When did you first show up on Canyon Road?
I was traveling across the country on a little motorcycle slowly. It had been over a month since I left from Boston. I was 26 years old. This was in 1964.
I stopped in Taos for a month and I tried to integrate myself in but they didn’t seem to like me there and it didn’t go so well. Somehow the people were snobby to me. One day everyone said, You’d do better in Santa Fe. And so I came down on the motorcycle and I found Canyon Road. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
Artists lived there and each one had his own little gallery. So I went in and this old guy’s sitting in front of a wood stove and with a coffee pot and the worst coffee in the world, but I thought, Oh, this is just so great.
So then I kept going and I found Claude’s Bar, which is just up the street, and I went in there and they were friendly. So I said, Oh, you know, I just got here today and I’m looking for a place to live and a job. Well, a news boy came in– amazing that they existed– and he said, Oh, my father has a place for rent.
How much was the rent?
$18 a month, which included gas and electricity. It had no bathroom. It had an outhouse, and the outhouse was on the ridge and you could look down over the whole city. So I took it. Then I went back to the bar and Hamp and Jerry, who owned Claude’s, they were a gay couple and they liked me and they hired me to be a waiter in the restaurant.
I had never been a bartender, but I liked bars and I thought, Well, how can I go wrong? I paint bars, I like bars, and now here I am getting paid for it. And the restaurant was called The Mousetrap.
Why would they call it a Mousetrap?
Because they had it in their minds that politicians that were coming to the Senate would have mistresses and they would come there and kind of hide out with their mistresses to take them to dinner. It was all dark and it had black tablecloths, and it was usually pretty empty.
I had at least ten different galleries over the years. And during the 70s, it was crawling with hippies. And some of them were artists. And a lot of them went to Claude’s. Claude’s became a boisterous kind of hippie center.
It changed completely from those old artists who were singing quartets to a bunch of hippies, all bragging about their drug habits.
Walter Chappell was kind of a leader in the hippie world. He came into Claude’s one night and I was sitting with Tom Watson, another big old hippie, a very handsome guy. Looked like Ernest Hemingway.
And Walter Chappell came up to him and started yelling at him. And I remember this particularly – he kept calling him a motherfucker, kept saying, motherfucker! You know what I mean? So apparently Tom had slept with his wife. That was life at Claude’s.
Claude’s became so popular with the hippies and the artists that they had to close it down because the neighbors didn’t like it, all the noise and stuff, crazy people stumbling in and out. But you could just walk in there and meet a bunch of artists. You used to, even if you didn’t know them, you’d meet them.
One time I was sitting there and these two Indian guys, American Indian, Native American, and they were young and one guy was saying to the other, I’m the best artist in Santa Fe. And I thought, What kind of bullshit is that? He’s just some kid.
Well, it turned out he was. He was. He’d just come from Vietnam and was a star artist. What’s his name? Cannon.
T. C. Cannon?
Right. T. C. Cannon.
So I had to eat my anger. But then he died in a couple years in a car crash.
You paint lots of bar scenes, lots of nudes, the impact of light coming in. I think there’s sensuality in it that you don’t often find.
You mentioned light, and I think what’s interesting is bars are hopelessly dark. You go in a bar and just say, Oh, I’m gonna paint this bar. And you can’t see anything. Everything is in front of everything else, and it’s dark, there’s no color.
So I realized that I had to kind of make it up. And back in the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of sex. There was like a sexual revolution. So it wasn’t all together boring. Like some of my more recent bars, everybody’s old.
I’ve got a bunch of bars where there’s no sex at all. Everybody’s too far gone.
Did you always know that you were gonna be an artist?
I always knew, and they always knew because both my father and my stepmother were writers, professional writers. And her father was a sculptor that I admired as a kid.
At my height, in the 80s, I was almost making a living and I was selling some art, but I wasn’t in one of the better galleries or anything.
Your background is really interesting – most people don’t put in their bio that their father was a communist.
You know, I am a member of the Communist Party, and it doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference anymore, but my mother was in the Spanish Civil War. So I believed some of the things that she believed.
They were fighting for the anarchist government in Spain, and she was in the International Brigade. She was a doctor. She worked in a hospital.
At one point, you changed your name; why did you do that?
I wanted to be a different person. It was a big mistake. I mean, it fucked up my whole life.
Why?
Because nobody was interested in my Greek and Roman myths paintings and nobody wanted me to have the name Jo Bastiste. Nobody would give me a show. And the work was good. And finally a gallery said, If you’ll just go back to being Eli Levin and paint bars, we’ll give you a show. And I did.
I’ve painted these themes so many times and I’m still painting them. I just finished ten bar paintings. This one is 2006, but then I repainted it in 2016 and 2019.
Do you ever fuck them up?
I don’t. To me, they get better. But someone else of course could say, Oh, you ruined it. Especially if they like loose, spontaneous stuff. I’m kind of a tight painter.
How does light in New Mexico inform your art?
That’s a classic question. Before I moved here, I heard that everybody loves the light in New Mexico and they always talk about painting the light. It’s beautiful light, can’t get enough of it. And when I came here, there was no smog at all. And you could stand in Santa Fe and see every individual tree on the mountains in Cerrillos. It was kind of spooky how clear everything was.
I try to get the air, the background. It’s all full of light.
SUBSCRIBE TO SANTA FE MAGAZINE HERE!
Photo Abby Mattison
Paintings Eli Levin
