The Seen and the Unseen:
The Life, Death, & Mystery Art of Simon Sparrow

By Paul Schmelzer
The Outsider, Volume 5/Issue 2/Winter 2001

"Look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."
II Corinthians 4:18

In the Yoruba traditions of West Africa, where Simon Sparrow was born, the gods are said to have two kinds of eyes: “outside eyes” with which to see the world of humans and inner or “spiritual eyes” with which to see the divine. As an artist, it’s clear that Sparrow’s ancestral beliefs echoed his own way of seeing. His pastel drawings, alive with contrasting primary colors and gestural curves, feature ghostly faces and show-like birds. His chaotically layered assemblages glimmer with glitter, buttons, marbles, beads and dime store toys bearing what appear to be images of mythic emperors and the omniscient eye of God. But beyond the work’s deep spiritual resonance, fantastic imagery, and sheer inventiveness, what makes it so enigmatic is what Sparrow claimed it represents-the human soul in its essential form.

In February 1998, a painting hung above the bed in Sparrow’s nursing-home room in Madison, Wisconsin. A small portrait of a woman, the painting was saturated with blues, golds, and browns, and spanning the woman’s chest were the letters J-O-C-E-L-Y-N. The name was that of his second wife, who had died a year earlier, but the portrait, one he’d painted years before he met Jocelyn, wasn’t of her-it was his vision of her spiritual essence, her soul. “I don’t draw people,” he’d explained. “When I draw a person, I’m drawing the mystery form of that person.”

Given what he says his artworks are about, it’s not surprising that he attributed their origin to the Holy Spirit. “I only know when I started working and everything starts moving around,” he said. “The spriit life moves me and sometimes it comes out things I don’t even know.” He called his creative process “art-feel” for obvious reasons. When drawing, he would grasp a pastel between weathered fingers and hunch close to the paper. Letting his mind go blank so the Spirit could fill him, he would make a few tentative strokes just above the pages, as if gauging the heft of the pastel and his intended line, and set in drawing. His concentration was nearly unshakable, trance-like, as images of horrifying creatures and sublime faces emerged from the paper. He couldn’t explain the process, but he could describe the sensation of Holy Spirit-possession: “All you can feel is like mystery coming inside of you. It’s sweeter than anything on earth…I feel like I’m climbing.”

For nearly seven decades, Sparrow believed he was a divine vessel through which God’s messages flowed, translated through artwork and Sparrow’s booming preacher’s voice. But on Se4ptember 26, at the ages of 85, Sparrow died, leaving the vessel empty and only the eternal remains.

A Mystery Child
When he was a young boy, Sparrow’s mother called him her “mystery child,” and as he grew older the moniker continually re-asserted itself. His father, a West African, met and married his mother in the United States, then returned with her to Africa, where Sparrow was born in 1925. Two years later, the family traveled on a banana boat back to the States and settled on North Carolina’s Cherokee Indian Reservation, where his grandfather lived and, according to Sparrow, was a tribal chief. Surrounded by Native American families in a region heavily populated by the descendants of slaves, Sparrow developed an ecumenical faith. Disavowing the term “Christian,” he began referring to himself instead as a “child of God.” “When you come to be saved,” he explained, “you is saved by God, by the Son, by the Holy Ghost. Not by no religion. Religion is man-made.”

At age seven, Sparrow received his calling, literally to create art and preach the Word. God spoke to him simply, he recalled: “Open up your mouth, and I will speak for you.” He responded by walking into the forest and climbing atop a stump, from which he began talking to the animals. “The birds would stop their twittering, and the squirrels would stop chattering,” he claimed, “and they’d all just sit there quietly, listening to me.” Daily, he returned to the stump to communicate with the animals, until one day, he unexpectedly began speaking in tongues: “That’s where I started preaching,” he declared. Days later he showed up at his family’s Pentecostal church and, to his mother’s dismay, went straight for the pulpit.

Around the same time, Sparrow began making art. Undaunted by a shortage of art supplies, he began drawing stick figures in the sand with a branch and pictures on scraps of paper bags. One day he sawed up pieces of plywood and began drawing on them in his front yard. Just as he finished a man happened to walk by and upon seeing the work immediately offered to buy it. Sparrow was so offended, he recalled, that “I nearly sicked my dong on him,” but his mother intervened, establishing a selling price that was “high enough so I wasn’t mad at her.”

