Once revered as a talent on the rise, Tom Blodgett has discarded nearly everything but his dreams

THIRTY YEARS ago, Tom Blodgett was living the good life as a successful, perhaps brilliant, Eugene artist. He had art degrees from Lewis & Clark College and the University of Oregon. He was a popular art teacher at Lane Community College. He was selling work both here and in New York City, creating drawings that fellow artists say are among the best in the Northwest.

Today, Blodgett lives in a house that is falling down around him, with peeling floors, broken windows and plumbing that no longer works. His wife left long ago, as did most of his friends. If you saw him on the street, you'd probably take him for homeless. At the age of 58, Blodgett is dependent on the good graces of a handful of idealistic young art students for food, for cigarettes, even for art supplies to continue his drawing and painting.

What went wrong? For Blodgett, the answer is simple: "I discovered the secret of art," he says, his face spread in a wry smile. Others who have known Blodgett for years suggest other answers, equally simple. "He burns his bridges," says a former colleague, with whom Blodgett literally came to blows one night. "He alienates the very people he's trying to convince. None of us likes to be called a prostitute and whore."

But beyond all the words - and Blodgett is a man of many, many words - there stands his work: sublime, ecstatic drawings and paintings, as powerful as any you'll find in Eugene. So good he won the Mayor's Art Show in 1990. So good he could probably sell them through galleries almost anywhere - if only he would.

Blodgett's images are piling up by the hundred - by the thousand, even - thumbtacked unframed to walls and lying in unprotected piles, molding in the damp of his decaying home. Charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, pastels, oils, finished portraits, brooding landscapes, erotic nudes, the whole artistic gamut, seldom let out to see the light of day. Finally there is The Painting, as Blodgett always pronounces it, a huge canvas in the back room, a monstrous work that leans against a wall and sags under the weight of years of accumulated brushwork, a fantastic study in motion and light. "Death of an Idolator." A life's work sprung from a life spinning out of control.

"Nobody in this state has even gotten a painting into the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Blodgett says. "And that painting, or one of its brothers, is going to be the first."

Art and anorexia

Blodgett saw his first psychiatrist when he was 10 years old, the year he stopped eating and nearly died. Born in Oregon City, he grew up with a father who wanted him to be a baseball star and a mother who took him to the Baptist church, where he would kneel on the floor, facing backwards into the pew, and draw. "I started drawing when I was 3 1/2 years old," he says. "The first thing I drew was my brother's Model T car." One day he just stopped eating.

"No one understood what was wrong," he says. "I kept doing everything. I played sports. I drew. But I couldn't eat. I would throw up all the time. It was like being anorexic, which is what, people theorize now, it was. ... I just couldn't do what I needed to do." His 10-year-old world already seethed with a kind of childish magic, which had its own arcane rules: Friday was a magic day, because he knew he didn't get sick on Fridays. If he dropped his soap in the shower, though, he knew the sickness was coming on fast. If his youthful life was complicated, his teachers were indulgent, and often let him draw with chalk much of the time during class. Finally, the hospital. "I just remember blacking out. The tunnel, the light, the train, all the things people remember when they die. The doctor saying, 'He's dying.' My mother crying. And I remember coming back to life. ..."

The young artist soon found himself face to face with a doctor who wanted to talk to him about his drawings, which the adults around him had begun to find disturbing. "It was a lot of stuff about God and sex and masturbation," he says. "I had all kinds of sexual fantasies all worked out. And I drew all these animals fighting and killing each other, because that's what was going on in my head." The condition passed as mysteriously as it had come on. "One day I was just well," he says. "I woke up and started eating. They told me I had a rare virus."

Art and the academy

Blodgett studied art at Lewis & Clark and then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he received a master of fine arts degree in 1966. Ken O'Connell, now an art professor at the UO, remembers encountering Blodgett as a graduate student when he arrived there as an undergraduate. "He immediately struck me as an interesting and different painter," O'Connell says. "In those days most everybody would stretch canvas on frames and paint it white. Blodgett started his paintings with a black background. Right away I walked up and introduced myself."

