I had to get a haircut,” Elder said. “So, I
said, ‘Where’s my portfolio?’ And they
handed it to me. I took the scholarship
papers, tore them up, threw them on the
desk, and walked away. I went to
Chouinard.”
On full-tuition scholarship at
Chouinard, Elder studied with co-
founder Robert Graham and Phil Lieder
and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine
Arts degree in 1968.
Boyd had a studio on Sunset Blvd.
“Bobby Fuller … was my patron, so he
sponsored everything,” Elder said. “He
paid for the studio. He paid for the
paint. And then he was murdered in ‘66
… that was a really emotional and psy-
chological setback.”
In those heady years, Elder’s friends
and supporters in the L. A. art/music
scene included fellow Texans Bobby
Fuller and Joe Ely plus Rick Griffin, Joni
Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Neil Young,
“Mama” Cass Elliot, Darryl Hannah,
Stephen Stills and Ron Stone.
At Chouinard, Elder met Luann
Darling Finlayson, then Assistant to the
Dean. After he graduated, the couple
moved back to Texas, where they lived in
a studio in a converted water tank on
Idalia Street in El Paso. They welcomed
first daughter Flaunn on Oct. 25, 1968
(her Godmother is Joni Mitchell).
The Elders moved to Valentine;
Luann gave birth to Shaula in nearby
Marfa on June 10, 1971 (her
Godmother is Sandy Sussman). In
1979, Boyd and Luann moved to Kona,
Hawaii, where their contentious rela-
tionship ended in 1981.
They shared custody of the girls, who
grew up with their mother in Hawaii
and visited their father on the Mainland
each summer for road trips and adven-
tures.
Just before Christmas 1971, “Rick
Griffin sent me a present packed in an
apple crate and lettered ‘To Boyd’ in
continued from page 15
wrapper and the burnt ends of your
French fries? (OK, yes, there was this
one time when my daughter was little
and her hamburger had the wrong thing
on it and she complained and I didn’t
feel like hearing complaints and arguing
and telling her to just buck up and
scrape the offending vegetable off, so I
threw the whole thing right out the win-
dow for shock value. But this was a one-
olde English, and inside was the breast-
bone of a Thanksgiving turkey he’d scal-
loped and pinstriped,” Elder said. “I had
also done a lot of research into how the
Indians painted buffalo skulls for the
Sun Dance ceremony, where they had
black and red dots symbolizing hail-
stones. They pierced their backs and
dragged the painted buffalo skull for the
ceremony.”
With animal skulls given to him by
local rancher friends, Elder began exper-
imenting with air-brush painting, pin-
striping and adding beads, feathers and
other symbolic adornments.
Just four months after receiving
Griffin’s gift, Elder unveiled his first
“American Fetish – RIP” pieces at the
infamous “El Chingadero” art exhibit in
Venice, California, in April 1972.
Dubbed “The Best Rock Party Ever”
by the Village Voice in New York City,
the “Chingadero Show” was the most
historic of the more than 40 art exhibits
Elder staged coast to coast during his
career. His first in L.A. was “Newcomers
1967.”
Elder suffered a huge setback person-
ally and artistically on May 31, 1973,
when a mysterious fire destroyed the
Bell Motor Company garage and store
in Valentine, an authorized Ford repair
shop run for decades by Howard Bell,
Sr. and Howard Bell, Jr.
The garage housed many Bell and
Elder family artifacts. The garage was
also where Boyd kept nearly all his art-
work to date.
From those ashes, Boyd rose
Phoenix-style. In the next couple of
years, with his photo on the back cover
of an Eagles album (“Desperado”) and
his “American Fetish – RIP” skull art on
the front covers of two more Eagles
albums – “One of These Nights” and
“Their Greatest Hits” – his future
looked more incandescent than ever.
While rock ‘n’ roll accolades were great, they did not satisfy Elder’s tandem
quest for recognition and respect as a
fine artist. “After the Eagles covers, I
wanted to symbolize that the painted
skull is a genre, so I married the painted
skull with the canvas, and it became fine
art,” he said. “There was a whole series
of those, including ‘Murderer,’ ‘Lone
Star Sunrise’ and ‘Y6 Sunrise.’
“You know I’m a fine artist,” he said.
“My studio burns, and what do I do?
Make album covers. And there are mil-
lions of them out there. But my work is
still not in the Guggenheim, or
MOMA, or LACMA.”
