Leave Home, Meet Strangers, Learn to Draw: An Interview with Basil King by Michael Seth Stewart
Leave Home, Meet Strangers, Learn to Draw: An Interview with Basil King by Michael Seth Stewart
$10.00
Authors: Basil King, Michael Seth Stewart
Editor: Michael Seth Stewart
Series: Lost & Found Mouth to Word
32 pp, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
ISBN: 978-1-958675-03-8
The irascible and brilliant painter and writer Basil King, an eternal kid in his mid-80s, has seen it all. In this conversation “Leave Home, Meet Strangers, Learn to Draw” with his good friend (and erstwhile student) Michael Seth Stewart, editor of the letters and journals of King’s old friend John Wieners, he gives us hair-raising stories, lessons in art history, gossip about dead geniuses, and some of the wisdom he’s accrued over several decades of making art in New York City. Basil “Baz” left his native England as a child during the Second World War and hit the ground running in the United States. He was the enfant terrible of Black Mountain College, then a painter among giants in midcentury New York, with teaching stints here and there. Zooming with Stewart from the Brooklyn brownstone where he’s lived with his wife, the writer Martha Winston King, for decades, Baz opens up about all this and more, in a rollicking and often blistering portrait of the artist as a (perpetually) young man.
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Author and Editor Bios
Basil King was born in London in 1935, immigrated to the USA at age twelve, and began studies at Black Mountain College in 1951. After college and time in San Francisco, New York City, and Montana, where he worked under Peter Voulkos, he ultimately settled in New York City’s Lower East Side—and then Brooklyn. In 1985, following his first return trip to the UK, he began to write seriously and has since published both chapbooks and full-length collections of poetry. His early abstract expressionist works grew into a new approach to art employing fluid forms that combine abstraction, surrealism, and figuration. Now in his 90th year, he lives in Brooklyn and paints and writes daily. Learn more at Basil King’s website www.basilking.net.
Michael Seth Stewart is an English teacher at the University of Alabama. He edited the journals and letters of John Wieners, an outgrowth of his work at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Lost & Found Initiative; these were published, respectively, as Stars Seen in Person (City Lights, 2015) and Yours Presently (University of New Mexico, 2020). He is currently working on translating the work of Brazilian poet Torquato Neto and editing a collection of John Wieners translated into Portuguese.
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