Jon Serl

1894-1993 · Lake Elsinore, California, USA

Vaudeville kid, Hollywood voice actor, fruit picker, and finally, for his last fifty years, a painter of jittery souls on scavenged board.

The life

Born Joseph Searls in Olean, New York in 1894, Serl grew up travelling the vaudeville circuit with his theatrical family and went through life shedding names: Slats on the stage, Ned Palmer doing voice work in Hollywood, Jerry Palmer picking fruit. He kept company with film stars and worked seasonal harvests, and in the late 1940s in Southern California, wanting pictures for his walls and short of cash, he started painting his own. He never stopped, producing over 1,200 paintings before his death at Lake Elsinore in 1993, aged 98.

The work

Oil on found board, often in pigments he invented himself, in earth tones and odd pastels. His stretched, agitated figures gesture and mug like performers who never left the stage, the whole footlit world of his childhood replayed in paint. He is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Why we love them

A man with four names and one voice, which turned out to be paint. The vaudeville never ended; it just changed medium.

Go deeper

• Jon Serl at the Outsider Art Fair
• Jon Serl on Wikipedia
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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