These days, I, like many people in these unexpectedly serious and dangerous times, feel a sense of isolation. Somehow, it’s gotten me thinking about oddball people I know a tiny bit but not enough about—I think of them as quirky geniuses.

An inadequately short gallery. Just some that have strayed across my artsy quests and that I’m aware of for their genius and quirkiness to which I’m especially attracted. I’ve had to do some research to help fill in some background. (Note that, despite my great enthusiasm for Abraham Maslow, I don’t think he was “quirky,” I don’t include Picasso–not quirky, just a self-absorbed genius.) My format is to give some faint clues and end the short renditions with the geniuses’ names. It’s all fun and games. And far better than twiddling thumbs.

Because of my lack of universal knowledge (HA!), the current compendium is, I know, inadequate. My list includes too-few musicians and too-few women. My bad! I’d be happy to have suggestions—that describe why your suggested genius was/is quirky.

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Created paintings and individual prints plus books of prints beginning in the late 18th century and to mid-19th century. Reportedly moved from one residence to another about 90 times, supposedly for non-payment of rent. Created a series of woodblock-printed sketchbooks referred to as “Manga,” did two series of prints about Mt. Fuji, Considered by many as the greatest Japanese artist ever. Described himself as “The old man crazy about painting.” Just before dying at age 90 he reportedly said, “If heaven would give me just five more years, I might become a true painter.”

Below, a cropped image from the 3-volume set of books, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, Fuji shown small, upside down in a cup’s liquid. As the mountain here is a mere reflection, an unsubstantial creation, possibly the picture is symbolic of art’s unreality and is a self-portrait expressing Hokusai’s great reverence for Fuji.

HOKUSAI

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Began his adult life as a minister in a neighboring country. Later did oil paintings of the poor peasants who lived there. Began paintings influenced by early Impressionist work. Suffered several mental breakdowns and was hospitalized. His brother did much to help him personally and commercially. Vincent hoped to start an artist group in southern France. Reportedly cut off his ear—but actually only cut a small part of it (Who cares about truth when exaggeration is so much more entertaining?) . Only one of his paintings sold during his lifetime. A quote from Vincent: “Real painters do not paint things as they are…they paint them as they themselves feel them to be.” Apparently, with the onset of another mental breakdown, shot himself in a sun-filled field and died.

VINCENT VAN GOGH

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Wrote poems and plays about his native country and town. Traveled his land with a mobile theater group, performing for the people. Associated with some of the foremost creative artists of his day, including Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, with whom, it’s said, he had affairs. Dali and Bunuel reportedly made the experimental film Un Chien Andalou mocking him. (Un Chien Andalou in English=The Andalusian Dog.) At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he stayed with a good friend in his home town, Granada, Spain, thinking it safe for him, but was taken by a rebel group and shot. Buried in an unknown grave.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

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Creator of some of the most innovative literature of the early 20^th century. As a child was sexually molested by siblings of both sexes. Throughout her life had bouts of depression/psychosis.

Married Leonard Woolf and they created a self-sustaining publishing house that published her work and that of other major literary artists. Created strange, modernist written works before it became fashionable to do so. Wrote volumes of diaries about her life and her work, edited and published after her death by her husband (who had supported her emotionally and intellectually and promoted her works after her death). One condensed volume: A Writer’s Diary, constitutes the best and most fascinating author’s description of life and creative process that I know of:

What it wants is presumably unity; but it is I think rather good (I am talking to myself over the fire about The Waves.) Suppose I could run all the scenes together more?—by rhythm chiefly. So as to avoid those cuts; so as to make the blood run like a torrent from end to end—I don’t want the waste that the breaks give; I want to avoid chapters; that indeed is my achievement, if any, here: a saturated unchopped completeness; changes of scene, of mind of person, done without spilling a drop. Now if it could be worked over with heat and currency, that’s all it wants. And I am getting my blood up (temp. 99). But all the same I went into Lewes and the Keynes came to tea; and having got astride my saddle the whole world falls into shape; it is this writing that gives me my proportions.

