Vibrant Spirits: The Art of Derek Webster

By Marilyn Houlberg
The Outsider, Volume 8/ issue 3/ spring 2004

Lyrical, frightening, otherworldly, joyful, and dark. The work of Derek Webster seems to emanate from a deep place peopled by sublime yet sometimes ferocious screaming spirits. Eyes swooning upwards express an intensity, whether they are the eyes of dogs, birds, or humanoids emerging from joints of twisted limb, popping out from unexpected places. Some of his life-sized figures wear sunglasses with eyes peeping over the rims.

How to describe the world of Derek Webster is a challenge. Some of the labels – “self-taught,” “outsider,” “folk artist” seem so limited in conveying the richness of his work. I prefer to simply think of Derek as someone who creates his art and through that act invites us into his special world. Thus: Derek Webster, Artist.

The art with which he decorates the outside of his house, overflows into his garden. Dramatic figures reminiscent of lightning bolts cover the front and side of his corner house. He says his house attracts a lot of attention and even causes traffic jams. “I love making my art. I always have to be busy making my art. I just can’t sit still. My second favorite thing is working in my garden. I put a lot of my art in my garden. And the third thing I love is fishing.” His art ties in with his fishing because he feels obsessed to clean up all the mess other fishermen leave behind before he sits down for a session of fishing. He takes home the bottles, bottle caps, cans, and other detritus and uses them in his art. “Remember, I used to be a janitor,” he comments. “I make art out of junk. I think they call that recycling now.”

Rabbits live in his garden even though he’s located only minutes from downtown Chicago. He enjoys when strangers stop to compliment him on his house and his garden. His work joins the ranks of many self-taught artists who create environments that play on the fuzzy border between art and garden, nature and culture.

A Trip to Derek’s House
It was in 1978 that Derek and his family moved to 97th and Lowe, located on the south side of Chicago, just off the Dan Ryan Expressway. He marks that year as the beginning of his artmaking.

Heading south from the Chicago Loop via the Dan Ryan Expressway and exiting at 95th street leads to an area of middle-class bungalows with neat lawns and gardens, some with artificial Astroturf on the stairs and porches. Derek’s house stands out brilliantly with all sorts of sculptures intertwines with bushes, flowers, whirligigs, and bottle trees. Upon entering the front door, his art is everywhere, framing doorways and lining the stairs to the second floor. A pink sofa with glistening clear vinyl slipcovers and a big screen TV dominate the living room, except for all the life-sized figures crowded everywhere as if they are having a family reunion. On the way downstairs to what Derek terms his “museum,” the staircase is lined with reliefs. Dogs, huge birds, dancing people, fancy ladies, monster men, and the rest of his cast of characters densely inhabit Derek’s museum. Visitors have to snake their way through the labyrinth of the crowds of figures.

The Cosmic Cockpit
The last stop on his interior tour involves trying to squeeze into the studio where he creates his work. It is a space about 6 x 6 feet, right next to the furnace. He has his radio in here and often cranks up the ‘Oldies but Goodies’ station. He currently listens to V103.5. Derek works on groups of figures simultaneously, while sitting on a kitchen chair, surrounded by cans of bright paint, glue, putty, and shoes. High-heeled as well as gym shoes become the shoulders of many figures. When he sits down to work, in the midst of all this, he truly appears to be ensconced in his “cosmic cockpit,” busily preparing to spin his creations out over every part of the United States. He notes with a shy smile, “You know, I never knew I was an artist until people started telling me that I was.”

Webster is a master of assemblage and embellishment. Figures incorporate a range of materials: bird’s-nest wings, red painted nails made from pistachio nut shells, junk jewelry, bangles, flattened tin cans, old hand bags, bottle caps, and broken light bulbs give energy to his “Fancy Ladies.” His basic material is wood, whether in the form of sawed planks or organic tree trunks. Derek attributes his interest in wood back to his birthplace in the Honduras in 1934 and to his youth spent in Belize. For about ten years he worked on freighters as a quartermaster in the Caribbean: Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica. Other ports of call include Europe (Portugal), South America (Venezuela, Argentina) and several African cities, such as Liberia. Ironically, Derek’s African ancestors came to the Caribbean and Central America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and he completed the full circle back to his ancestral African homeland in the twentieth century an then back again westward across the Atlantic ocean for a second time.

Echoes of Africa
Elements of Derek Webster’s work are echoes of Africa. He collects and incorporates smooth river rocks in some of his pieces. He honors their inner spirits. In another form of animism, he responds to the living spirits of trees. He considers his sculptures to be living beings. “My ideas come from the materials I use. I find the wood and it speaks to me.”

One day we were down in the basement museum, which doubles as his show room. He wanted to show me several older pieces that he had stored under the staircase, but he was having trouble finding them, so he called out “Come here, come here!” I went over to his side and said, “Here I am.” He responded, “No, I wasn’t calling you, I was calling them.”

In another example, when he sells certain pieces, such as those from his “Fancy Ladies” series, he gives them a good-bye hug and kiss. When he sold a sculpture of one of his now-deceased dogs, he also kissed the dog goodbye.

Whenever Derek sells a lot of his work, he says he misses all of his friends and needs to work fast to create more of his family and friends. It bothers him when his museum is empty. He feels lonely. Some of his figures have distinct personalities. One wall piece requires him to put Levi shorts on the figure “because he was a very rude boy.” In a 1985 interview, Derek said about his pieces, “Sometimes they take a real talking to before they can be controlled.”

Many of his characters are intended to draw the viewer in. He loves faces popping out from unexpected places and wants the faces looking at you from every direction as you encircle the art. He is particularly proud of his idea of painting his cutout standing figures on both sides as another way of “tricking” the viewer.

Derek is now an accomplished artist, but it all started back in 1978 with a garden, a fence, and a white toy poodle with red fingernail polish.

“We had a poodle dog. I wanted to put a garden in the back but I knew that my poodle would go running in there and tear my garden up. So I tried to stop the poodle from running in there. I wanted to build a fence of my own, just my ideas, but I don’t know how to put a fence. But I think about it and I go to bed and I can’t sleep, I have headaches thinking about what I want to do. When I was a janitor, I worked nights and would get home at 2:30 in the morning. One night I went to sleep and I dreamt about this fence. I got up at 3:30 in the morning and I came out here and looked at this space and I said, “Oh, I got it!” (Laughs).”

Now Derek’s work is so full of dynamic color and implied movement the strobe lights or disco balls can hardly capture the staccato of this style. Figures dance to “Rock Around the Clock” or perhaps “Twist and Shout.” Perhaps his work of today can be described as a cultural collision of Derek with a whole Caribbean Carnival—glitzy and gyrating hips in a Samba line comes to mind.

When touring his house, studio, and garden environment, visitors transform just as he transforms his life into his art, even though there is hardly a line that divides the two. If you are lucky you will go away with one of Derek’s “friends,” and his world will intersect with yours. His goal of making people happy with art will have been accomplished. If you happen to visit him during the late summer, you could also go away with some of the vegetables from his garden. But he says, “If you come to see me and I’m not at home, it’s because I’ve gone fishing.”

Thanks to Neysa Page-Lieberman, Kathy Smith, Erin Johnson, and Flo McGarrell, whose assistance in conducting interviews with the artist is much appreciated.

Marilyn Houlberg is Professor of Art and Anthropology at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the curator of the show "Vibrant Spirits: The Art of Derek Webster"