Arts/Entertainment
University Daily Kansan / Thursday, October 22, 1987
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Elizabeth Layton, a 77-year-old artist from Wellsville, takes a moment to ponder. Her drawings are often humorous, but many carry serious political messages. Leyton took a drawing class 10 years ago as therapy for a depression and later became quite famous. Her drawings have been exhibited in art galleries across the United States, and she has received attention from national media, including Life and People Magazine.
Story by Brian Baresch Photos by L.A. Rauch
Above: Layton drew "Hunger" or "The Trickle Down Theory" in 1985. Right: Layton sits in the room where she draws. Everything hanging on her walls was given to her and, according to Layton, reflects what people think she is, or what she should be.
Artist pours pure feeling into honest self-portraits
he county road south to Wellsville is gloriously awaiting winter as the trees show how much color they can produce late in the year. In town, two small maple trees the color of sunset adorn the lawn of Elizabeth
whose drawings have intrigued and frequently disturbed nearly everyone who has looked at them.
Inside, the Layton house is neat and orderly. Photos and drawings line the walls of all the rooms, upstairs and downstairs, but few are Layton's creations. Rather, traditional family photos of children and grandchildren, crayon drawings from young acquaintances and photos of Layton and her second husband, Glenn, take up the walls.
Nothing about Layton or her surroundings hints that she fell into a deep depression 10 years ago, that she took an art class to pull herself out of it, and that since then she has produced more than 700 self-portraits, many of which have been exhibited in galleries across the United States and in two traveling exhibitions.
"No art looks like this," said Don Lambert, a Topeka graduate student and her promoter and friend. He first noticed her art in 1977.
“It’s pure, it’s honest and it comes from deep within her,” he said. “She’s not concerned with art history.
"She draws feelings, that's all, pure and simple, and we're not used to seeing that in art, pure feeling."
Drawing cured depression
A long depression, started by Layton's divorce in 1957, reached bottom in 1976 with the death of her youngest son. After that tragedy, she took an art class at Ottawa University to take her mind off her condition, and was soon drawing 12 to 14 hours a day. Her drawings, reflecting her troubled mind, immediately got the attention of her teacher and, soon after, Lambert, who started trying to convince art galleries to exhibit her work.
Even though she came out of her depression within a year of starting to draw, Layton didn't put down her pencils. "I still need to draw," she said. And she keeps at it, though only for a few hours a day.
The class, where she was the only student older than 22, taught her the contour method of not looking at the paper while drawing. She used colored pencils and sometimes cravots in her work.
Layton's art style is honest, sometimes brutally so. She meticulously draws every wrinkle and every eye spot on her face and hands. Her occasional nudes are almost embarrassingly exact; one shows her looking down her chest. She has very short hair, rounded by plans for various diets. She has no illusions; she celebrates her age and life in her drawings.
"She certainly doesn't think old," Lambert said. "She savs the happiest time of her life is right now."
Art critic Kay Larson wrote in New York Magazine in 1983, "Considering her background, I am tempted to call Lavton a genius."
A showing of the sometimes troubled, frequently political, always powerful drawings at the Phoenix Art Museum provoked such an enthusiastic reaction that the museum asked to add four or four times, Jim Ballinger, museum director, said.
Three of Layton's drawings are on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., including one she drew specially for the museum's open house. The museum's first major exhibition was a Layton one-woman show
The KU Museum of Anthropology has two of her drawings on permanent display. The Spencer Museum of Art has one, which it displays infrequently because the colored pencils fade easily.
Although her art has also appeared in exhibits in New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia, Layton doesn't act like a successful artist. She refuses to sell her works. She keeps her studio closed so she wants to, and leaves the promotion to Lambert.
Visitors to her home find themselves immersed in friendly chitchat; her grandmotherly wisdom is infectiously charming, and she laughs easily. "Tell me about yourself," she often says to new acquaintances.
She demonstrates social conscience
Lambert said, "She's very bright and has always had an acute social conscience." Many of Layton's drawings demonstrate that conscience, tackling women's issues, emotional punishment, and addressing hunger and euthanasia.
In one drawing, Lyaton is Eve, being chased by Adam carrying a snake and an apple.
"Women have had the blame all through the ages for everything," she said. "You know that's not right. Now a woman would not listen to a snake, she'd run, wouldn't she?"
In a drawing inspired by the concerts for victims of starvation in Africa, Layton is sitting down to a large meal as children starve underneath the table. U.S. soldiers, too, live on ketchup trickling down from the table.
Layton gets most of her ideas for political drawings from reading the local newspaper every day and from reading magazines such as The Progressive, a monthly of socialist and activist politics.
"It has a universality that I need to address in the pictures," she said. She added that she had to sort out the broonaganda from the substantial articles.