With the world—including one of her homes with the published books bombed out by Nazi planes at the beginning of World War II, and beginning another psychotic episode, the last words in her A Writer’s Diary, in 1941, three days before she filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked to her death in a nearby river, she wrote:

Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours flying. This I see verges on introspection; but doesn’t quite fall in. Suppose I bought a ticket to the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.

April 12, 1937

VIRGINIA WOOLF

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Twentieth-century artist/anti-artist, painted a “nude” which was rejected or decried by major art expositions. He exhibited many “found objects” as “art,” including a urinal signed R. Mutt.

According to–https://www.theartstory.org/artist/duchamp-marcel :

“A taste for jokes, tongue-in-cheek wit and subversive humor, rife with sexual innuendos, characterizes Duchamp’s work and makes for much of its enjoyment. He fashioned puns out of everyday expressions which he conveyed through visual means. The linguistic dimension of his work in particular paved the way for Conceptual art.”

He was thought to have given up art for decades, devoting himself only to playing chess. But, in secret, for more than 20 years, he was developing a strange, three-dimensional construction, “Etant donnes” that can only be viewed by one person at a time looking through small peepholes at a landscape background and, in the foreground, a casting of part of a woman’s naked body. He wrote an elaborate user manual for disassembling and reassembling the piece, which now resides, assembled, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art where, through the peepholes, I have peeked.

MARCEL DUCHAMP

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He influenced a new generation of performers and listeners through his illuminating piano interpretations of the music of a variety of composers, including his 1956 recording of J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” His playing was fast, precise, cold, and elegant.

He found a particular piano that responded to his style, and the seat his father made for him he took with him to use for all his concerts—if fitted him just right. He stopped public performing in April, 1964—he disliked public performances and felt that recording in a studio, with all its technical possibilities was preferable:

 “I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

In 1967, he created his first “contrapuntal radio documentary,” The Idea of North, an innovative tapestry of speaking voices, music, and sound effects that drew on principles from documentary, drama, music, and film. He explored in it the nature of solitude. His first biographer, Geoffrey Payzant, argued that these were “hybrids of music, drama, and several other strains, including essay, journalism, anthropology, ethics, social commentary, [and] contemporary history.”

He died in October, 1982, just after his 50^th birthday.

“My idea of happiness is spending 250 days a year

in a recording studio.”

GLENN GOULD

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Rhodes Scholar. Projects great joy and intelligent humanism in her broadcast work, sometimes uses a situation we’re familiar with to metaphorically explain a difficult current issue. Pursues ideas with logic and organized ideas. Out-of-the-closet lesbian. She, in her spare time—it seems so strange—pursues fly fishing.

I am enamored of her joyous, intelligent persona.

RACHEL MADDOW

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Co-originator of Fluxus art movement, created happenings, quirky books he and others wrote. Though he lived as a starving artist, with inherited money he established his Something Else Press, a publishing house devoted to the unexpected and quirky. Married a woman poet—they had twin daughters, they divorced and later remarried. Loved a guy named Eugene (no relation to me). After performing a piece consisting of screaming as loud as he could for as long as he could, that evening he died of a heart attack.

DICK HIGGINS

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What an extraordinary experience for those who only knew of his “foreign man” role in Taxi to see him turn himself from the doofus foreign persona into Elvis Presley and do such a good rendition that Elvis himself regarded it as the best of all imitations! Having turned foreign man into Elvis, amazed audiences applauded. He thereupon  transformed back into his first level created persona, foreign man bowing, saying, “Dank you veddy much!”

His foreign man persona got him the major Taxi role which made him well-known and rich–but he quickly came to hate it–he was forced to copy his same (scripted?) role month after month–he wanted to do new creative stuff.

In stand-alone performances he also created other quirky comedic bits, some masterful, some not so. Bio-pic MAN ON THE MOON gives some sense of his bizarre genius, as do the couple of biographies of him.

