The Renaissance man

Admit it. When you think of needlepoint tapestries, the first image that comes to mind is a granny figure, hunched over in a chair like Whistler’s mother, painstakingly sewing away on a piece of cloth that, upon completion, will read something like: “Home Sweet Home.”

You may not think of needlepoint as art.

But Sacramento artist D.R. Wagner does, and he’s got the fabric to prove it. Wagner is the subject of a 30-year retrospective at two Davis galleries, a museum and a library this fall.

Actually, the term “artist” doesn’t quite serve Wagner. He’s also a poet, composer and musician; he’s published books and magazines, and once he ran an art gallery in Sacramento called the Open Ring Gallery. Since 1989, he’s been a lecturer in the design department at the University of California at Davis, where he teaches classes including one titled Design and Visual Culture.

“Two hundred and twenty kids out there, waiting to find out what the world’s all about,” Wagner enthuses. “And I have a great time with them. I do everything. I was just reviewing the beginning of Yellow Submarine, to show them what graphics looked like at that time because the opening sequence with ‘Eleanor Rigby’—when they start bonking all of Pepperland—is exactly what that period looked like, when they went back to drawing all the graphics instead of using machine graphics.

“In 1968, they didn’t have photocopying machines. Everyone was using their hands again to draw, and getting away from all that modern look,” Wagner says.

That modern look is something you can’t accuse Wagner of chasing after, either. Framed examples of his obsession with the decidedly archaic medium of needlepoint rest against shelves and chairs in what should be the living room of his house in suburban South Land Park. He has been getting the pieces back on loan from various collectors, to hang in his retrospective. The first showing, at Pence Gallery on D Street in Davis, was up through September and closes Friday, October 4; the second, at UC Davis’ Memorial Union Gallery, opened September 23 and runs through November 1; the third, at UC Davis’ Design Museum, opens October 13 and runs through November 15; and the fourth event in his retrospective opened September 26 at UC Davis’ Shields Library and runs through December 14.

The tapestries, which range from postcard-sized to larger pieces about the size of an open gatefold album cover, are hand-sewn by Wagner using colored floss. He does precisely 625 stitches per square inch and uses a grid for reference. “I don’t do it with a machine,” he says. “That’s the amazing part about this—there’s over a hundred pieces in the show.” Laughing, he continues, “I sat on my ass for a long time.”

You might think it takes an incredible amount of patience. Wagner disagrees. “I don’t think it’s patience,” he says. “I think it’s persistence. I want to see what the thing is going to look like. And nobody else is going to do this, that’s for sure. So, I keep plugging away until, eventually, I get a picture.”

It can be difficult, given Wagner’s busy household, with his wife, Frannie; twin teenage daughters; and two dogs competing for his time. “I can usually do a piece in a couple of weeks, if they leave me alone,” he says. “Maybe less. Other pieces, I work on for months because it’s so complex. I keep thinking of new shit to put in it. Then, I put text in it, and the problem is that I keep working right out to the edge, and then I can’t frame the darn thing.”

The floss Wagner uses has nothing to do with teeth. Each one is woven from six strands of colored thread, and his palette is a huge case with drawers full of spools. Sometimes, Wagner will combine strands of floss for his own custom blend. “I’ll take the different colors apart, and I’ll put them back together, in order to get stuff like this sky in the background,” he says, holding up a tapestry with an iridescent field of color that’s difficult to describe. “I make that color up by blending other colors,” he says.

One of the rooms in the Design Museum show will be built to accommodate Wagner’s interest in a certain kind of trompe l’œil, made possible with that old staple of the stoner counterculture, the ultraviolet or black light. “A piece looks OK in normal light, like this one here,” Wagner says, picking up a tapestry in which the antlers, head and body of a buck deer can be seen, hidden in bluish camouflage. “But, when you put black light on it, this guy lights up, and all of this glows and reacts to the ultraviolet light,” he adds. “It’s a special kind of floss.” Another of his pieces depicts a low urban skyline, with the twin towers of the World Trade Center hidden in the sky above. Yes, it sounds Franklin Mint kitschy, but Wagner’s version is anything but.

