It breaks my heart to announce Jack the Pelican is closing our space at 487 Driggs Ave. in Williamsburg. It is our hope to re-open some months in the future at another location. But where and when, we cannot say.

But we are saying goodbye for now on a bright note, with one final show that is dear to our hearts…

THE SACRED COMIC BOOK by anonymous, ca.1921 opens this Saturday February 20, 7 – 9pm

This is a beautifully drawn, 40-page comic book about an artist, his seedy existence, his community, and his struggles. A single narrative, extending over 30 years, it was completed anonymously in 1921, which makes it the earliest document of its kind. What we’re showing here are the original drawings in watercolor and ink.

This comic book belongs to Jack the Pelican and all our artists and also everyone who struggles against the odds and the day-to-day adversities of being an artist. It’s central message is Just Keep Pecking Away, and it’s dedicated to “the down and outs, the never-was-its and the also-rans (sic), in the Year of our Profits 1921.In the early days of Jack the Pelican, we invited all our artists to read it. It was akin to an initiation. We always called it “The Saced Comic Book.” It’s not really much of a mission statement for a gallery, but it was the closest thing we had. We are happy now to have this last chance to share it with all of you.

We’re not presenting it as a book. The pages were never bound. It came to us as a stack of drawings. We’re hanging them in sequence on the wall, running through all four of the gallery’s spaces.

The first thing that visitors will note is that it looks way too modern to have been drawn in 1921. The pen and brushwork is too fast and furious. Plus, it has a smelly, underground quality that makes it feel very contemporary. This could be Williamsburg now. Those kids—now long dead—could be you and me. What’s more, it appears to have been influenced by R. Crumb and fired by the imagination of Dr. Seuss—and it’s almost even as curmudgeonly as William Powhida—even though it comes many many decades before all of them.

Around 1910, our hero,’ as the artist refers to himself, goes to an art gallery that guarantees fame.’ He is duped. Inside, he finds a note from Art and Fame, whom he’s been chasing for years: Sit down & make yourself at home,” it says, “Will be back in 100 years. This strong point of view is consistent throughout. He is skeptical of those who run the art world and many of his peers whom he sees as selling out. But he remains darkly optimistic, an idealist to the end. And, he loves his dog. And it’s 2010 now, so…

That this work was authored and drawn anonymously is no accident. It is emphatically anonymous. Song without Music, reads the cover, Whistled to any old tune; Composed, sung and illustrated by the author; Published by the same guy. The protagonist is fantastically obsessed with art. He runs off in his youth to Tahiti to make paintings. He wins the Great War for his country (as an artist). At first, we thought the whole thing a satirical work of fiction. (Oh, and it never was published, nor even intended to be, in the traditional sense. Nor was it ever even seen by the public, until now.)

But no, it’s him. It all turns out to be an autobiography. The incidents and the people he describes are real. More than a few went on to brilliant careers. We know this because we were able to figure out his identity.

His name is Charles Nicholas Sarka (1879-1960).

Sarka’s uncanny skill in capturing the attitude and character of people and places in quick flashes of pencil and watercolor has long been widely admired. In the first decade of the 20th century, he traveled extensively by steamship to paint on-site in diverse locations around the world, including Egypt, Morocco, the Hawaiian Island, the West Indies, Tahiti and Mauritania, and Southern California. Well known among fellow artists of the time as Sarka of the South Seas and dubbed in 1966 by Pacific Islands Monthly (Sydney) as the American Gaugin, he was long associated with that region and wrote a novel based on his experience there, Tahiti Nui, available in the Archives of American Art. (Despite the Bowery dialect he uses in his comic book, he was a literate man.)

Among his traveling companions were George Overbury Pop Hart, an older and better known artist, whom he depicts throughout The Sacred Comic Book as the crusty old mustachioed sign painter, always carrying a pot of beans. The two lived modestly in their travels with their income mainly coming from watercolor portraits of yachts they painted in port. They apparently also did a lot of fishing for dinner. Sarka was celebrated in the 1960s as the ideal of an itinerant hobo’ artist. It has been noted that his inability to sit still was probably a detriment to his career and that as a result of constantly moving, much of his work has been lost.

A serious painter, with an active exhibition record, Sarka nonetheless became better known as an illustrator for books and magazines, an occupation not uncommon for American artists in this period. He was successful at it for many years, doing covers for the foremost periodicals of his day, including Collier’s, Leslie’s, Scribner’s, Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s and Harper’s. He was popular. There’s even a contemporary coffee-table book that features him as one of the greatest American artists of the era. The New York Times gave his exhibitions mixed reviews, on the whole commending his adventurous spirit and talent, while criticizing his slapdash approach.

The Sacred Comic Book is set in New York, where Sarka moved from his native Chicago in 1899 to work as a staff artist for the New York Herald. His close friend and mentor was Walt Kuhn, American painter and organizer of the 1913 Armory Show. Another close acquaintance was Rudi Dirks, renowned creator of the Katzenjammer Kids. Sarka shared a studio with Rudi’s brother Gus (who killed himself there with a revolver). Sarka built his shack on Canada Lake, near Gloversville, in the summer of 1910. In 1914, a terrible fire in his Gramercy Park studio destroyed much of his work. It was humorously reported in the New York Times. Read it to see what a character this man truly was. In the early 1920s, he escaped from New York to make Canada Lake his permanent home. He continued making art for the rest of his life, but seems to have abandoned his restless pursuit of Art & Fame.

In 1963, following his death, a show of his Tahiti watercolors sold out, with works going to major American Museums, including the Metropolitan, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney. The only one to get into private hands went to then First Lady Jackie Kennedy.

His watercolor technique is still much admired. In the American Art Review in 1999, James Crawford wrote a feature about him, entitled The Watercolor Tradition of Charles Sarka. Sarka loved to draw and paint and his friends looked forward to his letters, pouring over with elaborate, humorous sketches. His friend, naturalist artist Paul Bransom declared that throughout his long life in art, “Sarka never drew a bad line.” Several of his colorful missives were featured in 2000 in the Smithsonian’s Art of the Illustrated Letter, which identified the genre as one of the forerunners of the comic book. Nothing in that show, however, gives the merest hint of what visitors to The Sacred Comic Book will encounter. Please come and help make Sarka famous.

February 20–until the marshal comes (1, 2, 3… weeks?)