ANDY KAUFMAN

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ʺAutism [neural atypical] is part of who I am.” When young she was considered weird–teased and bullied in high school. ʺI had people in my life who didn’t give up on me: my mother, my aunt, my science teacher.”

When Allison and I met her at a small gathering, we asked how we could help our autistic son when he became obsessed with something—she said we should help broaden out his obsessions into related fields.

She is the author of over a dozen books. She thinks in pictures and thus solves problems in an unexpected way. Having a special empathy toward animals, and finding that they were often difficult to control on the way to the slaughterhouse, she designed special facilities for humane slaughter. These designs are used by about 1/3 of the U. S. cattle industry.

DR.TEMPLE GRANDIN

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Comic who, manipulating early TV technology with camera tricks, turned our world sideways and upside down, creatively messing with our minds. Sometimes he just amused us with the unexpected–such a being part of a gorilla musical group called “The Nairobi Trio.” I can’t adequately describe this–you gotta see/hear it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tFyBLo71U).

In one scene his doofus character Eugene (no relation) is seated in a room. He removes his lunch from a brown paper bag and puts it on the table in front of him. He pours milk toward a glass and it goes way beyond its target, seeming to defy gravity’s logic. He puts a handful of grapes (?) on the table and they go bouncing across it and off onto the floor. What is happening to the law of gravity?! He’d had the entire set including TV camera constructed on an angle so that on-screen he and the set appeared upright—but weren’t. The effect for the viewer was gravity-defying.

ERNIE KOVACS

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Enamored of Jean Shepherd’s genius, she schemed and successfully stole him from his wife, Miss Chicago of 1948, the actress, Lois Nettleton. She began as his gofer and eventually became his radio and performance producer. He sometimes treated her badly, even on live radio. Despite his self-absorbed mistreatment of her, she stuck with him, devoting to him her creative mind, body, and soul. She mostly abandoned her own dreams of creative work, except for writing a novel, The Show Gypsies, focused on her former profession as a horse-show-jumper. She dedicated the book:

For Jean Shepherd…this fool’s rainbow.

As if the dedication was not enough to express her idealistic dedication to Shepherd, I believe the book’s entire story is a metaphor for the uneasy relationship she had with him. The final scene between the novel’s loving couple:

Diane squeezed his hand. “Oh come on,” she said, “since when have I been a cop-out? Of course I’ll go with you. Only I’ll expect you to make an honest woman out of me.”

He smiled and put his arm around her shoulders. “Yeah, I’ll get around to that one of these days.”

As they left the stabling area, a sleepy saddlebred came up to its door and pushed an inquiring nose in their direction. Diane absently patted its neck. As they stood, she could hear the faint sounds of a radio from the stall where the grooms were already beginning to measure out the morning’s feed. The sound followed them as they walked along the echoing hallway to the elevator.

From the rocking of the cradle to the rolling of the hearse

the goin’ up was worth the comin’ down.

As he ended his radio career 15 years after they’d begun their affair (two years after her book was published), he made an honest woman out of her. They remained married for 20 years until her death in 1998. Not being able to live without her, he died the next year.

The full photo, un-cropped, does not show her

doing her own creative writing—as the caption to it indicates,

she is taking Shepherd’s “dictation.”

LEIGH BROWN

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He was a wild and crazy guy. Best known for his written/illustrated children’s books, he had spent years touring the world and writing cartoon-illustrated, humorous stories for Playboy. Most people are not aware of his bawdy songs, and are unaware that he wrote the Johnny Cash hit, “A Boy Named Sue.” Nor that the song is a loving poke in the ribs at his best friend, Jean Shepherd, who often complained on his radio broadcasts and privately about having “a girl’s name.”

Dedicated to living every moment of life to the fullest and freest, Shel drew fast and furiously, refusing to correct errors. For a theater piece assembled of Jean Shepherd’s friends, “LOOK CHARLIE,” he drew the entire program, including descriptive comments of the participants, only to be told he’d have redo the cover because he’d left a letter out of CHARLIE. Instead, he fixed it in his own quirky way.

SHEL SILVERSTEIN

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