Artist Robert Weaver a man of many stories, many myths
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BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
His voice is low and harsh.
Listen, sweetheart, I'm not interested in doing no f---ing story with you. And I'm sick of all the bullshit and the politics with this show. …
But, Robert, I really was looking forward to this, because I heard what a great artist you are, and I'm no artist but I looked your work up and really like it, and you sound so interesting. …
No. I don't have time for this bullshit.
He hangs up.
The editor suggests she ask one of the paper's photographers to talk to him. They're good friends.
Oh, that's just Weaver, the photographer says. He's freaking out about the show. He's been making everybody around him mad.
The photographer says he'll call Karen Duncan, a local woman who's his patron. She'll get him to behave.
Karen Duncan doesn't seem rich.
She pulls up in an old red BMW and apologizes for being late — she was eating a tomato sandwich from her own garden and they're so good this time of the year, aren't they?
She wears jeans.
Karen and Robert Duncan own Duncan Aviation. They don't do the social scene much, people say, or politics. They have a passion for motorcycles.
And art. Especially Weaver's.
Weaver's friends say Karen Duncan is Weaver's patron and protector and maybe the reason why, at age 70, he's still painting.
And breathing.
They say she's made it so he doesn't have to paint houses anymore. No more climbing ladders to second floors. No more working out of the second-floor studio of the old barn beside a rundown farmhouse near Martell where he lived until a few years ago.
In the winter, he'd warm the barn with a space heater. In the summer, he'd stand before his easel wearing nothing but shorts, rivers of sweat running down his skin.
When his old Chevy pickup broke down, she loaned him her Dodge 4-by-4.
She provided a house and studio in Palmyra.
That's where she's driving now, taking the reporter to Palmyra to get Robert Weaver to do a story.
"I think he's the best we've ever had in the Midwest,” she says. "He's not a jerk. He's a loner. Get to know him, and he's got a heart so big. It's like gold.
"I know it's hard when someone is so rude and uses sensitive language. But it's a real coverup for him.
"And now with things going on with the show — the work of his lifetime — and the documentary, I think he feels like he's being flayed.
"I think he's terrified."
In Palmyra, she pulls the red car into the driveway of a tan bungalow under tall trees. She parks in front of a steel-covered shed.
There's a closed door, painted white.
"This is his studio. I'll go in there first."
There are many Robert Weaver stories. Many myths.
They say he once slashed a painting he did of a woman who wouldn't pose nude. The woman was Lincoln painter Keith Jacobshagen's first wife, Susann.
In "Susann in a Greenhouse," the woman wears a bra and panties, her body showing through.
Jacobshagen remembers Weaver telling him he destroyed it. Maybe painted over it. He can't remember exactly how he said he destroyed it.
But it's missing now.
Maybe in the city dump.
They say he once punched a local TV personality he thought was having a fling with his girlfriend. Saw him through a window there on the couch, went in and just punched him.
Decades ago, they say, he once loved a sweet woman. She left him. Moved away. He followed, cared about her that much.
She wanted to get married. Have kids.
But he couldn't do it.
They say he loves animals and his friends and the women in his life with a passion, but that his life is his art.
They say that he researches his subjects thoroughly and won't paint anything until he understands everything about it.
A few months back, a Union Pacific bigwig came down to see Weaver's most recent painting of an old U.P. engine.
Karen Duncan had invited him, thought the huge painting would be perfect for U.P. to buy for its Omaha headquarters.
You painted that decal crookedly, the bigwig says.
No, Weaver says. I didn't.
Weaver sends him photos of the engine. See? It's this way.
U.P. doesn't buy the painting.
They say when he paints a portrait, the subject doesn't always like the finished work.
Because he paints his subject, wrinkles and all.
They say he remembers friends' birthdays like a computer. And their kids' birthdays. And phone numbers.
They say he can't stand to see anybody cry. Especially a kid.
They say he should get a bumper sticker that says: I Brake for Squirrels.
They say he can walk Yankee Creek looking for arrowheads and spear points and can find them when no one else can — it's as if he feels them.
He'll throw cigars into the creek as a tobacco offering, walk 20 feet and find an unbelievable Scottsbluff point.
Old friend Mike Burdic witnessed that one.
"Here's a good story for you," Burdic says. "The real Bob Weaver for you …
"He was telling me one time, 'Oh, Burd. I was driving down the road one day and I saw a turtle some asshole drove over. So I stopped.’
“‘Was it dead?' I said.
“‘No. Still alive.'
“‘So what'd you do?'
“‘I took it home, Super-Glued the shell where it'd broke, put it in the bathtub a couple weeks until it got better. Then I took it over to the pond.'
"That's the real Robert Weaver. People who don't know him think he's an asshole. He has a difficult time relating to human beings. One reason why — it's because he's had a lot of bad stuff go down with people.
"But if you look at the soul of Robert Weaver, you'll find a very beautiful person."
He didn't want Karen Duncan to know he'd been in prison.
It weighed on him for years, not telling her that he'd robbed a bank.
He was 20. The other guy was older. It was in Missouri.
He spent five years in prison and later got pardoned.
One day on the Duncans' airplane, heading to Santa Fe, Karen brought it up.
Told him she'd known for years.
If anybody doesn't like it and they judge you by that, she told him, then they're not friends of yours.
The prison time is mentioned in the Robert Weaver documentary, part of the retrospective.
Bob Starck filmed it. He's another old friend. He spent three years with Weaver, interviewing him and filming him walking Yankee Creek, visiting his mother's grave, swearing every other sentence.
And painting.
He's happiest when he's painting.
The two are not speaking now, Starck says. Weaver left a nasty voice mail the other day. But still, Starck says, he loves the guy.
Dan Ladely, director of the Mary Riepma Ross Film Theater, kicked him out of his office the other day. But still, he loves the guy.
That's a pattern with Weaver, his friends say.
A few years back, after a trip together to salmon fish in Seattle, Weaver started acting cold to Burdic.
What the hell did I do? Tell me. I'm sorry for whatever it is.
Just coldness.
One day, months later, Burdic went over to show him a rare spear point he'd found in the creek.
Weaver liked the point.
So are you mad at me?
Yes, Weaver says. Remember in Washington when you told me to shut up?
That's how sensitive Weaver is, Burdic says. He still loves the guy, too.
Says Starck: "Weaver's background makes him a really, really interesting character. But his art is what we should really celebrate. Because there's nobody like him around here.
"He's rough on the edges. He offends a lot of people. But his focus on art is unparalleled around the middle part of the country."
The studio smells of turpentine.
Colorful books cram shelves on the west wall. Books on Rembrandt and Georgia O'Keeffe and birds and Vietnam and wolves.
Paint splatters cover the canvas on the floor and the carpet.
The two easels are empty.
Weaver is well over 6 feet tall and thin. Handsome. His sleeves are rolled up. Veins pop from his forearms.
He has wrinkles.
“What's your next project?” Karen asks.
He takes the toothpick out of his mouth and smiles.
“To get the f--- out of Dodge.”
Karen suggests he offer something to drink. He seems grateful for the chance to get away.
There's a rectangular table in the middle of the studio. It has a glass top and blobs of paint the size of fists along the edges.
That's his palette, Karen explains. Everyone loves his palette.
So this is where it begins. With the blobs of paint. And with the long, fat brushes in the jar. And with his hand …
The table is to the left of the easels.
"Is he left-handed?"
"No. Right-handed."
"Then why is this table on the left side?"
Weaver returns. He sits on a stool.
"You've got red in your hair," he says. "Oh-oh."
Karen sits down on a couch near the big bookshelf.
The reporter crosses her legs and opens her notebook.
"You painted them."
"What?"
He points to her toenails, another shade of red.
He's painted Bob Devaney. His mother. His dad.
Lots of paintings of his dad.
Why so many?
He won't say.
He’s painted Mike Burdic. And Norman Geske, former director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery.
His portraits are like psychological studies.
He's painted a World War I ace standing by an airplane. A naked woman on the floor of a greenhouse, near a man in camouflage — himself.
A raven. A bluebird.
A toy case.
A pond.
"I'm looking at one of his paintings hanging at the Sheldon," Burdic says. "And my wife is standing back behind me. 'Come here,' she says. She's about 10 feet away from the painting.
"I start backing up, and all of a sudden it comes into focus — the depth of the water, the three dead trees, leaning over, everything. Like a photo.
“‘My God,’ I said to Weaver. ‘The landscape painting. … How in the hell did you do that?'
“‘It's in my brain,' he said.”
You can't step all the way into Weaver's brain, friends and art experts say. But for clues to the man, just stand before a Weaver piece.
Says George Neubert, former director of the Sheldon who curated the retrospective: “He relates to the struggle, the physicality of the paint. Often, his work is depicting an image we recognize. But it's also about paint, and the beauty of paint. And the ability for paint to express human emotions, human feelings. …"
When he stands before a Weaver piece, Neubert says, he sees the joy and the struggle.
