Bobby Gosh
Bobby Gosh
by Joyce Marcel
People are collectors by instinct. Children collect bottle caps, baseball trading cards and dolls. Adults collect everything from guns to antiques to wine. There’s even a whole category called ”collectibles,” which is so wide it includes 1930s kitchenware as well as ancient woodworking tools and ceramic planters. Pretty much everyone collects something.
Bobby Gosh
by Joyce Marcel
People are collectors by instinct. Children collect bottle caps, baseball trading cards and dolls. Adults collect everything from guns to antiques to wine. There’s even a whole category called ”collectibles,” which is so wide it includes 1930s kitchenware as well as ancient woodworking tools and ceramic planters. Pretty much everyone collects something.
And some people — lucky people — collect art.
Here in Vermont, despite the state’s small size, the quality of the art that graces people’s walls is surprisingly high. Mara Williams, curator of the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, recently mounted a show called ”Vermont Collects: Modern & Contemporary Masters” that includes work by Jim Dine, Wolf Kahn, Jules Olitski, Julian Schnabel, Sol LeWitt and Robert Rauschen-berg. It’s surprising how much wonderful art is living in our woods.
When it comes to collecting art, there are no set rules, according to Williams. Most people simply buy the things they love.
”There’s an object that somehow sparks your imagination, which sparks passion in you, so you’re passionate about it,” she said. ”There are people who buy out of their coolly reductive intellectual side. Some collect one or two artists that they adore, or one or two styles. Some collect only artists they know. Some are relatives of the artists they collect. Collectors who would make it into the Art in America Top 200 Collectors in America are collecting in an incredibly focused and disciplined way, whereas most people who buy art are rather, ‘Oh, I love that.”’
Bobby Gosh, 73, of Brookfield , is an ”Oh, I love that” kind of collector. Gosh, a tall, forceful, energetic man with a bald head that’s been clean shaven for decades, has had a long and successful career as a rock and pop performer, conductor and songwriter. He once opened for Barbra Streisand in front of 250,000 people in Central Park. He wrote the international hit ”A Little Bit More,” which has been recorded by over 60 artists. He was Paul Anka’s road conductor for two years. He’s worked with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Cahn. He’s written over 200 radio and television commercials.
Since 1971, he and his wife, Billi Gosh, a major force in the Democratic Party on the national, state and local levels, as well as a founder of both the Vermont State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Vermont Women’s Fund, have been living in Vermont. They designed and built their spacious home on a wide set of meadows that are perfect for vistas, as well as for large outdoors sculptures by Ezio Martinelli and John Matusz.
Among their other impressive collections are rare books, Tiffany lamps, antique furniture and the social realist paintings of Vermont artist Philip Hagopian. Their walls are filled with paintings, drawings and sculptures. There’s an original M.C. Escher lithograph, an early political Sabra Field and a large collection of work by other Vermont and New England artists whom Gosh knows and just flat out loves.
One of the most notable is Ronald Slayton, whose work Gosh discovered late in the artist’s life. Slayton’s son Tom, the beloved longtime editor of Vermont Life Magazine, wrote about this discovery in the Vermont Sunday Magazine in 2003: ”Through his 60s and into his 70s, Slayton taught art and continued to paint — though without getting much recognition. Then one day, Gosh turned up at Slayton’s Berlin home, fell in love with his work and began purchasing paintings.”
The influx of money begat more paintings, and eventually Gosh helped Slayton mount a major retrospective of his work. By the time Slayton died, at age 81, ”Ron Slayton felt that his life’s work had been justified — that all the years of lonely work, painting because he loved it but without much recognition, had been worthwhile,” his son wrote.
Many Slaytons hang on the Goshes’ walls, and Gosh estimates he has over 200 of his paintings. He is currently working on a centennial show of Slayton and another Vermont artist he collects, Francis Colburn, for the Fleming Museum in Burlington next year.
Gosh’s Slayton pieces are just a small part of his entire art collection, which he estimates at 1,400 works. Today, his taste runs to found objects and found art. In fact, he has built an entire gallery devoted to Rhode Island artist Tom Deininger, whom he has known for 10 years.
Deininger’s complex work — some of it giant — involves making painterly landscapes and portraits which, upon close examination, reveal themselves to be made completely of plastic garbage and contain not a drop of paint.
For example, taking up one large wall of the gallery is a huge landscape showing a snowcapped mountain towering over fields of green. The snow is a collage of old telephone parts. The sky, a lovely blue that shades into purple, is made entirely of the caps of plastic milk and water bottles. The greenery? Old camera parts, wire, a few typewriter keys, a sandal, and a lot of other junk.
Then there is Deininger’s picture-perfect copy of a Monet painting, ”Water Lilies and Japanese Bridge,” which he did in 1899 at his home in Giverny. At least it’s picture perfect from a distance. But get up close and you’ll see it’s a thick, dense, twisted collage made of plastic cartoon characters, dolls and McDonald’s toys; a tiny statuette of Christ that Deininger has placed in a rocket ship is Gosh’s favorite. Some of the figures are in situations that can best be described as pornographic, or ”doing something nasty with Barbie,” as Gosh gleefully puts it.
Gosh calls Deininger ”today’s Heironymus Bosch,” referring to the Dutch painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who used fantastic and sometimes hellish imagery to illustrate moral and’ religious concepts of his time.
”These are an incredible comment on society,” Gosh said. ”Deininger is saying, ‘Look, you guys, you take all this crap and give it to your kids. Your kids have all this stuff, and then they throw it away. Now you’re putting this crap which has a life span of what? Twenty thousand years? You’re putting it in the ground. I’m going to take this stuff and throw it right back in your face. I’m going to make something out of it.’ And 25 years from now, when these pieces are hanging in museums, and they will, people will look at them and say, ‘Remember? I had one of those.’ And you’ve got the nostalgia factor. Nobody’s ever not responded to this work. You can spend weeks looking at this stuff.”
If there’s a through-line to Gosh’s collecting, it’s that he likes art that is tough, uncompromising and conveys a social message.
”With Deininger, it’s the idea of a bunch of stuff going to the dump and he’s made something out of it that I defy anybody to throw away,” Gosh said. ”That’s the gist. I go to show after show and it’s just another set of landscapes. Some are good and some are terrible. I call that safe art. I like art that makes me think creatively. I want art that jolts me, that makes me excited. With Deininger, this guy jars me. I can’t stop looking at it. I get excited about it, plus the unique aspect of discovering it.”
Gosh has collected so much art that he keeps a storage facility in his basement for the hundreds of works that he can’t find room for on the walls.
”The way I do it, once something makes it on the walls, that’s it until we die,” he said. ”Once it works, they’re the favorite things. There’s a lot of favorite things in the basement, but we don’t have the room. I don’t collect any of this stuff because of what it’s worth. If you take the art out of the house, you take the soul out of it. I can’t live without having art around me.”
Gosh’s friend and fellow collector, Lyman Orton of The Vermont Country Store, says that Gosh collects his art the way he writes his songs.
”Like a giant sea sponge,” Orton said. ”When I last visited his home I noticed dozens of scraps of paper on his piano, each with some observation he had made going through his day. Somehow he turns these scraps into beautiful music and I suspect he approaches collecting art the same way; something catches his attention or his eye and he thinks of the possibilities. He appears not to worry where he will hang it. He either finds a nook in his house or adds on another room! He is the most joyful, enthusiastic madman I ever knew.”
For more information go to bobbygosh.com
