Sketch Artist 
Folks
Some of the hottest artist in Texas can be found in prisons, mental institutions, and on the streets. Finally embraced by the art market, these self-taught “Outsiders” create work that defines the world in their own terms.
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For all its flamboyant trappings, Xmeah’s theology is quite sophisticated, his rhetoric untainted by such fashionable born-again—isms as a “personal relationship with God.” Instead he seems to inhabit with serene conviction and uncanny insight the conceptual world of Christianity’s first-century founders. It is a world in which human events, soon to be eclipsed in the apocalyptic climax of time and history, are pale intimations of a cosmic struggle between demons and angels. “We are in the latter days,” Xmeah says matter-of-factly, “at the fourth seal of Revelation.”
The depth of his vision perhaps explains Xmeah’s frustration with painting as an appropriate medium for his message. He describes painting as akin to a visual speaking in tongues. Beginning with amorphous fields of white mixed with black or blue, he delineates with brighter colors the images and texts dictated to him by the Spirit.
“The painting is the burning bush,” he says. “It gets your attention.” But Xmeah stresses that even his fantastic images are mere symbols of vastly more ferocious celestial combatants. “These aren’t dark spirits,” he says of the demonic figures in his paintings, shaking his head and exchanging a knowing laugh with Cherry. “And you don’t want to see an angel, either.” The effect of such an encounter is suggested by the inscription on the toilet seat: “If you saw an angel, you would have no problem with constipation.”
That frighteningly violent angelology, long supplanted by chubby Renaissance cupids, was a commonplace of first-century apocalypticism. And there is a certain irony in realizing that the first generations of Christians, waiting confidently for the final conflict between the armies of light and darkness, would scarcely have comprehended a painting like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam but would probably have found in Xmeah’s visions a coherent representation of their terrifying yet hopeful faith.
C.A.A. DELLSCHAU’S RESCUE from anonymity did not begin until more than four decades after his death—and even then his redemption was tenuous. According to the Dellschau legend, sometime in the late sixties the notebooks were discarded with a pile of trash removed as a fire hazard from a Houston house. Transported to the Washington Street dump, they were purchased from an unidentified trashman by Fred Washington, the proprietor of Washington’s O.K. Trading Center. More certain is that in 1969 an employee of the de Menil family (Houston’s internationally prominent art collectors) found twelve of the notebooks stacked on the floor of the O.K. Trading Center, hidden beneath a tarp. The de Menil representative bought four of the notebooks for $1,500; later that year they were displayed at the University of St. Thomas in an exhibit titled “The Sky Is the Limit.”
In 1972 a Houston alternative-sciences buff named Peter G. Navarro acquired the eight remaining Dellschau notebooks. After studying the thousands of drawings and annotations, Navarro concluded that before coming to Houston (at a date he has variously estimated as the early 1870’s or the late 1880’s), Dellschau had led a secret existence as the secretary and draftsman for the Sonora Aero Club, an organization frequently mentioned in Dellschau’s notes. Navarro envisioned the club as a group of pioneer aeronauts located in the central California mining communities of Sonora and Columbia who were advised by a shadowy parent organization known as NYMZA (an acronym extracted by Navarro from Dellschau’s code) in the construction of “aeros” equipped with futuristic innovations like retractable landing gear, gas propulsion systems, and airborne lavatories. For almost a quarter of a century Navarro’s research has titillated alternative-science theorists, some of whom have speculated that NYMZA may have acquired its advanced technology from extraterrestrial advisers.
Navarro was also accepted as the definitive Dellschau source by more-conventional scholars. In Texas Folk Art: One Hundred Fifty Years of the Southwestern Tradition, an otherwise authoritative survey published in 1981, Navarro’s conclusions that Dellschau’s whereabouts before the 1880’s were mysterious and that he participated in the high-flying activities of the Sonora Aero Club are presented as fact.
In recent years, however, Dellschau’s life and work have also been subjected to more skeptical examination. William Steen, a conservator at the Menil Collection in Houston, has combed census archives and other public records, attempting to establish a factual chronology of Dellschau’s life. Steen found that Dellschau, at age twenty, had entered the U.S. through the port of Galveston in 1850, one of tens of thousands of German immigrants to come to Texas in the mid-1800’s. In 1856 Dellschau applied for U.S. citizenship in Harris County; four years later he received his Letters of Citizenship in Fort Bend County. A year after becoming a citizen he married 32-year-old Antonia Hilt, who had a 4-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. In 1865 Dellschau, who had fought for the Confederacy, signed the Amnesty Oath. The pardoned rebel’s height was recorded as five feet three inches, his hair color auburn, his eyes hazel, his complexion fair, his occupation butcher. He resided in Richmond, Fort Bend County, about 25 miles southwest of Houston. Over the next two decades Dellschau raised his own three children and saw his stepdaughter married to a saddlemaker named Anton Stelzig, acquired land in Richmond, and lost his 6-year-old son and his wife within two weeks in 1877. Ten years later Dellschau moved with his stepdaughter and her husband to Houston, where Stelzig ran a saddle shop; according to anecdotal accounts, Dellschau briefly worked at Stelzig Saddlery as a cranky, uncongenial clerk. The family moved to the house on Stratford Street in 1908, and there the 78-year-old Dellschau undertook the autumnal opus for which he will be remembered.
Steen’s chronology explodes the notion that Dellschau’s life was a blank page before his arrival in Houston, to be filled with tales of a secret career in aeronautical research in California. But Steen himself believes that it’s likely Dellschau did travel to California sometime between 1856 and 1860; at least one other resident of Richmond is known to have gone to California during the gold rush.
If Dellschau was in California in the 1850’s, it is possible that he saw a balloon demonstration or even assisted at one. By then, barnstorming balloonists were crisscrossing the United States in hydrogen-filled aerostats, staging highly publicized demonstration flights at venues as far west as Oakland. At the same time, inventor-entrepreneurs were demonstrating flying models of powered airships and trying to finance full-scale versions (some of them strikingly like Dellschau’s drawings) capable of carrying dozens of passengers across the continent.
But given the mania for lighter-than-air exploits in the popular media of the day, the lack of any independent record of the Sonora Aero Club is telling; “aero clubs” were actually the rage in the first decade of the twentieth century, when sport ballooning enjoyed a vogue. Nevertheless, Dellschau’s Sonora Aero Club may represent an embroidery of his own history. Perhaps while in California he met regularly with a group of would-be aeronauts whose dreams of riding in the clouds were much discussed but never came close to realization. Or maybe Dellschau was merely an avid reader of newspaper accounts during the pre—Civil War balloon craze, a passion that was rekindled by the airplanes, zeppelins, and aero clubs that were making news more than half a century later, when he began to draw.
We will probably never know. Perhaps the miracle described in Dellschau’s mysterious notebooks isn’t the presence of advanced technology in a gold rush mining town but the story of the immigrant butcher who returned from his California adventure, got married, fought in a brutal war, raised his family, buried his wife and child, stood grumpily at a saddle shop counter, and in some secret recess kept alive his visions of flying, finally recording his youthful dreams in the years when most men await their death. And perhaps the lesson that Charles August Albert Dellschau, speaking for all self-taught artists, teaches us is that regardless of who or where we are, in the spirit and the imagination we all can fly.
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