Marathon artist ‘Chicken’ George Zupp reflects on life after the fire that destroyed his toilet
MARATHON — The bells at Paris’ famed Notre Dame cathedral again rang above the City of Lights Saturday night after a conflagration at the Gothic landmark almost destroyed it five years ago. The dongs were a joyous sound of rebirth for Parisians who still don’t know how the fire started.
The only thing ringing in “Chicken” George Zupp’s new bathroom is an occasional bellow from a bowel and the final gurgles of a flush. Chicken has been through a swing of moods the last couple months after a September 28 fire destroyed a new building and bathroom, both nearing completion, that would have added a bit of refinement to his rugged desert living on the outskirts of Marathon.
Chicken is well known in Marathon for his bizarre compound of shacks, steepled roofs, trailers and odds and ends scattered amongst the creosote outside of town — situated across from the odd collection of colorful papercrete buildings of the La Loma del Chivo hostel/Airbnb. He’s also known as an accomplished artist; his thick, colorful paintings depicting Far West Texas life have shown at numerous galleries nationwide. He sells his work anywhere and everywhere — at galleries, online, at events or from inquiries he gets.
We’re sitting by his studio-slash-home drinking a beer, and for me, a couple shots of tequila he made sure to have on hand. Directly across from us is all that’s left after the fire — a concrete foundation and a pile of burnt wood. Rammy, the speckle-striped herding dog of some mangled variety, wanders around, stopping occasionally to beg for affection. We’re talking about the fire — the good, bad and ugly it’s produced in his life now at age 56. Chicken talks in a bit of a low grumble and always has a bewildered look on his face, which one might call a ruggedly handsome hillbilly mug if he gave a damn and embraced it. His hair is always shaven, but his face likely not, and he often dons a straw cowboy hat.
Chicken was in San Marcos when the fire broke out — likely an “electrical f-up” he reckons, but he stares at the dirt and expands on the possible cause. “I don’t know how the fire started. I wasn’t here to see it. It’s been a who-done-it Clue game, and everybody here was really nervous when I got back. But after all the figuring, the experts chimed in that it was electric or ion batteries or the red Baptist satellite lasers — which we all agreed it had to be lasers.”
He’s already constructed a new outhouse with plumbing next to the barren foundation and piles of ash and wood where a new studio building would have sat. “I don’t know how to set a toilet,” he says, showing me his handiwork. The toilet is not flush against any wall and sits diagonally in the middle of the room, and most of the roof is missing. But its installation is an achievement that gives him mixed emotions, sometimes fervent with the attitude of a phoenix, sometimes downtrodden that $15,000 in construction and equipment were left in a smoldering heap.
Chicken recalls one of his first reactions after the fire, pondering the survival of a stack of porn magazines that had lain deteriorating in a box for over a decade inside the bathroom. “That box was in there, but when the building collapsed along with two other new side buildings, the firefighters took to dousing the whole pile down, hitting the box and blowing pages of porn all over the fire site,” he says. “The fire chief said, ‘You never know what you’re gonna find at a site.’ I was looking down at the ground and saw a lady’s butthole. There was that along with a box of my high school history of the occult and strange religions — and 1970s horror comics were blown all over the place. It looked like a magic trick had gone bad and exploded the building. The sheriff’s department and the Border Patrol showed up to see if it was a blown meth lab. Nope. Just a catastrophe of idiocy!”
Beans
Chicken is in a lot behind a row of studios in Marfa stirring a pot of beans heated by propane below. He doesn’t stop stirring. “George, why do you keep stirring the beans?” I ask. “You never stop stirring.” He looks at me like I’m stupid, but in a kindly way, as if I were a child merely unwinding life’s mysteries. “So they don’t stick,” he says. “They’ll stick to the bottom of the pan if I don’t keep stirring.” We eat the beans later standing in the studio space. They’re good, soft and warm with cheese and other garnishes.
I don’t ask him about the origin of “Chicken,” because I’ve heard it and it’s simple: He painted a bunch of chickens during a stint in San Marcos after he found they sold well. Sometimes “Bone” gets added — “Chicken Bone George” — but to me that’s too much, kind of like the famous late Marfan named Chili (sometimes Chile) Bean Ridley whom you could call “Chili” or “Bean” but never “Chili Bean.”
I’m looking at some of Chicken’s paintings he’s hauled from Marathon to Marfa to sell out of Myles Glynn’s studio. Chicken often turns grotesque into fun, although maybe the deranged kind. His work features characters from his life in Far West Texas. Their visages and outlines are rough, almost garbled, and the scenery features a lot of booze bottles, boobs and butts.
