well, maybe not chet baker

Rage against the machine

Glebe show redefines what it is to be 'punk'

The Ottawa Citizen

Monday, July 25, 2005

By Peter Simpson

Weldon Poapst methodically pours five creamers into his coffee, waits patiently for the waitress to come near and then politely asks "for a sugar -- or two." He's not a man to rush into things.

"I've been doing art all my life, and I waited until I was 46 to put a show on," he says.

A lot of people believe it was worth the wait.

Thirty eight pieces were sold at the opening of Poapst's new show at Artguise in the Glebe. "The crowd loved it, so I was happy. I was king for a night."

Not that anything so crass as sales brought him to the Bank Street gallery, or to a late-afternoon interview in a nearby pub. Poapst is swirling in the vortex of introspection that is the mid-40s, where many men discover a need for something new. Poapst was on the tail-end of two decades of computer-based animation and web work, and he decided he needed to create that something new with his own hands.

"Computers are useful tools, but after a while you sort of rage against the machine. I'm sick of having beautiful drawings behind the glass, where you can't touch them, and they're just fake. I just needed to touch a drawing. That's why I was drawn to the silk screen. I just needed to touch and choose the paper it goes on. It was a very physical release. I wanted to slap a piece of paper down and draw ink, get into the craft of the art. Because sitting there with Photoshop, anybody can click and shift and whatnot."

The show, Dead Roots, includes 20 silk screens, in editions of 10, of Poapst's musical heroes. It's a gallery of punks -- though most of the individuals Poapst chose after whittling a list of 50 candidates down to 20 aren't of the punk genre. There are a few official punks: Joe Strummer is cast in pink, with the mohawk cut he adopted after watching Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver; Plasmatics' singer Wendy O. Williams glares menacingly, like a wildcat about to leap from the paper; Joey Ramone broods and Johnny Thunders lives on. Otherwise, the subjects in the show preceded punk, people like Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, LaVern Baker and the jazz giants Davis and Coltrane, to name a few.

To Poapst, they're all punks.

"When punk rock happened I realized that Johnny Cash was punk. Woody Guthrie, who had 'This machine kills fascists' written on his guitar and sang about non-unionized workers in the Dustbowl, was punk. Sammy Davis Jr., a one-eyed black Jew stuck with those guys, was a punk. Even the traditional guys, like Louis Jordan, who was too rock 'n' roll for the jazz crowd and too jazz for the rock 'n' roll crowd. So everyone in the show, although not traditionally a punk rocker, they have that sort of working-class-hero ethic."

Everybody?

"Well, maybe not Chet Baker. He was just a loser."

But that's kind of punk.

"Ya, it is. Exactly."

Poapst, in his cowboy hat and boots, looks more cowpoke than punk, but it's in him. He says he wasn't much of a punk growing up in the Glebe, or going to Ottawa Technical High School because it had a great art course. It wasn't until he left for Toronto in the mid-'70s to study animation at Sheridan College that he "took to punk like a duck to water."

In fine punk fashion, the first thing he did was to quit college.

"I guess it was the classic young rebel, and I didn't like what they were teaching," he says. "They were teaching the Disney method and the Disney mold, and I was more Tex Avery and the Warner Brothers, a little more wacky. I always had great grades, but they said 'if you don't conform, we're going to kick you out.' I said, 'I tell you what, I'll save you having to kick me out, because I quit.' That way I got some of my tuition money back," he says, with a conspiratorial laugh.

He moved back to Ottawa and started "on the shop floor" of a local animation business, and worked his way up through the ranks over 20 years. Probably the most famous toon he worked on was The Ren & Stimpy Show, which was created by another Ottawan, John Kricfalusi.

In the late '90s Poapst realized that sticking with animation would require him to move to Vancouver or Los Angeles, but his need to be close to a child from a first marriage kept him in his hometown. That led to seven years of web work, from which he was recently "downsized" when his employer moved in a new direction.

Now he's busy with contract work, which leaves him time to look back upon 20 years of experience, and look at his art in a way he never could when caught in the work-a-day grind.

"You do your art 10 hours a day, then you don't want to go home and create art just for art's sake. You go home and you just want to throw your paint brush in the cupboard and not have to deal with it. ... I have buddies in the web world who are incredible illustrators. I say, 'Why don't you pick up a pen or a pencil and do something for you. They say, 'I do it all day long, you know, who wants to?"

So he started to keep a sketchbook for the first time since college, and that led him to think about screening, which is why he walked into Artguise one day looking for supplies. Co-owner Jason Vaughan remembers it well.

"He's a real character," Vaughan says in a phone interview. "He strolls into the store wearing a white cowboy hat, cowboy boots with flames on them and a belt buckle with a scorpion. My reaction was, 'Who is this?"

Vaughan liked Poapst's idea and eventually offered him a show at the gallery. Fast forward to a year or so later, and the huge success of opening night.

"I think his experience as an animator and designer is a perfect mesh with the silk screen," Vaughan says. "It is so incredibly graphic the way he's using it, incredibly bold."

It wasn't always a smooth trip between inspiration and vernissage: you can almost feel Poapst shudder when he recalls tossing out the first 10 prints of Hank Williams Sr. because he couldn't get the registration just right (solution -- put Hank's hits on the stereo in the studio while working). And cutting the list of subjects to a manageable 20 required hard decisions -- losing Big Mama Thornton, for example, or Stiv Bators, or Patsy Cline. "I couldn't get the image just right for my tastes, so I let her go."

Yet even those lopped off the list live on in the spirit of the show, brought together as unlikely comrades in Poapst's definition of punk.

"It's anybody who says no, basically. Anybody who just doesn't accept, anybody who just doesn't go along without stopping and questioning. To me, that was the punk ethic, although they sometimes said it a little louder, with a middle finger, mind you. It was, 'No, I'm going to stop, I'm going to question, I'm going to figure it out myself, and then I'm going to move forward.'

"It was very much for me a personal deal, taking and holding control of yourself, like a lot of those musicians did."

Dead Roots is at Artguise until August 17.