The wildly creative brain of Leo Buelna Jr.
‘Right now, I’ve got 8 million things in my mind’
Leo Buelna Jr. did not seem to notice Journey’s “Separate Ways” blaring from the radio Tuesday morning as he identified people in dozens of fading family photographs hung high on the walls in his sculpture studio. Heavy metal and rock music are his life’s soundtrack.
“See that one up there?” he said with a gravelly little laugh. Somewhere underneath his baggy flannel shirt and jeans held up with suspenders, his wiry frame shook with the chuckling. “That’s me as a kid. They had me chained so I wouldn’t go over the fence.”
Buelna, who turns 83 in July, proudly described the rugged roller coaster of life revealed in all the photos that seem at odds with the escapist sensibility of his art — including small sculptures and surreal acrylic paintings that are a bit Salvador Dali, a bit Hieronymus Bosch, a bit “Yellow Submarine” and Disney.
Some of his paintings are on view at G Spot Contemporary Art Space in the Heights, his first show in a decade.
Pretty much every square foot of Buelna’s modest home and studio compound in southeast Houston is jammed with his art and odd collections, leaving little room for furniture. The place feels like the inside of a wildly colorful pressure cooker.
“I’ve got to create. Otherwise, I’ll go bonkers,” he said.
Buelna has made art obsessively at least since he was five, when his mother gave him his first oil set and he used it to paint over the upholstery of her new couch.
Some people might find his imagery disturbing. Or just twisted.
He sometimes renders scenes from an invented planet, Trivers, which is peopled by whimsical
aliens whose bodies are part flesh, part flying machine and part fantastical plants. Other works feature disembodied figures representing people he’s met. He can render people realistically, with empathy, when he wants to — although he generally finds that too easy.
G Spot owner Wayne Gilbert felt he’d made an important discovery when he first visited Buelna’s compound. “You might not like this kind of stuff, but an artist just can’t do this if it isn’t natural,” he said, admiring the minute details of a painting with creatures connected by umbilical cordlike strands on a blank background.
Gilbert has taken a number of art world people to see Buelna, and he’s helping to create a documentary about the elderly artist.
Bill Arning, the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, said he was fascinated less by the imagery than by Buelna’s compulsion to create, for so many years, without much of a desire to share his work like well-known outsider artists such as Forrest Bess. Arning said he likely would have discouraged a younger artist from making imagery that looks so cartoony and “heavy-metal illustrative,” but he was fascinated because of Buelna’s age and passion.
“I’m fully undecided if he’s a good artist, but he’s a really interesting phenomenon,” Arning said. He also was intrigued that Buelna set up shop just a few blocks from where the late visionary artist and postman Jeff McKissack built the Orange Show Monument, a treasure of outsider art; although Buelna doesn’t seem to have known McKissack.
“That two artists that eccentric could be working so close says something about Houston,” Arning said.
Buelna signs his work Leandra di Buelna Jr. He added the “di” because it sounds more artistic.
He was born in Houston, to Mary Petronella, a member of the Sicilian restaurant clan, and a handsome father who was part Cherokee and part German. His father drank heavily and died in a car accident after the couple lost their second child, a young girl, to spinal meningitis. Leo was two.
He and his mother ended up in California with an Italian boxer whom he doesn’t want to honor by calling stepfather. “I was raised by a fist,” he said.
Buelna said he didn’t go to high school. He left his first wife, after she became pregnant, to work in a Montana copper mine, inflicting some cruelty of his own. He knows he has a daughter but has never felt compelled to find her.
“My other wives left me because I was wild and crazy,” he said, grinning.
He served in Korea with the “Rakassans” (members of the 87th Airborne who parachuted into combat), then the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. Back in San Francisco by the late 1960s, he indulged in the Haight Ashbury scene, when he briefly taught art. At some point, he wanted to be a fashion designer, but got kicked out of Los Angeles’ Chouinard Art Institute because he drew nude models with eyeballs for nipples, a motif he still employs.
Buelna ended up back in Houston because his third wife wanted to see Texas. Later, when he worked as the head painter at an apartment complex in Southwest Houston, he met and fell in love with Sandy Gentry. They’ve been married 38 years.
Still a beauty, she now has Alzheimer’s and sometimes can’t remember him, but he’s not ready to let her go.
He tries to work early in the morning, before she’s awake and needs him. He paints in the smallest, darkest, hut-like structure, next to a table jammed with paintbrushes and ancient-looking tubes of acrylic paint.
The small yard also holds three other buildings. The three-room sculpture studio looks a bit like Pee Wee’s playhouse. Small, often freakish, sculptures spill across the shelves, fashioned from cigarette lighter parts, pistachio hulls, wire, toys, pipe cleaners; mobiles made from CDs and Slinkys dangle from the ceiling; and there’s an electric piano jammed into one corner, opposite a boxed alien toy that’s about three feet tall.
Dozens of large canvases are piled against the walls of another shed, next to a building that lost its roof during Hurricane Harvey, ruining some of Buelna’s inventory. He hasn’t yet finished the cleanup of destroyed shelves.
Both of Buelna’s parents drew, but it’s his dad looking over his shoulder, he said. He has a picture his dad made in 1928 of a sword around a snake. “That’s the kind of work he did. He’s the one guiding me,” Buelna said.
Images won’t stop coming to him. He sees things in slightly wicked ways.
“Right now I’ve got 8 million things in my mind,” he said. “While I’m still alive, I’m going to keep on going. The man upstairs says when you quit painting, you’re going to die.”