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The Story Of Two Artists: Jeff F. Wheeler Talks About His Friend Daniel Johnston

Courtesy photo

Jeff Wheeler has been a professional artist for more than 25 years, having amassed an impressive body of work — much of it focused on collaborations. One of the most fruitful of these partnerships has been with musician/artist Daniel Johnston. Wheeler will be showing some of their recent works at the Diver Studio in the show "On Their Way To Heaven Or Hell" this Friday. Wheeler and Diver will also host a screening of the 2005 documentary The Devil And Daniel Johnston.

Interview Highlights

Jedd Beaudoin: Daniel Johnston creates this art that many times has themes from comic books. He works with paper.

Jeff Wheeler: He deals with all of life's important questions and mysteries but in the most simple, direct way that you can. This goes for his drawings as well as in his songwriting. To me, that's why it hits home so much, his way of dealing with all that is important but yet through Hulk and Captain America in his drawings and through love lost in his songwriting.

Where did you encounter his work first and did you feel, when you encountered his work, that you were at the same level of simplicity or did you say, "Oh, man, I can pull back a little bit and be a little more simplistic"?

In 1993, he first came to my attention. I was in graduate school up in Ellensburg, Washington. Even back then I had ideas that I would like to collaborate with Daniel Johnston just because our ideas and the way we create our own worlds, I thought, would go good together, even back then. Fast forward to a couple years ago he was in a couple shows I curated with my brother called Ulterior Motifs. Maybe I had too much going on in my own work. He taught me how to back up and say things with less. It's something that we have fun doing. We learn from each other.

What I want to bring to him is, I think maybe he was stuck on 81/2 x11 cardstock. That's what he does, that's what he's comfortable with. I like to do work on old, vintage papers, Big Chief paper, big stuff, whatever I can find that will take my media. I'm trying to get him to branch out a little bit that way too. He doesn't like to work big, but I found a fun way to work big with Daniel so far is to send him a scroll. We have a couple that are maybe 15 feet long and maybe only one foot tall. He'll scroll them out little by little and work big that way. He only sees a little bit at a time.

I think the idea that people very often have of an artist is that they live this very solitary existence in their creation. They're sitting in their studio painting by themselves or drawing by themselves. Here you are, you guys aren't exactly in the same room but you're open to that. In your opinion, is that a different way for an artist to work, to collaborate like that.

In all the collaborations I've done, Daniel's no different, I don't like to talk about it. At all. We let the conversation be the drawings. You have to pick your collaborators wisely. And I've done that with James Porter and now Daniel. But what I like is for the conversation to take place on the paper so that we don't have to talk about it. Even when I do go visit Daniel, we don't talk about the drawings. We talk about anything but. It's just friends seeing each other and talking about what happened since the last time that I saw him. We try to keep the conversation strictly to the page. I like it that way.

Credit Courtesy photo

What's that like when you send of the package and wait … six weeks?

I've been in a residency in Croatia this year so part of the work we're showing here in Wichita are things I sent him maybe seven months ago from Croatia. I've just gotten a packet since I've been here in Wichita, I've been here for about a month.

Sometimes he sits on them and doesn't feel like it, sometimes I'll get them back a week later. I never know. His sister helps facilitate that for us. When he feels like it, she'll take the work to him and he busts them all out in one day, probably 20 drawings in one sitting. He's always excited to get them done so that he can go thrift store shopping and go eat some enchiladas. Then she'll send them back to me. So I never know when or how or how many or what I'll get back. In this particular case, for some of these brand-new ones that I'll be showing in Wichita, he drew on them but he didn't feel like coloring, so I had to go back and color his iconic frog images and whatever else that he did. He just didn't feel like coloring that day. So I never know what I'm going to get. And that's the fun of it.

So, you get the package in your hand, and is there a moment where you hold off from opening it?

Oh, yes! It's better than any Christmas. I savor the moment every time. There's been four or five of those up until now. I get one or two a year, I'd guess. It's really something to know that since '93 I've wanted to do this, I really look up to him and his work, it's just really exciting. A couple of times I don't even open it that day. I just let it rest and work up to it. It's a lot of fun.

One of the things that's unique about Daniel is that he has struggled through much of his life with mental illness.

Throughout all of his problems, one of the things that's inspiring is that, like me, he is a every-day-make-art artist. He has to do it to get by. Either he's making drawings or he's writing in these hundreds of spirals that he has at his house, all of these lyrics.

Ninety percent of them aren't even songs yet. The other 10 percent are the songs that we all look up to. So he's just a fountain of inspiration.

We've talked about Daniel as an artist but the other side of this is that he's a gifted songwriter.

Oh, yeah.

Is there a song that you feel really got you charged up about his music and you turn to when you think about him as a musician?

There's several. But the one that always rises to the top is "The Story of an Artist." That one really gets me. For him, it's autobiographical. I'm going to tear up just sitting here telling you about it. It really gets me every time. There are several like that but that one, to me, sums up him and his life but also me as an artist and all artists. We can all relate to that.

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Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.