In California: Lint Is Art

By Gregory Jaynes

Not to make too much of it, but Slater Barron is a lint artist.

A what?

An artist whose medium is lint.

Oh, like before Easter.

No, not Lent, lint -- like in your pocket.

So what kind of fuzzball are we talking about here?

We're not talking fuzzball, we're talking art, using fuzzballs, ahem, lint.

Barron gets so tired of talk that runs like that, and yet it happens all the time. "I've been working with lint so long, I don't see it as anything but an art material," she says. "Artists work with weird materials, or what some people see as weird. I'm not any different from any other artist."

She does not mean that she is not any different from any other artist, rather, that her individuality is not so rare when one considers the art scene. Or at least that is what one gathers in Slater Barron's presence -- that and lint.

Come again? Say that straight.

Art doesn't have to be linear --

But you do.

Why?

Art doesn't have to be understood.

You have a point.

Slater Barron: born East Orange, N.J., 1930; graduated Susquehanna University, 1951, degree in sociology; 1951-53, child-welfare work; 1953-55, U.S. Navy officer; 1955, marriage to U.S. Marine; 1963, art course for military wives while stationed in France; 1963-74, moving, moving, moving, mother of four children, trying to paint and cook and sew and clean house until one day, as she was working in oils, the buzzer went off on the dryer and a light bulb went on in her head. Lint!

"There were so many clothes, so much washing interrupting my painting," she recalls. "I was just trying to turn a detriment to my advantage." A little glue, a little canvas, a little lint -- in time she began to regard it as "so painterly." Still, there was the artist's dilemma: "What did I want it to say for me? I was looking for strong social commentary. I didn't want it to be a decorative thing. And then, of course! It could speak for what it was. The work became much more three dimensional."

Her art is about nostalgia, Barron says, for lint is nostalgic. It is about the fragility of life, and disintegration and death. And yet on the surface it has "the soft look of impressionism." One imagines a sort of shaggy Monet's Flower Garden, done in dust balls.

In 1975, a year after she turned from oils to lint, Barron was divorced and, she says, happily so. The last stop in the peripatetic life of a military wife was Long Beach, and there she settled in a stucco house with a cedar-shake roof, palms and jacarandas along the street, rosebushes and jasmines running along the fence. From this base she would attain a master's in fine arts, a job teaching at nearby Brooks College and a world of lint. Friends, neighbors, students began to save it for her.

Is this kitsch, or is this art?

Art is a personal thing, like plaid pants, so pipe down.

Something broody crept into her work. From flowers, fashioned from lint and showcased in acrylic boxes, came scenes. An intimate birthday party, with a chocolate cake, flowers and candles on the table, two figures seated across from each other, and the artist's comment: "All the romantic items -- the roses and things -- sometimes obscure the other person. There is tension between the people. But it's a birthday! You still observe it. But the food might taste like lint."

From old photographs, Barron chronicled her family with lint portraits, and the results in some instances are haunting. Stand back, and there is a vibrant wedding party, the artist in the middle as a young flower girl; look close, and there is a jungle of fibers that came from the cuffs on your least favorite trousers. She has done four studies of her aged mother, who has been ravaged by Alzheimer's disease. In one there is a woman toddling along in a jogging suit, and in another there is a bent-down crone who has lost her mind.

She make any money?

As much as $800, as little as $17.76.

Good paint-and-body man makes more.

And has less anguish. Listen.

Occasionally Barron creates whole lint rooms, or "conceptual environmentals," or simply, as she often puts it, installations. One of the most intriguing was called Six o'Clock News. Its inspiration: "I would visit my parents, and they would be watching the news, not knowing what was going on, just sitting there with the TV, lost." It is an 18-ft. by 27-ft. room -- in all, enough lint to fill a U-Haul van, ceiling to floor, which it does. It is like one of those Koren cartoons in The New Yorker -- everything and everybody is fuzzy -- except it is not at all funny.

To put together such a thing, she pastes lint to the furnishings in the room and the wire figures that represent her mother and late father. The worst part of it -- "drudge work," Barron says -- is the floors and walls. A project this size usually exhausts her lint supply.

Then her network kicks in. Pure white lint has long been the hardest to come by (not so in the days before disposable diapers). "After Christmas is always great lint," Barron says. "People wash things for the first time. And new towels. I can always tell when the neighbors buy new towels. There's some wonderful psychic energy going on around me when people do their wash."

Not only that, when she thinks of the linty road ahead, the artist remembers that "one old man came up to me at a show and said, 'If you've got lemons, make lemonade,' and I thought that was a good way to look at life."

You agree?

Sure. Lemons, lemonade. Lint, art. Makes sense, kind of.