Art for Your Sake: This week, Binky Schwartze, the blind sign painter...
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2003
The Lost Art of Finding Lost Art
We, here at Irritating Punk Rottisserie, Your Froodle Ich Thine Arabesque, are as fascinated with Art as the next person, who happens to be be his wife and she wishes we'd eat at our own homes occasionally...
This particular profile of a recently-deceased and rediscovered artist is particularly close to some of our hearts because the fellow in question, though legally blind, was, in his younger days, quite a tattoo artist. He did it by touch, with the aid of a small cobbler's tack hammer to raise the appropriate bumps,
and what remained of his light sensitivity, so most of his work was in black and blue... which puts him on a par with the finest of the Shanghai ink artists who used to hang around Lady Jessica's Bar and Grill in East New Delhi, during the great days of the Phoney Raj, back in....
Ah, never mind, it was before your time and during one of those long weekends that seemed to go through one's pay packet in a couple of drunken, stinking....
And forget I said that, too.
Any way, here is our resident Art critic, his wife, Mrs. Emelia Erlenmeyer, with her profile of the artist who probably didn't know how good he was: the Rev. Binky Schwartze!
Mrs. Erlenmeyer:
The Reverend Binky Schwartze was a remarkable man, about whom much was said during his life.
Oddly, since his death in 1960, very little has been heard from him.
His art has been popping up all over the place, as buildings are burnt, torn down, fall down from faulty council bidding practices and are parted out by collectors of vintage drywall and Labour-era aluminium wiring....
A major inhibition of his art and a catalogue of same, will be traveling in a rented caravan queaueue for the next ten years, funded by the Blind Piano Tuner's Benevolent and Burial Association, who are big fans and often recipients of the Rev. Schwartze's Braille Tattoos.
The Reverend Binky Schwartze was the product of a working class background in East Kenya Acres, North Nether Wallop, New Zealand. His father was a calliope repairman for the Royal Surgical Zooligical Society and Medieval Round Glee Club.
His mother was a midwife to the St. Pertwee's Home for Wed Mothers and Indigent Gentry.
Binky learned his skills as a bully at the Queen's Own Military Home for Left and Unclaimed Children With Parents Of At Least Two Races That Cannot Be Immediately Discerned By A Normally Sighted White Person, punching and kicking, pinching and biting his way to the top of the hill in a rough and tumble atmosphere where cast was determined by color and since Binky was almost completely blind, he hated everyone 'cause they were always in his way, especially those pesky masonry walls and double-bricked corners...
When he was thirteen, he was thoroughly thrashed by a new child at the school, a fifteen year old totally blind girl who was also partially deaf. Her name was Refrilia Porf, and seven years later she was to marry him in a double ring ceremony in the bell tower of the Royal College of Bell Ringers in East Peal, Ringerton, Pennsylvania, although we are not quite certain at this late date that the Reverend was ever made aware of the purpose of the ceremony or the events that followed, as he kept asking her, for the next fifteen years before she died in a bizarre mixing bowl incident on live TV, why she kept following him around and messing with his sheets...
He became a tattoo artist and a sign painter during a mix-up in his o-level results. Despite all attempts to correct this, his parents were informed that the boy would take instruction or find himself working in a steel mill driving a forklift somewhere.
Hooray for the Council of Esteemed Occupational Educators. Nothing like dealing with experts, is it?
Anyway,
seek out the Inhibition of his Art and the Catalogue of same when it rolls into your neighborhood. He truly is an uncelebrated and unsung fellow who is belated receiving his due, and we hope he knows it.