When he was 12, Sparrow left home on a train bound for Philadelphia. He knew no one in the city, but was soon adopted by a Jewish family. He earned money as a dishwasher at a restaurant and drew portraits of the customers in his spare time. In 1942, at the age of 16, he married Johnnie Roper, with whom he would eventually have six children before their divorce in 1946. Also in 1942, he lied about his age and joined the Army. He was assigned to Fort Dix in New Jersey and served “two years, two months, and four days,” but never saw combat. After his discharge, he moved with his family to New York, where he held down a series of colorful jobs as a house painter, singer, pizza chef, and briefly, a professional wrestler heroically dubbed the Green Lantern. For a time, he even worked as a sparring partner for 1950s middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson.

Continuing to paint while in New York, Sparrow focused on realistic subject matter, until one day in the early 1960s, when he returned home to find his apartment building engulfed in flames. The building was virtually destroyed, and all that remained of his artwork was a single painting that remarkably had been left undamaged by the fire. Interpreting this as a sign from God, he never painted in a literal, representational style again. Instead of taking his visual cues from the world of physical reality, he began to focus exclusively on portraying life’s spiritual dimension.

In 1968 Sparrow married Jocelyn Reed, who was more than 25 years his junior and would bear him two children. A year later, they moved to Madison, to be near her family. There, he continued making art, and he took his ministry to the streets, donning a home-made pastoral robe and toting a tattered Bible, from which he frequently asked his listeners to read. He became an endearing character in the local fabric, holding impromptu art sales in the parking lot at Henry’s Restaurant and setting up a table in the student union on te university campus, where he’d draw with pastels and talk theology with passing students. He remembered proudly that every time Charles Mingus came to town, the legendary jazz bassist would reserve a seat for him in the front row.

In 1983, Sparrow’s work began to attract notice within the art world, and examples of it were soon featured in major museum exhibitions, while his names and photos of his work began to appear in books on folk and outsider art or purchased by the Madison Art Center (the first museum to show his work), the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of American Folk Art, and other institutions. In October 1999, the Kohler Foundation donated Sparrow’s latest assemblage work – a late-model Buick encrusted with religious figurines, animal statues, and glitter, akin to Noah’s Ark on wheels – to the Art Car Museum in Houston.

Unimpressed by fame, Sparrow said he realized he’d “made it big” when he received an invitation to President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. But the fame and the money never meant much to him. “I’m no happier with one thing than I am with another,” he insisted, adding wryly, “I’m no happier to get a million dollars than to get ten million dollars.”

In The End Was The Word
Sparrow’s preaching came to him just as his creative work did: “All of my teachings come directly from the heavens.” Essentially illiterate, Sparrow carried a coverless Bible with him wherever he went. He said his knowledge of the Scriptures came to him without formal study, and he could recite any biblical passage verbatim. “When we get known unto the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, we don’t have to read his holy word, because he give us his holy word, he teach us his holy word,” Simon explained, punctuating his pints forcefully as if addressing a congregation. “Man can have this book stacked up, piled up with God’s words in it, but God calls you out from under those words, so you don’t need what man has wrote.”

Still, Simon tired his hand – or rather the hand of longtime friend Darryl Markowitz – at writing once. In the late 1970s, he felt God calling him to capture his words on paper, and he asked Markowitz, then a student at the University of Wisconsin, to transcribe for him. “I don’t know when I’ll be writing it. I have to wait until the spirit moves me,” Sparrow told him, “but it could be any time.” Markowitz agreed. Several nights later, a knock came at his door at 2 a.m.; the call had come. Sparrow preached until morning, and Markowitz recorded each word in longhand. Every few nights, Sp[arrow would return, often at three in the morning, and Markowitz would dutifully grab his pen. After a year, the writing was complete: Sparrow’s 200-page cosmology, The Standard of the Foundation of the Understanding of Life, was finished. Inscribed on the title pages was a dedication that 20 years later could serve as much as a farewell as an introduction:

“I love you all and that is the reason I’m giving you all these words that Jesus Christ has pledged on my heart. God bless you all that read these words, because they are truth. My name is minister Simon Sparrow.”

Paul Schmelzer is Associate Director, Marketing/Creative at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.