‘He was treated like a holy figure’: why Captain Beefheart quit music for the easel

He was a musical maverick whose Trout Mask Replica still sticks out on best-of lists, but when he gave up rock to paint, his art was dismissed as doodles. Now his remarkable work is getting its due

Located on a street off London’s Park Lane the Michael Werner Gallery is the epitome of moneyed art world chic: situated in a Georgian townhouse, so discreet a passerby would never know it was there. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to find the late Don Van Vliet’s paintings in these surroundings – Michael Werner has been his gallerist ever since the early 80s, when Van Vliet stopped calling himself Captain Beefheart and gave up music entirely to devote himself to visual art – and yet it is. The paintings in his first London exhibition for decades feel somehow at odds with their surroundings.

Partly this is because they’re visibly a product of the wilds of California (for a time, Van Vliet lived and worked in the Mojave desert). Representations of wild animals and cacti abound, his paintings seem increasingly overwhelmed by their surroundings: the later works are filled with white space, as if blanched out by blinding sunlight. It’s partly because they seem so frenetic and untutored: wild brushstrokes, thick impastos, paint applied to canvas direct from the tube. But it’s mostly because – name change or not – they’re very obviously the work of Captain Beefheart, one of the truly legendary figures of 60s and 70s rock.