is imperative. It makes the word foreign, hence fashionable. Mr. Otis’ reproductions and Stewart Holbrook’s writing reprinted with permission of Sibyl Strahl. Clinton St. Quarterly 29
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz