No, this isn’t a shocking tell-all. Robert Lee Blust was not literally the most famous (or infamous?) anonymous artist of the modern era.
But he was a talented artist who turned pretty much anything and everything into art, in unconventional ways. And his art took forms that would become famous in the hands of better-known practitioners.
On one level, this wasn’t a surprise. He had an artistic temperament, and started his career in an artistic profession: architecture. He took reels and reels of Super 8 movies of us growing up, a treasure trove I’m still sorting through. The same with photos; I still have the sandblasted Konica camera he took to the beach for years. Even his angular handwriting was an artist’s interpretation of the classic architect’s script.
Still, I’m not sure how many people knew about his art, or how prodigious his output was. If you ever got anything in the mail from him, you knew it. The postcards and envelopes would be covered with wildly colorful graphics.
He bought a giant office copier — back when they were the size of a car engine — at a flea market and used it to make black and white collages, images that would predate artists like Banksy by many years. He would make physical collages by cutting up photos, cards, stamps — whatever was at hand.
Many of those collages would be what we would call “meme graphics” today. Photos with weird and hilarious captions to entertain or make a point. But instead of making them with Canva, he made them with cardboard and photos and glue.
He was also an absurdist. Big time. He painted “Viva Charo!” in giant letters on the underside of the canoe he kept in the side yard of our house growing up.
Once he received a coupon in the mail for a free glamour shot at the Sears Portrait Studio. Bob being Bob, he decided to bring along his favorite fish oven mitt (!). When he asked to include the oven mitt in the photo, I imagine the poor overworked Sears photographer just sighing with resignation. The result was, in my estimation, epic.
My father was not a writer, at least in the traditional sense. But he filled many journals with pages of reflections and notes. Much of it would be meaningful only to him. But going through them again recently, I found a page in my father’s yearly journal on my mother’s birthday — 10 years after they separated.
(No, I’m not crying. You’re crying!)
One of my favorites of my father’s artistic endeavors were the Christmas cards he designed for the family each year. Each was a different interpretation of a family portrait with a holiday theme. Sometimes the portraits were photos, and sometimes drawings. I see his artistic vision so vividly in these designs.
It was so clear that to my father, art was life, and vice versa.
I’m sad to think of the works of his we won’t get a chance to see. And technology! My father was always an early adopter; he had one of the first consumer calculators, a now laughably chunky beige brick with dim red LEDs for a display. I fire up Procreate on my iPad, touch the Apple Pencil to the screen, and think, “My father would have absolutely loved this.”
Although I am nowhere near as multi-talented as my father was, especially in art, I believe I inherited from him a sense of the importance of good design, of surprise and humor, of how anything can be made just a little more interesting with careful thought and attention.
I can’t think of a better legacy.