BASIL KING was born in the East End of London in 1935 and came to the U.S. in 1947. At 16, he entered Black Mountain College, where he studied painting and writing. In 1958 he married Martha and settled in New York to paint. During this time he made art for Yugen and Kultur magazines, and for books by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Allen Ginsberg, and others.
     In the early 1970s, with two partners, he founded Mulch magazine; Mulch Press subsequently published six books, including Paul Blackburn's Piere Vidal and Allen Ginsberg's Visions of the Great Rememberer, both with art by King.
     In the 1980s King painted images from playing cards, baseball, trees, portraits of artists and poets and began writing regularly.
In 1992, he began his long documentary prose/poem/media work, Mirage.
     Mirage paintings, watercolors, and pastels were exhibited for the first time at Gotham Book Mart in 1994, where King also read from his texts. Since that time, King combined reading with showing slides of his own art and others.
     King's visual art is in the collections of the New York Public Library, Yale University, the late Morton & Lita Hornick, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Grand Valley State College, University of Kansas Museum of Art, David and Becky Starobin, State University of New York at Buffalo, the Gladstone Museum of Baseball Art, and Tom Seaver.
     Mirage performances have been presented in Prague, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Groznjan (Croatia), Duino (Italy), Dartington College (U.K.), and Cody's Bookstore, Berkeley, California.
     Text from Mirage has been published in Otis Rush (Australia), Boxkite (Australia), House Organ, and First Intensity. The summer 2000 issue of Poetry/New York features a cover, portfolio of art, and a section from Warp Spasm, "Karla Faye." Another section from Warp Spasm, "Identity," will appear next fall in First Intensity. King's other Mirage books include The Complete Miniatures and Devotions (Stop Press, London). Both combine text and art. The complete Warp Spasm is on the Fall 2000 list of Spuyten Duyvil Press, New York.
 

 

ON THE ART OF BASIL KING


     Basil King was doing art for books and magazines long before his wife Martha began writing seriously. His approach to this task was described by her in the King collaboration Seventeen Walking Sticks (London: Stop Press, 1997). To accompany was his deliberate choice of words, for he never approached this kind of work as if he were to illustrate what was written. He wouldn't begin until he felt he had internalized the text-almost like an actor preparing for a role, which partly explains why the work he did for, say, Paul Blackburn's Piere Vidal translations was so different from the drawings he did for Allen Ginsberg's Reminiscences of Kerouac.

     Basil King's graphic art appears most recently in Sequentia by Theodore Enslin (London: Stop Press, 1999) and in Nine by Theodore Enslin (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, forthcoming). Increasingly, his graphic art accompanies his own texts in books including Miniatures and Devotions (London: Stop Press, 1998), Warp Spasm (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2001) and in exhibition/performances of his metawork, Mirage.

"We find ourselves looking at paintings that...seem as capable of considering us as we them." —Harry Lewis, Utica News.
 

 

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