"Now don't go writing that I'm a big reader," she said.
"Sometimes I can't do much more than read the headlines."
Even though she has lost sight in one eye, with the darkened lens on her glasses lending a slightly sinister touch to her beaming face. Lylon hasn't slowed down.
Her recent work is full of celebration of age and of life. One drawing shows her dancing near the gate between this life and the next; the gateway itself is death. Rather than being afraid of death, Lyaton said, she has accepted its inevitability. "But I'm not going to sit around waiting," she added.
Up in her second-floor studio, she once spent those 12 to 14 hours a day at the drawing board, Layton showed some of her recent drawings. One is a comical portrait of herself scolding Glenn at the dinner table: “You don’t, you go bald.” Another has her chiding him for munching on Twinkies. “Eat that sugar, your teeth will rot.”
"I've decided I'm going to make a show of silly ones," she chuckled.
Layton also has donated drawings to charities, suen the Meminger Foundation and the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association in Topek. She drew a 10-color lithograph, "Cinderella," which was reproduced and sold to benefit the Lawrence Arts Center, Ninth and Vermont streets.
But it hasn't always been this easy, and the drawings haven't always been as optimistic. Her work from the period when she still was emerging from her depression with the anxieties of aging and the traumas of depression
In one early drawing, she is crouched in the bedroom closet that was her hideaway during the depths of her depression. Another shows her, as old as in real life, nursing a baby who represents her deceased son.
"No matter how old your child is when it dies," she told a biographer. "you teed to think of it as a baby."
Attention was inevitable
As she was starting to come out of her depression, Lambert, then a reporter at the Ottawa Herald, noticed her drawings at an exhibit of the art class' work.
"I saw these strange drawings at Ottawa University of an old woman with big green eyes," he said. "I thought she was doing something."
Lambert then met Lyton and started trying to interest art galleries in the primitive-looking drawings. He hung them in the Ottawa public library, but couldn't get anyone interested for several years.
Layton's first public recognition came in 1880, when her drawing 'Skipping Down Christo's Walkway' placed first of 600 entries at the Mid-Four Annual Juried Show at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo. Soon her art was on display in New York and Washington, D.C.
"When you are as good as she is and have such a clear vision, attention is inevitable," said Craig Stubler, director of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Gallery of the University's forebusty autumn displays and produces worth looking at."
The UMKC gallery was one of the first to show Layton's works, also in 1980.
Layton still draws self-portraits, many of them including her husband. Smiling in the pictures used to be
"When you get practice you can smile a lot easier," she said. "I can smile much easier now then I did when I started."
'Withnail and I' depart 1969 London filth for country living
By BRIAN BARESCH
Staff writer
The title characters in Bruce Robinson's comedy "Withnail and I" are out-of-work actors living in the mid-20th century and decline of post empire 1989 London
Withnail, Richard E. Grant, is a sardonic, wild-eyed con man who sneers at the jobs he offered; he sneers at the decay around him, in that childlike insouciance that most of us outgrew but that engages our attention. He's convincing and funny, and his shitty energy keeps the movie
"T," Withnail's chum played by Paul McGann, seems to resent his roommate's constant ridiculation, but he won't leave because Wainail is so enthralling. The two finally become fed up with the mess they're living in and depart for a country house in Nassau, where he encounters Richard Griffiths. The comic lines come more slowly then, but the film doesn't lose its touch.
going.
In the country, the inept pair find themselves at odds with nature, the neighbors and each other. A neighbor's delivery of a live chicken no dinner, instead of the expected dead one, momentarily shocks them into action. We use their scheme for roasting it is ludicrous.
The unexpected visit of Witmail's uncle adds to the confusion. He brings with him money and food, to which he asks, "Do you have a cue from a mischievous Witmail?"
con, puts a move on "1." who then
looks around and out from an uncomfortable corner.
Bruce Robinson, who also wrote the screenplay, is making his first try at directing with this film. He doesn't show us the Great Britain of the tourist brochures; this is the gritty, dirty London, without any gloss, that Robinson grew up in. We don't wonder that Withnail and "I" want to get out, we wonder, instead, why they stayed so long, and why they were glad to return.
Robinson makes effective use of minor characters, such as the drug dealer who seems to share the apartment in London with the two heroes. He doesn't really live there; he's just part of the flat's indigestion dirt. A poacher in the country village carries his catch of eels hidden in his pants and threatening points one at Withnail when provoked.
But it's Withnail who carries the
day, even at the end when "I" has to leave him, having outgrown his antics. Withnail obstinately refuses to adjust to the world around him, and finally suffers for it. His anties can't carry him all the way through life; but he carries the movie, enjoyably.
"Withnail and I" is showing at 5:30, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. today and 6:42, 10:42, 16:42, 642 Massachusetts St. and 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.