The Outsider, Volume 5, Issue 2, Winter 2001 / The Seen and the Unseen: The Life, Death, & Mystery Art of Simon Sparrow by Paul Schmelzer via ABEA-Wisconsin

“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 spirit 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 September 26, at the ages of 85, Sparrow died, leaving the vessel empty and only the eternal remains.

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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.”