Tom Billings is hunkered down in his “terrorist art bunker,” next to his Lay Away Visual Arts Gallery, in the basement of Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Building. He’s wearing a T-shirt stamped with the “signature” he uses on all his works (and which is tattooed on his left arm): a TV set with a skull inside. Billings reaches into his pocket and produces a crumpled Bazooka Joe bubble-gum comic. In the comic, Joe dreams he’s rooming with Picasso. “I paint and I paint and yet my work seems to get worse,” Pablo tells Joe. Joe says, “That isn’t true. Your work is exactly the same as it’s always been. . . . It’s your taste that’s improving!”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Billings is determined not to fall prey to good taste. Take the unfinished “found” paint-by-numbers version of “The Last Supper,” plastered with a sticker that says Caution Workmen Above. Or the series of desecrated pope pictures; in some, the pope is saying “unspeakable things,” comic-book fashion. This is an artist who’s been mingling the sacred and scatological for years, and whose most recognizable image may be that of a snarling Doberman labeled Beware of God.
It’s no accident that the “Billings brothers” moniker has an outlaw ring to it. The boys were born in East Chicago, Indiana, and brought up in Gary, Calumet City, and Hoffman Estates. Their dad, now retired, was a commercial artist for Leo Burnett; their mom used to teach painting. Tom–who never had any formal art training–says they were the kind of kids who ditched Sunday school to watch cartoons, and who vandalized construction sites.
One piece of text, lifted from a New Art Examiner article, appears on a number of paintings, including one entitled “My Best Work.” “I think it is central to America’s problems as a civilization that we accept sloppiness and permit our workers to make crummy things and to be on drugs while they are making them.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Charles Eshelman.