His favorite piece is Weaver's self-portrait.
Up front. In your face.
The national art world doesn't know him.
He's not that well-known, even in Nebraska, except among the people who know art. Among them, he's a living legend.
"What I really like about it is that it’s so absolutely raw, and up front," says Jacobshagen, a friend since their days at the Kansas City Art Institute.
"When you look at a Weaver painting, what you see is exactly what you get. There's no artistic guile involved in it.
"He's very, very honest in the way he makes those paintings."
He has a great affection for his subjects, and it shows.
Geske says Weaver has accomplished something no other Nebraska artist has accomplished — a 50-year retrospective in two museums at once.
“In a sense, these exhibitions have got to be the climax of his career. What comes next? In as much as he’s not interested in being out in the world.
“I told him, ‘Well, you accomplished it all. Now it’s time to relax.’
“But he won’t.”
The problem with Weaver is he doesn't play the game.
He could be rich and famous now, says Ladely. But he doesn't need to be known by the art world.
In the art world, you play the game by behaving with agents and rich people and critics and newspaper reporters.
But this retrospective, his friends say, may finally put him on the national stage.
And maybe that's why he's freaking out.
On one hand, he doesn't care what others think.
But on the other hand, he does care, maybe because he's afraid of failure.
"This is probably going to be my last f----ing interview. I don't like doing it. I don't like doing it."
He says he always wanted a show when he turned 70, that the show covers 50 years.
"Cincuenta."
He says a curator thought he didn't know his own best work and that really made him mad.
It's a good show, he says. But a bit too safe. Some of his best works are his erotic works.
He speaks in fragmented sentences, throwing in Spanish words.
He talks of growing up in small-town Missouri, being farmed out to his grandparents, but says that wasn't so bad because a lot of kids were back then.
He talks about his uncle, a cartoonist. Says that's how he started his own art. Cartoons.
Says he overheard his uncle tell his mother one day: That kid's a genius.
The oldest piece in the show is a cartoon he drew as a child.
"It's a good show. But all the bullshit in between I had to deal with. The political bullshit.
"All the caca del toro out there."
He talks about the woman who was teaching him Spanish. A great woman. She got the flu real bad and died suddenly.
He knew she had the flu.
He looks at Karen Duncan. His face shows pain now.
Why didn't I go knock on her door that night? He says. Maybe I could have saved her.
He talks about another woman, a writer from a newspaper who once called his work "whimsical."
"I said, 'Why do you call my work whimsical? Whimsical means rabbits and flowers.'
"And she said, 'Give me a better word then.' And I said, 'I don't know what the f--- it is.’”
He jumps up and goes over to the table, picks up a big brush and demonstrates his technique.
His right arm moves from color blob to an imaginary canvas and back, crossing over his body.
Why is this table on the left side of the two easels? Wouldn't it be easier for you to have it on the right?
He stops and stands there a moment, thinking.
Then he smiles.
"Guess that's just how my brain works."
In the cold silences, they still love him.
Maybe they see the locomotive. The turtle with a broken shell.
They see the hundreds of pieces from a lifetime of work and know those pieces could only come from a sensitive soul. They stand 10 feet back and the pieces that looked ugly at first glance come into focus.
And the people who love Robert Weaver realize that he needs pain in his life like he needs paint.
So he can turn it into something beautiful.
Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.
John Robert Weaver
Born: Sept. 9, 1935, Stilwell, Kan. Grew up in rural Missouri.
Education: Kansas City Art Institute (B.F.A.), University of Nebraska-Lincoln (M.F.A.).
Personal: Lives and works in Palmyra
Weaver art on display
in Kearney, Lincoln
“John Robert Weaver: American Artist – A Retrospective,” is the Nebraska artist’s first major exhibition in more than 10 years.
The recently opened show, which celebrates the artist’s 70th birthday, is on view both at the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney and at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln through Jan. 22.
The show explores the evolution of Weaver’s art: his paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures on loan from collections and people across the nation.
The oldest work is a cartoon Weaver did as a child.
The show continues through his exploration of abstraction and expressionism and ends with his current realist manner.
According to a MONA press release: “Weaver’s reputation is defined by his most noted works – expressionistic figurative portraits in a modern vernacular style and straightforward depictions of familiar mechanical objects, animals and figures on canvas and print form.
“Working within the Realist tradition, he produces both large-scale paintings and small intimate works on paper depicting subjects from across the cultural spectrum.”
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