I note to him a couple favorites of mine — a cowboy raucously riding a goat, which has been a hit for him. But I’m drawn to a scene with a woman dumping a body from a lounge chair into what looks to be a fire pit, with a garish face of a man dumping a bottle of something on it. Behind them are a cowboy that looks like he’s riding a bull sidesaddle while in rigor mortis and a naked woman relieving herself in a bucket. Many of his works feature the highs and lows of men and women simply having a good time over food and liquor, although in a world that’s not quite right. They’re figurative works, but as if the painter’s subjects were denizens of a rugged landscape defiled by debauchery and captured in thick globs of colorful paint.
Back at his home studio, Chicken says he isn’t sure if the fire will inform many paintings, but he suddenly channels some optimism. “I am going to build back better studio-wise. I have been making these new elite lines of work called flaming outhouses to work down the loss of the whole mess.” He shows me one piece, an outhouse violently burning and spreading to a wild hog. “There was no hog present for the real fire,” he says. “But in this painting, I just figured no matter how hot the fire got they would want to BBQ themselves over it. So, it fits in.”
Being one of the more popular residents of Marathon — with a population that’s on the decline sinking below 400 now — Chicken still had plenty of people ready to jump to his aid. But he eschewed a GoFundMe campaign to help him rebuild. “I’ll just sell more paintings,” he says.
The compound
Chicken’s origin story has been reported widely: growing up in high school near Houston, school at Texas State University for painting, then UTSA for sculpture, living with Enrique Madrid, the renowned historian, in Redford, living with James Evans, the accomplished photographer, in Marathon — all in a variety of living spaces. He finally seems to have settled on the property he bought in Marathon.
As we walk through his compound, a circle of ramshackle buildings with some trailers, I note that desert plants are accompanied by little plantings of ceramic tea cups and other little ornaments of, well, junk. “People like to give me stuff,” Chicken says. And so, each little gift has its place amongst the plants. He and visitors, a cadre of young guys that often visit and stay, leave markings in Sharpie — little pithy sayings or meaningless scripts on walls and supporting 2-by-4 studs. Inside his cramped studio, it’s a mishmash of works in progress, sketches, objects found, objects left. The defining anchor, though, is a long table filled with the remnants of hardened paint, lumpy blobs of colors, that stretches the length of his studio.
His proximity to the La Loma del Chivo guest quarters leads to interactions with tourists, which he finds entertaining. One of his Facebook posts makes the case: “A lot of people are irritated by the tourists walking around, but I actually like them. It’s a great opportunity to bullshit. Like yesterday, a couple walked up on my place and asked me where was I gonna spend Thanksgiving?” ‘I only got 17 more Thanksgivings left,’ I responded. And she asks, ‘Oh why is that?’ ‘Well, I went to my folks’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. Ma bought 30 Hungry Man Thanksgiving dinners for me. They don’t want to deal with it anymore.’”
The compound is the starting place for many of Chicken’s other dabblings, such as video snippets and short films posted on social media. Sometimes they are stories, sometimes just musings on whatever has been bothering or interesting him. His videos have an air of horror to them, as if a chainsaw massacre or planted-bodies-to-BBQ Motel Hell venture is about to erupt.
In one video, he walks a desert dirt road eating a slice of frozen chocolate cake, reenacting the story he’s about to tell. Shirtless, with paunch, curled chest hair and cowboy hat, he recounts, “I realized I had this one event … that laid the foundations for who I am out here in West Texas.” It happened in 2002 while he was living in Evans’ barn, and he pried off a piece of the cake left in a freezer and began to walk the streets in the hot summer sun. “I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten frozen cake, but it’s like gnawing on a brick,” he says.
A family checking into his neighbor’s Airbnb peered over a balcony to watch the strange figure dropping cake from his mouth and eventually spitting it all over the ground. When the family asked, “Who the hell is this guy,” his neighbor responded, “Oh, he’s the resident artist.” The family then declined to stay at the rental.
“It dawned on me what my purpose was in this town,” Chicken says. “It’s to repel the gentrifiers.”
Chicken has withstood what Far West Texas has thrown at him — isolation, loneliness, the lack of comforts, and now, he even admits, the company of a woman. But the fire wasn’t going to drive him away and send him down in the dumps. He’s here to stay, stirring the local pot so the beans don’t stick.
“I was getting used to hanging out here in this town,” he says in a video posted on Facebook recently. “They didn’t think I would last that long out here. But with enough beer, music blasting and coffee, you can do anything.”
You see more of Chicken’s work at www.georgezupp.com and @gzuppcollection.