By Amy Boaz

“Art is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature”: Vernon Fimple wrote Goethe’s words on a scrap of paper and kept it close throughout his life. Determined through many decades to make his way as an artist seeker in the face of imposing odds, Fimple stuck valiantly to that truth.

Painting, sculpture, illustration: Fimple imbued his vibrant, fantastic images with a sense of awakening consciousness, deeply imbedded in instinct, dream, and nature. His work explores existential polarities and clashes of cosmic foment, spectral yin and yang, and symbols drawn from alchemy and myth. He waged his artistic struggle unfailingly until his death in 2018, at age 88.

In art resides the seed of truth — this Fimple believed since he declared being an artist his profession at the portentous age of 27. It was his birthday on July 31, 1957, and he was doing a mural for the town of Denver, married at that point, fresh out of the Navy, and determined to embrace the artistic pursuit when friends his age were already ensconced in their professions. Did he realize then what toll the struggle to be an artist would task him?

Fimple was largely self-taught and a voracious reader of philosophy; his scant art education comprised the years 1954-’56 at the Denver Art Academy and a short stint at the Art Students League in New York City, before having to drop out for lack of funds. He preferred to do life drawing from models. In his carefully maintained diaries throughout his life, he recalls those early years visiting galleries in New York when his “mind was galvanized by the work of a few artists” he saw and from that moment he knew “what direction he wanted to take.” Albright, Wyeth, Dickinson, he mentions these (contemporary) artists of influence in particular, expressing “the great feeling of elation of finally knowing what I wanted to do and be — knowledge that school was not for me and need to be alone and work out my problems with paint.”

Deeply influenced by Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, and Renaissance artists, as well as the changing times, Fimple evolved over the decades in his themes and method. His first efforts were surrealistic figures morphing into grotesque visions such as “In View of God” (1960), gaining him the description by one critic as “pure hybrid of Hieronymus Bosch and Walt Disney’s Fantasia” (New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 2, 1965).

His work was hard to categorize even in the early 1960s when he had his first one-man show in Los Angeles. He writes that he was resented by the Abstract Expressionist painters then in vogue for painting “surrealistically when it had already had its day.” He recalled hostility toward him by the other painters, who ganged up on him and claimed he was “decadent”: “Why didn’t [he] wise up and get with it and paint abstractly?”

When his marriage imploded, he headed to Europe in December of 1965 for another kind of education. Portugal, Madrid, Barcelona, France, Ibiza — he lived and painted in a shared house in Santa Eulalia, 10 miles from Ibiza, in early 1966. Then on to Paris and England, before he returned to New York and Vermont and Welcome Hill, New Hampshire, always in search of a studio where he could paint his physically demanding work and enjoy the privacy and freedom he needed.

At this point Fimple was reading books about the stained glass method, glazing, and the patterns of butterflies. All of which inspired him (while reading Thoreau’s Walden and Goethe’s Theory of Colors). The results are his paintings Requiem for an Eagle and the cycle of seasons, Winter, Spring, etc., by 1967.

Art colonies offered a haven for the peripatetic artist and a sense of community he rarely found elsewhere. Huntington Hartford Foundation, McDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ossabaw Island Project, Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Ragdale Foundation all provided him stays over the years, often more than once. However, he noted that he never felt as gregarious as other artists and did not like the competition with them. He wrote from Ossabaw Island in May 18, 1979, revealing a clue into his method, that while the other painters were drawing from nature: “My process is one of inner distillation of the total experience. I have always had trouble with these kinds of feelings and have never enjoyed working around other artists because of it. While others produce in gallons, I produce in drops.”

As he was kicking around New York and L.A. in the sixties and seventies, his notebooks are full of numerology, recordings of dreams and cosmic awakening — he first took acid in March 1965 and recorded the results in detail in his journals. By the late 1960s his work grew spiritual, all the while he was having to scrape by doing janitor work at public schools or other hard manual labor while living in L.A., Santa Barbara, or Denver.

Fimple was at the top of his game during those years, enjoying one man shows at Parsons Gallery (1962), Gallerie de Ville (1963),

On June 5, 1968, the date of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Fimple wrote how he felt “more and more strongly the need for continual and concerted efforts in the arts to kindle and maintain the spiritual. I see and detest the dead and meaningless currents of contemporary art that flood this city. Intellectualism, at best, prevails and feeling has gone.” On his birthday in 1968, he records that he felt like giving up on painting but felt God and friends were “showering gifts on me.” He was deeply immersed in reading the poems of Robert Frost and the counterculture novel by Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.

A Nov. 28, 1968 entry in his diary muses on the “polarities of all things… the very breath of life, the force and variety, growth, the unique creations which pulse around and away from these — continual creation as an exchange of polarities.” This quality he wanted to concentrate on in his paintings — the tension of contrasts. The primordial theme prevailed in his occasional sculptures as well.

He loved the colors of the Southwest, as evident in his oeuvre — Arizona delighted him, first Bisbee in the late 1970s, though it proved intolerably hot in the summers. While his transient life suited his need for privacy and independence, his reliance on the kindness of friends and family often grated on their nerves, and reinforced his sense of loneliness and rejection — inculcated from childhood living in an orphanage and later at his uncle and aunt’s house in Denver. It was a relentless cycle for Fimple.