Long before he died, though, Elder’s
legend loomed large among his mentors,
peers and friends, as well as younger fans
attuned to the rich history of the Texas-
California-Colorado-Hawaii art and
music scenes of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Boyd Elder may not have coined the
term “artlaw,” but he defined it.
In the early 1970s, “Larry Bell called
me and said, ‘You’re going to have a new
neighbor, Donald Judd,’” Elder said.
“Donald called me either that day or the
next and said, ‘Come on over.’ The
women cooked. Don and I drank and
talked about sleazy art dealers and muse-
ums.” Boyd and Donald remained good
friends until Judd’s death in 1994. As a
stoker of Judd’s artistic flame in the
community, Elder most recently created
a skull-art T-shirt design for KRTS,
Marfa Public Radio, where he was a
semi-regular drop-in guest.
Along with “60 Minutes” and KRTS,
Elder’s art and exploits have been fea-
tured in countless media outlets includ-
ing KVIA, NPR, Rocky Mountain
Musical Express, Texas Highways and
Texas Monthly. Yet, as writer Sterry
Butcher put it, Boyd Elder may have
sold more art than Picasso, but he was
still “the most famous artist you’ve never
heard of.”
For more than a year, Elder had been collaborating with longtime journalist
friend Stephen K. Peeples. Peeples met
Boyd Elder and wrote his first story
about the artist in 1978. At the time of
Elder's death on Oct. 6, 2018, he and
Peeples with producers Tamara Deike
and Corey Stewart were developing a
career-spanning coffee-table art book,
collecting a lifetime of Elder’s art and
stories titled Artlaw: The Greatest Artist
You've Never Heard Of, now to be com-
pleted in collaboration with his family.
“I’ve always been more interested in
what’s ahead than what’s in the rear-
view, and that’s still true,” Elder said in
the book proposal. “But my supporters
have been after me for decades to put
together a cross-section of my past
works and get these wild tales told.
Now’s the time.” With the help of his
family, the “Artlaw: Boyd Elder” project
will be completed this year as the ulti-
mate homage to the man and his art.
Boyd Elder died Oct. 6, 2018 in San
Marcos, Texas of natural causes.
“He was stardust when he was alive
and now he’s stardust forever,” said
Flaunn and Shaula, who are hosting a
few life celebrations in their dad’s honor.
“So, tell everybody to start resting up
and get ready because we’re going to
party hard, and it’s gonna be like a
f***ing freight train high-ballin’ up the
line from the south side of heaven.” One
party in November packed The Capri in
Marfa; another is coming up at the
Chinati Foundation. Watch for the date.
Written with much appreciated assis-
tance from Flaunn Elder Jamieson, Shaula
Elder and Mack Elder. Read more at
stephenkpeeples.com.
Boyd Elder designed the Artwork on
page 4 for a t-shirt for Marfa Public
Radio’s 2018 pledge drive, collaborating
with the station’s DJ John Paul Schwartz.
Available for $35 at http://marfapublicra-
dio.org.
time event.) Mostly I recall having big
messes in my car and regularly cleaning
out the trash, which doesn’t mean I have
been not-guilty of littering, but as we
grow older, we – hopefully – grow ever
more mindful of how we live and how
we consume and how we want to leave
the place, any place, better than we
found it. Even if you’ve littered in the
past, this is an easy behavior to change:
Just don’t do it. Keep a trash bag in your
car. Secure that trash – AND EQUIP-
MENT I MIGHT ADD – in the bed of
your truck. Turn down those receipts if you don’t need them. Keep a hold of
those plastic bags, if you must have
them. It’s windy here, people!
By the way, prisoners don’t clean up
litter – that’s a myth. You will have to
pick up after yourself. And you may
have to pick up after dozens of others as
well.
This is the first in a multi-part series
about trash in the Big Bend region. We’ll
go into disposal and recycling next issue.
In the meantime, pick up some trash.
Get onto people when they throw their
Big Gulp cup out the window – make them turn around, pick it up and dis-
pose of it properly. At the very least, be
cautious of the people (like myself )
pulled over on the side of the road pick-
ing up litter. Thank you for reading.
Now, pass this magazine off to someone
else to read in the interest of “recycling.”
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS!
NOTE: a big THANK YOU to the
Tierra Grande chapter of the Texas Master
Naturalists who were spotted doing high-
way cleanup on HWY 118 just before this
issue printed.
Cenizo
First Quarter 2019
27