Harley Francis, the Painter of Unicorns - in memoriam.

[Bruce Grenville]

HARLEY, THE PAINTER OF UNICORNS: IN MEMORIAM STAMP.

Occussi-Ambeno will issue a commemorative stamp on 27th March 2017, to celebrate the life of Terra Candella’s Painter of Unicorns, Harley, announced the Postmaster-General, Sir Hantuk Belagar, today.

The full-colour stamp is being printed in miniature sheets of three. It shows a portrait of Harley with cigar in hand. The stamp is valued at 30 cents (rate for inland letters in the Sultanate), and price for a full minisheet is 90c.

In the lower margin of the sheet is this quote, which sums up Harley well:
I am, above all else, a passionate and lifelong student of Art.

Harley, Terra Candella’s Painter of Unicorns
(October 15, 1940 – January 10, 2016)

Harley was born in New Albany, Indiana and lived in Graton, CA at the time of his death. He is survived by his partner Hamlet Mateo, his children Tristan Francis and Gabrielle Francis-Zenger, their mother, Harley’s former wife, Patricia Snow, his former partner Kevin Burton, his sister, Joyce Blair and his grandchildren.

Residents of Oberlin, the small college town in Ohio where Harley lived for many years, might, if they happened to be taking a late night walk during the late seventies, glimpse a bearded figure, cigar jutting from its mouth, moving about in the brightly lit, second floor art studio above the stores flanking one side of the town square. On a hot summer’s night one might, drawing closer, hear the faint strains of Italian opera. The studio, filled with ceramics, drawings, paintings, collage, jungle-like plants, and a neatly assembled jumble of old yet functional odds and ends of furniture and rugs, was a temple of sorts, perfumed with the incense of cigar smoke, and inhabited by that oddity of human society, an artist with no vocation other than art, no trust fund, and no day job.

Father and then grandfather, husband and partner, lover, friend, Harley lived a large and complex life driven by large and complex appetites. “Simply speaking,” he would say in his nasal, and sometimes acerbic manner, “My needs are greater than my fears.” He simultaneously embraced the artistic fantasy of royalty while being unabashedly true to his family’s Indiana farming roots, and he would often regale visitors to his studio with tales of his grandmother, who would fly out of the farmhouse and use a rake to club a snake out of a tree, then finish cooking a gargantuan breakfast concluded with several homemade pies.

Harley loved life and he wanted to live longer than he did. Even as his health declined, he adapted, as he always did, to continue making art. If he didn’t have money to buy paint and canvas, he would glue labels and tickets and cancelled stamps, bits of foil and cigar bands, to paper. When he could no longer stand upright to make large paintings, he sat and created smaller works. One of his chief survival tools was a wicked and sardonic wit, and his family members report that he made them laugh in the last few days of his life, even joking with the nurses as he returned to consciousness, in pain, after what was his final surgery in a hospital in Northern California, where he made his home for the past almost thirty years.

Harley’s art was never sold widely in famous galleries, though his extensive participation in the mail art movement made him known internationally; he survived through skilfully cultivating and maintaining a far-flung community of friends and acquaintances who would be invited to the house for dinner or a birthday party, and who might leave with a painting or set of drawings that had begun to speak to them, perhaps forcefully or, as Harley loved to say, sotto voce.

The painter of unicorns, the postmaster and resident ruler of Terra Candella, the Land of Light, has set down his brush. Plans are being made for a retrospective show of his work to serve as background for a memorial gathering, details to follow. Gifts and remembrances should be sent to Tristan Francis, 7985 SW 67th, Portland OR 97223.

Collectors wishing to buy this stamp may purchase them from the General Post Office in Baleksetung, or any Occussi-Ambeno Post Office or embassy.

[joey Patrickt]

my archive is blessed with Harley's signed communication from 1983

[Ruud Janssen]

Harley printed all his rubber for the archive.

[Ruud Janssen]