Born on July 31, 1930, in Gillette, Wyoming, Vernon Duane Fimple was the baby in a family of five brothers (Leonard, Dale, Virgil, Cordie, Vernon) and a sister, Fern, to transient field workers who moved around picking cotton and cutting trees in the Southwest, California, and Oregon. His mother, Emma Mattucks, was in failing health and died in Love, Arizona, in 1933. Heartbroken and impoverished, his father, Oliver, hanged himself the following year. Fimple later recovered that painful, traumatic memory. The death prompted the Red Cross to move the remaining family back to Missouri “to establish residency before we [could] be put in an orphanage.”

While the older siblings went to work, Fimple and his older brother Leonard were sent to the Home for Little Wanderers (Noyes Home for Children) in St. Joseph, Missouri, 1934 or ’35, he later recalled, where he suffered bullying. As a result of having to fend for himself, he became the fastest runner, an athlete and a fighter; he loved comics and learning “smudge” drawing, and made a few good friends. In early adolescence, he and Leonard were sent by train to live with their Uncle Jim and Aunt Sirelda in Denver. It was, he recorded with a heavy heart, “the end of childhood.”

He was put to work as a grocery sacker and paper boy. His memories are of wandering in the local park, walking to and from school alone, with few friends. He wrote presciently, “Search — world — don't belong, how I live in the moment everyplace, but do not belong anyplace.” He was always fighting and hustling, and he excelled in sports like swimming, boxing, and track. Ultimately, at age 17, he dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Navy, attended sonar and submarine school, and for five years, until age 22, he worked on big ships in places like Guam and Hawaii. He loved the sea and the camaraderie, but was happy to gain his freedom. He was discharged on Jan. 12, 1953.

For much of the rest of his life, Fimple was a rambler. In one letter from Miami (Feb. 3, 1985) he recorded how he would move someplace he had never been before but “had some romantic notion about or the climate seemed to be what I needed” and thought it would be permanent — e.g., San Francisco, Venice, Santa Barbara, California; upstate New York, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Arizona, and Tennessee — and stay long enough to do a painting or two, look for a parcel of land to buy, but then the “inevitable discontent would set in” and he would pack up and start out for a new place. He was always thinking that it would work out and he’d stay, always working toward a new show and to make sense of all the “wandering and searching.”

An evolving bird motif in the early 1980s resonated with him — “an abstract of yin-yang” and “the marriage of spirit and physical” — reminding him of an idea that had sounded for him since 1958, when he painted Nonentity and, later, Fledgling and Icarus Will Not Fly of the mid-1960s. He saw a breakthrough here. While wandering from Arizona to Miami to Fly Creek, New York, where he fixed up a studio in a silo, in Oct. 1985, he hit on a “system of creativity,” painting The Guardians then Homeward Bound and the Lands End series, and was very happy with the result.

Struggling to pay off debts and doctors for dental work, Fimple was also battling the VA administration in order to have a dispensation to sell his paintings and not have the income deducted from his pension. He often mentions that he was “living on the edge of a cliff.”

Ultimately, he hit on a storefront property in Clifton, Arizona, known locally as the Clifton Flower Shop. Clifton was a defunct mining town, “where the residents hardly know what ‘art’ is,” Fimple wrote in one letter of September 1991. “Art, oh you must mean the mechanic down at the Chevy station.” He felt being there was like being “in exile.” He had to contend with a stingy landlady and drug dealers next door, but he was able to buy the run-down building for a lump sum of $2,500. He moved in upstairs. “For better or worse, it seems that I was meant to have it,” he wrote. (Letter Sept. 14, 1991). It was the first time in his life he owned anything, besides his old car. “I only hope I don’t regret it,” he added.

At age 61, he felt the sense of a resurgence. “It’s possible that I’ll spend the rest of my life here in quiet oblivion,” he noted in a letter of Sept. 22, 1991, “but on the other hand I now have time to paint at my own pace and it’s just possible that I could make a comeback someday. Those things do happen occasionally.”

Putting aside the noise and traffic, and despite a tremor in his hands, bursitis, foot and tooth problems, Fimple was able to get a lot of painting done in Clifton. He had begun to do “total abstraction” and it felt “like a breakthrough.” His new paintings had the quality of stained glass, he noted in a letter of March 1992. He constructed a new easel for himself, reminding him of a “Diane Arbus photographic subject,” he wrote — 4 feet wide, over 9 feet high, and with a built-in table over 6 feet long — involving a complicated system of ropes and pulleys: “It’s a beautiful, ugly contraption and looks like a humongous Tinker Toy or a Medieaval torture rack…. If I can’t paint any longer maybe I can produce easels.”

He lived in Clifton for the rest of his life, naming it Base Camp 1. After a final stint as a Wurlitzer fellow,Vernon Fimple died on Dec. 13, 2018, due to chronic obstructive lung disease. He left his worldly goods and entire oeuvre to the Wurlitzer Foundation.