Tall, intense, charismatic, Blodgett went on to become a popular teacher of art at Lane Community College, where he was hired on the staff soon after getting his MFA, and at the UO, where he taught as an adjunct professor. "He was a very effective teacher, very personal," says LCC art instructor Harold Hoy, who has also known Blodgett since graduate school days. "He dealt with his students on a very intimate, personal level. He was one of the instructors that brought in other forms of art. He talked about poetry, writing short stories. He tried to interest the students in that direction along with the visual arts."

Art and alcohol

As Blodgett became a successful artist, he also became a drunk. The two conditions were inseparable for years, as he taught students, sold paintings, made friends and drank himself over the edge. "I did really good academic painting that got bought," he says. "I played their game, and it like to have killed me. Only I didn't die - I just drank and drank." Enraged by a political squabble, Blodgett quit his job at LCC and began supporting himself with manual labor.

Twelve years ago, he quit drinking for good. Like many recovering alcoholics, Blodgett was stunned to discover that he'd given up more than drinking. "The sad thing I found out when I quit drinking was that alcohol was my one link to most of the people in the world." But there was even worse news than that. Blodgett found out he could no longer draw. "I would sit there in front of a piece of paper and make a few marks," he says. "And I would look for the bottle, and it wasn't there. I couldn't think. I went through convulsions. I had no spirit. I hated God. I was dead."

Art and aggression

Blodgett is tall and thin, with muscular forearms made sinewy by years of holding pencil and brush. The tip of his left index finger is missing, legacy of an accident while working for the railroad. His hair is gray, close cropped, as is his beard. He has the coiled energy of a predator.

"I could kill you right now and nothing would ever happen to me," he said to me out of the blue one day. "I have the nut jacket to get me off. It would just be called a psychotic episode." It's that kind of abrasive pronouncement that has soured much of the world on Blodgett - especially the art world, which he professes to despise at the same time he seems to be desperately seeking its approval. Always, Blodgett is on the attack. America is a nation utterly devoid of culture, except for a few remnants in New York, he says. We are a nation of frauds. There are no artists worthy of the name in Oregon, excepting himself, he says.

"Americans don't understand art," he says. "They believe illustration is art. In their mind art is just something in your head. An opinion! We don't know what ugly is. We laugh about beauty and make a big deal about ugly. Do you ever watch television? I firmly believe that creative people in this country have all been changed or altered - they've capitulated or been driven mad."

Like many who have stumbled across a big truth in life, Blodgett is seized with it, held captive, apparently powerless to resist its force and majesty. Beauty is truth and truth is beauty, as he is fond of saying; beyond that he cannot, or will not, see. His views on art are so uncompromising that Blodgett might be an Old Testament prophet, crying out in the wilderness, shrieking truth, shunned by his own time. But he insists he's no prophet.

Two years ago, O'Connell brought Eugene gallery owner Candy Moffett to Blodgett's home to see if she might be able to sell some of his work and help him get some money together to repair his house. Impressed by the work, Moffett - who had been on a jury that awarded one of Blodgett's drawings Best of Show in the Eugene Mayor's Art Show in 1990 - offered to try selling some of his small nature drawings for $100 each. That would have been, she says, a typical start for a gallery relationship with an artist.

But Blodgett was incensed. "She was the most condescending... She was insulting. She came here and offered me $100. She's an enemy!"

After years of verbal and artistic sparring, former LCC art department colleague Craig Spilman and Blodgett literally put on boxing gloves and had at it one night. The match, Blodgett insists, wasn't a real fight. "And he hit me 100 times more than I hit him," he says. Just beneath the surface, he admits, neither man was kidding. "I don't know what the story is with Tom," says Spilman, who still teaches at LCC. "He is so tremendously talented. A compulsive image maker. He produces and produces. I used to think he was powerful. Now I think he's terribly afraid. He is an extremely frightened person."

