The Process: “Moving Paint”

“Watching Earl Biss paint was an almost otherworldly experience.” He didn’t work in a traditional studio, and he didn’t paint like other men. “One time we set him up in one of our warehouses in Denver,” remembered Bonnie Zueger. “You didn’t see him, but you knew he was working—there was oil paint on the doorknobs, the stair railings, the carpet, the bathroom walls…”

Earl would black out the entire space—walls, floor, ceiling, and windows—until it became a void. “He didn’t want to know whether it was night or day.” The canvases, sometimes as many as sixty, would be hung around the room like a silent chorus waiting for his command.

Then the lights would go out, save for a single 40-watt bulb or the flicker of a television screen. “I see it in my mind,” he said when asked how he could paint in such darkness.

The ritual began. Paints, brushes, and tools were arranged in sacred order—often by a partner or by his adopted son Dante. Then he’d begin, moving from one canvas to the next, circling the room in a trance-like state. “It was like Jackson Pollock, the ‘mad dripper,’” Dante said. “Just going to the next one. Going to the next one. He flipped a switch and the blinders were on.”

“He’d be working with each color,” said Paul Zueger. “Three or four brushes in one hand—all different colors—and the other hand the same way. He was ambidextrous. He said he taught himself to paint that way in jail with a one-armed cellmate.”

“He never stepped back,” said Gail Abbo. “He could be this close to a canvas—literally inches—and he never went back to look. He just went from side to side. It just flowed out of him.”

Once he started, he didn’t stop—not to eat, not to sleep. He painted three, four, five, sometimes seven days straight. “When he got in the zone,” said Wayne Yakes, “he didn’t see anybody. He didn’t see the world around him.”

“Earl knew his medium totally,” said his framer, Tom Egenes. “It just flowed. It was magic.”

And then came the visions. “When he was eight years old and hospitalized with rheumatic fever, he saw the spirit world,” said Dante. “The animals riding on the edge of our world and the next. Horses. Warriors. Buffalo. That’s what he was reaching for.” Earl would say that the energy of the spirit world “went right through him and onto the canvas.”

“It wasn’t exactly a trance,” said his biographer Lisa Gerstner, “but his whole countenance changed.” Earl told her, “I like pushing my body to extremes when I paint. It’s almost like the Sun Dance, where great spiritual breakthroughs accompany pain and the stretching of the physical body to its absolute limits.”

He painted to music—chanting, the Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails. “He swayed, rocked back and forth, almost danced,” Gerstner wrote. “He hummed, growled, talked to the canvas and his ghosts.”

Anything could be a tool—“cardboard, a broom, a paper towel,” said Yakes. “Whenever he got an idea to complete the sentence he wanted to write, he would use it. You couldn’t contain him or his mind.”

As the hours passed, the studio devolved into chaos. And Earl shed his clothes like old skins, often finishing his paintings naked. Bonnie Zueger once found him passed out, face down and nude, outside the studio—inside, a naked blonde woman lay collapsed beside the canvases.

Though he hated being watched, sometimes he allowed it. One night at the El Dorado in Santa Fe, people came and stayed. “They were just in love with him,” said Bonnie. “He didn’t even know they were there.”

His process was entirely intuitive. “He didn’t divide the canvas, block in areas, or do underlay sketches,” wrote Gerstner. “He simply walked up to a blank canvas and began ‘moving paint.’”

“Earl was a master of alla prima,” said sculptor Presley LaFountain. He scraped through color to find light, turned canvases upside down mid-stroke, painted with a brush in each hand “like a banderillero in a bullfight.” Then he’d splatter pigment, toss turpentine across the canvas, and let it run like a final breath.

When it was finished, he’d become quiet—soft-spoken, almost shy. “I didn’t do it,” he’d say. “They were already here. I just let them out.”

— Moving Paint: The Life and Art of Earl Biss, John Goekler (American Design Ltd., 2018)