Wilson, S. Clay

Robert Crumb, in his introduction to the book “The Art of S. Clay Wilson”:
“I was never quite the same after meeting Wilson. I studied his portfolio of drawings ... I was being blasted away, dissolved, atomized! There was something very familiar about the drawings, yet something entirely new, never before seen! They were a synthesis, just like he himself was. There was the cartoon element, but that was just one layer. It looked like folk art, like old-time tattoos, like some demented high-school hotrodder’s notebook drawings. The drawings were rough, crazy, lurid, coarse, deeply American, a taint of white-trash degeneracy. Every inch of space was packed solid with action and crazy details. The content was something like I’d never seen before, anywhere, the level of mayhem, violence, dismemberment, naked women, loose body parts, huge, obscene sex organs, a nightmare vision of hell-on-earth never so graphically illustrated in the history of art! Wilson was the strongest, most original artist of my generation that I had yet met. Suddenly my own work seemed insipid, troo cloyingly cute, timid, still constrained by built-in censorship. Here was a young artist drawing in a raw, unsophisticated, vulgar, unschooled style, blatant, unashamed, free of all social restrictions and the aesthetic considerations of the time. ... He was a huge influence on me and on my work. After the breakthrough that Wilson had, somehow, made, I no longer saw any reason to hold back my own depraved id in my work. Why hide it? Why not put it on the paper? ...
It was Wilson’s fault! He’s the one who started it, not me!”

Wilson actually had longevity in his genes, both parents lived to very ripe old ages, so if he had quit drinking he could still be producing great art. Wilson had a 150% personality, he was much larger than life, was very intelligent and could talk about anything. He also had a great memory and would recount with great clarity stories from his life going back many years. It’s a real tragedy what happened to him (although not entirely unexpected).