Spilman doesn't hesitate in his assessment of Blodgett's art. "I would consider him to be the strongest draw-ist, person in drawing, in the entire Northwest," he says. "There is a dark side that comes out in his work even when he's doing portraits. He picks up fear in people."

Art and alchemy

Blodgett won't just tell you "the secret of art." "It's not the kind of secret you could just hand to somebody," he says. But he does throw out hints, as he sits on a day bed in his gloomy living room, drawing obsessively on a lined notebook page with a plain yellow pencil, finally covering the entire sheet with a nearly unbroken sheen of graphite. "The piece is in the paper," he says. "I know, now, how the Old Masters made those drawings. You'd have to spend a lot of time doing this, building up a visual literacy. It's the kind of secret that requires pure ability. You don't need to think about images or anything. That will come. It's the weave. The weave of the universe. That's what this is all about."

As Blodgett tried to put his life back together without alcohol, he learned to draw all over again, coming to trust the ancient process of translating the world into areas of line and form, light and shade. Some of the process has been frankly mystical in nature, and Blodgett talks of lines that "appear" on the page without his help. His perceptions altered. He began to see the emptiness of some paintings - "paintings that weren't there," he calls them - and the mastery of others. He worships Van Gogh. Velasquez. Seurat. Pollock.

"It's not in your hand," he says. "It's not in your vision. It's in the painting."

Lately, Blodgett has been trying to share the secrets of art with a handful of young art students, who have heard about him one way or another and have made their way to his doorstep. One, 20-year-old Jonas Rake, comes by once a week or so, showing his recent work and getting assignments and critiques. In the beginning, he admits, Blodgett just made him angry - but Rake kept coming back anyway, surprised to find an art teacher who wasn't reluctant to offer solid criticism and advice. "Tom is not afraid to offend me at all," Rake says. "And it does get offensive. On the other hand if he didn't want to do that, I wouldn't be learning. I would just be making crap. I have to humble myself to force myself to go over there. I really have to shut up and hear what he has to say sometimes, rather than trying to say what I think."

The church and The Painting

For a man who lives in near total poverty, Blodgett doesn't mind dreaming big. He would like to paint a church, a giant, epic endeavor, a Sistine Chapel for the 21st century. The man who can't afford tubes of paint to finish a single canvas goes to bed at night imagining an artistic cathedral, the pews, the spires - every surface covered with art. "I know I can do it," he says. "I want to paint the Last Supper, the Final Judgment. I know I can do it, and then people want me to shoot at a level that's so far below that. I've got it in me. If I can just get to that place where that happens, I would know I've made a difference. I will have changed the world."

Meanwhile, for the last 10 years, ever since he got his feet back on the ground after quitting drinking, Blodgett has been at work on the same large oil painting. Hung in an unheated back room, the only light on it from a nearby window covered with cobwebs, "Death of an Idolator" represents Blodgett's headiest excursion into the secrets of art. From a hand that can draw anything, it represents practically nothing recognizable, at least at first. The image looks like a swirling mass of yellow and green daubs of paint, with a rift in the middle, and something like a human figure in the upper left.

But stand there a minute, and as your eyes swim around inside it, the painting begins to open a hole in the fabric of the universe. The painting is amazing. It may even be a great work of art, though in the end that will be for history to judge. Here's how gallery owner Moffett describes seeing the same painting two years ago: "It was like warped time. I can't put my finger on any composition right now of that painting, other than it was a mass of color and texture. But it was emotionally totally absorbing. Every time I tried to look at it, the picture constantly made me move around in it. It held you, almost captive. There are not many paintings that push me that much that I can think of. I can think of probably a dozen. It made me feel pushed, is the best word I can use. It totally sucked you in."

Blodgett would like to see work like "Death of an Idolator" become the foundation of a new generation of painting. "America could create art like the world has never seen," he says. "It would take somebody like me, and some other people, sticking with it, finding something that goes beyond formulas and techniques. We have to reinvent painting."