Mid Century -- The Bird and the Mouse

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Stan Fullerton
Mid Century -- The Bird and the Mouse
1964

About the Item

Wonderful mid century painting of the Mouse on the bird with a treat to get the fat bird to go where the mouse wants by Stan Fullerton, (American, 1935 - 2018). Signed and dated "S. Fullerton - 64" lower left. Displayed in a silver frame. Image 21"H x 21"W. Biography by Mark Marinovich; Born in Portland, Oregon on January 19, 1935. After a childhood spent in Oregon and Michigan, he moved to the San Francisco Bay area. Artist Stan Fullerton was a Bay Area artist and iconoclast whose colorful expressionist paintings frequently targeted favorite foils including religious and political authorities. Fullerton resided in North Beach district of San Francisco following his service during the Korean War. He moved throughout the Bay Area and eventually met and married Gail Putney Fullerton in Santa Cruz in the mid-1960s. They relocated to Oregon in the 1990s. Fullerton was widely known in Bay Area cultural circles. According to journalist and former "Merry Prankster" Lee Quarnstrom, who accompanied author Ken Kesey on psychedelic adventures and whose name appears in the non-fiction book, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," by Tom Wolfe, Fullerton, of Native American origins, inspired both the stoic American Indian character, “Chief” Bromden, and recidivist criminal, Randle McMurphy, in Kesey's novel, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." (Actor Jack Nicholson portrayed McMurphy in the film version.) Quarnstrom told friends in the Santa Cruz area that he related Fullerton's escapades to Kesey, who incorporated them in his story. It is not known if Fullerton and Kesey ever met. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fullerton resided in San Francisco. He was a close friend of author Richard Brautigan and painted Brautigan's daughter Ianthe's bedroom with life-size animals. In 1975, Brautigan's novel, "Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery," was published. According to Wikipedia, "The title character is a paper maché bird that shares the front room of a San Francisco apartment with a collection of bowling trophies...Richard Brautigan got the name Willard in the novel from his friend Stanley Fullerton's paper maché bird named Willard and, in fact, a bird is on the front cover of the novel." In his novel, Brautigan described Fullerton's fanciful creation: "Willard was a papier-mache bird about three feet tall with long black legs and a partially black body covered with strange red, white, and blue design like nothing you've ever seen before, and Willard had an exotic beak like a stork." Fullerton gave the paper-mache sculpture to Brautigan cohort Price Dunn, who was the inspiration for the title character of Lee Mellon in Brautigan's 1964 novel, "A Confederate General from Big Sur." Dunn named the stork "Willard," and for his friends' amusement invented fantastical stories about Willard's life and times. Brautigan encountered Willard for the first time in 1967 and was smitten both with the sculpture and its elaborate biography. Brautigan invited Willard to move into his San Francisco home and soon the stork became a fixture in Brautigan's life and imagination. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, author Curt Gentry, actor Terry McGovern, and others also contributed to Willard lore. Brautigan never suspected that Willard was Fullerton's secret "satire" of the author. "[In] his walk and carriage in early days," Fullerton said, "[Richard] resembled nothing closer than a white stork." William Hjortsberg, author of the Brautigan biography, "Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan," writes that "many of [Fullerton's] bird portraits had bull's-eye targets painted, in Fullerton's words, 'on some portion of their anatomy, something to denote the behavior of the person thus parodied and not dissimilar to the basic behavior of birds.'" According to Hjortsberg, Fullerton met Brautigan in San Francisco in 1959. Hjortsberg writes that shortly after Brautigan's daughter Ianthe was born in 1960, Fullerton painted colorful "life-sized animals" to enliven the walls of what Fullerton described as her "small and ugly" bedroom -- "colorful long-necked giraffes, droll fat frogs, and various other gaudy amphibians, cavorting about the walls like illustrations from a giant children's book." Fullerton was a prolific painter, but he never enjoyed significant commercial success, of which Fullerton was wary. In an interview that appeared in the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1984, he said: "I think anybody who sticks their head up out of the sand to become a figurehead is no longer an artist."

Creator:
Stan Fullerton (1935, American)
Creation Year:
1964
Dimensions:
Height: 22 in (55.88 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
Medium:
Canvas,Oil
Movement & Style:
Abstract Expressionist
Period:
1960-1969
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Soquel, CA
Reference Number:
Seller: JT-R34041stDibs: LU5421625383