At that same show will be some rugs Wagner designed, one for the Navajo nation, along with a video of an animated 20-foot-by-40-foot “electronic tapestry” Wagner designed for a marquee at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

“It looked like it was stitched,” Wagner says. “It was fun. It was a really weird experience because when I went to the computer room there to program the reader board, these two guys with shotguns came over. They opened the door, and we walked to the back of the sports book.”

They went to a closet-like space that offered the only point inside the casino from which the light board could be observed, he said, “and it was like Scrooge McDuck’s money bin—money, cash, all over the place! Piles of it!”

It wasn’t the most familiar sight for Wagner, being an artist. “Nothing I ever did has made any big money,” he says laughing.

Wagner, who turns 59 in November, grew up in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and later moved to Phoenix and Albuquerque, N.M. After his father, who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission, died of lymphoma, Wagner moved back to Niagara Falls, where his mother taught school. Then 13, Wagner was the eldest of five kids. He got married at 18, but that didn’t work out. Then, he played rock ’n’ roll, and then an interest in poetry prompted Wagner to set up his own publishing company in 1965.

“I ran out of stuff to read,” he says.

“I published a lot of American poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, all those people,” he says. “And d.a. levy.”

Wagner also published magazines. “Probably the most infamous one was called The Eight Pager, named after those Tijuana bibles.”

Examples of these, along with poetry scrapbooks, manuscripts and books Wagner has written will be on display at the Shields Library show, in the special collections area on the north side of the first floor. In the library’s lobby, display cases will contain posters, early needlework, some magazine articles Wagner has written and some illustrations he’s done for various books.

By the early 1970s, Wagner was in a touring rock band named Runcible Spoon, which was cultivating a leisurely existence in the Bahamas. “We were hitchhiking on sailboats and playing on the islands,” he recalls. “I wanted to draw, and there was nothing to draw with on the boat. So, I went below deck and found a needle and a bunch of floss. Show you what I did,” he says, pulling out an old pair of jeans with various mandala-like embroideries. When the band later moved to England, Wagner found himself pursuing his newfound passion for embroidery more seriously, even though an art critic there wasn’t exactly offering encouragement. “ ‘That’s not very inventive is it?’ ” Wagner mimics him, speaking in a stuffy upper-class accent. “ ‘It’s the same thing over and over again—same stitch. It’s decorative.’ They’ve since come around to my way of thinking; I’ve been published in two books there.”

After the band ran its course, Wagner moved to Sacramento, where he reactivated his publishing activities. “Most of the people I published were California writers,” he says. “At that time, Sacramento was the coolest place to be. Ben Hiatt, Wally Depew and Len Fulton were all out here, publishing.”

Wagner got a job in the music business for a distributor called Canterbury Records. He got a job at California State University at Sacramento, where he brought Jim Morrison to do his first poetry reading in 1970, with Wagner and Michael McClure. “He started handing out the pages of his book to the audience,” Wagner recalls. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘They can read it; I’m not gonna read it.’ ” Morrison needed some help. “He got his friend Jack Daniel’s,” Wagner says. “And Jack helped him a lot—after about a fifth.”

Wagner also operated a collective called the Open Ring Gallery on K Street and in other venues. “We did the songwriter’s showcase there,” he says, “and what’s now the Sacramento Poetry Center—they started there. We did dance. We did everything. There was nothing at the time. This town was dead. And I did that for years.”

These days, when Wagner isn’t stitching a new work or teaching at UC Davis, he’s most likely making music. His reformed band, whose name is now shortened to R. Spoon, recently completed a year-long recording project at an Applegate recording studio owned by keyboard player Michael Madden. The result is an 18-song CD called Songs Nobody Ever Heard. It sounds like comfortable-old-shoe music along the lines of The Band and Bob Dylan. Wagner is also working at composing ambient music that may or may not be featured at his art exhibits. If he doesn’t get around to it, it’s just because he was just too damned busy doing something else.

“I’m having a blast,” he says, which is exactly what a contemporary Renaissance man is supposed to say.