Anchor House Gallery

t was a raw March morning, snowflakes falling intermittently, when I met Kevin Bouricius. We had arranged an interview for 11 A.M. at his apartment in the Colonial Village complex; I had just gotten off the bus and was walking towards Kevin’s place when an old, red hatchback pulled up next to me. The driver was a middle-aged man, wearing a wool sweater, his head ringed by gray-brown hair. The man was Michael Tillyer, founding director of The Anchor House of Artists, a man I had come to know over the past couple weeks.

“Hop in,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”

I got in and we drove the 30 feet to the apartment. A minute later, I was sitting in a chair in Kevin's living room. Paintings and clusters of photographs covered the walls. In the middle of the room was a long keyboard, with several stacks of cassettes on top of it.

Kevin's a painter who’s had many shows in the Valley, as well as in Boston and New York. He 's also an artist who "lives with schizophrenia".

***

I'd heard about Anchor House from a friend. I called the gallery to ask about a job.

Michael answered the phone.

I was surprised. I’d expected to get a machine. “I’ve heard about what you do," I said. " You need any help?” "Sure," Michael said. "Why don't you come by and we'll talk."

On Valentine’s Day, I walked out of downtown Northampton with a slip of paper in my pocket. I'd written “518 Pleasant St.” on it. As I walked, the coffee shops and bookstores faded away, replaced by mini marts and liquor stores. In the shadow of a 50-foot SHELL sign, I found number 518. The building was set back from the street – shabby, gray, nondescript – a small stretch of crumbling asphalt separated it from the sidewalk. The place didn't look like an art gallery. A small white flag with a blue anchor on it hung near the side door. The flag lifted up with the breeze as I walked in, past the Executive Hair Salon, the Pioneer Valley Boxing Center, and a place called Molecular Metrology.

I introduced myself to Michael. "Go ahead and walk around, "he said. "Go ahead and look at the art." Kevin Bouricius' new show was set to open that evening. Fifteen paintings hung on the walls. They were all oils; their colors, vivid, their forms, soft and melting into each other. The style reminded me of Van Gogh, but it was unique to Kevin.

The opening crowd was sparse. Some representatives of the Valley’s more “refined” element stood in clusters, chatting. Others strolled through the three rooms, examining Kevin’s work, shopping for conversation pieces for their next dinner party.

A week later, Michael gave me a tour. Anchor House’s garage was cluttered with paint, jars, brushes, canvases, easels, and half-finished projects, strewn about on tables and on a counter around the edge of the room. We walked through several large, back rooms; they looked as though they'd been abandoned for years – dirty, filled with junk, paintings leaning against the walls.

“These rooms used to be galleries,” Michael said, “but we don’t have enough money to keep them open anymore.”

Michael told me what he needed me to do: The back room needed to be organized; Anchor's web site needed to be updated; a new mailing needed to be prepared. I said I'd be back the next week.

***

Kevin sat on a couch in his apartment, smoking a cigarette, facing Michael and me. He wore an orange T-shirt, jeans, and glasses. He was unshaven; his hair was thin, gray, and disheveled.

“It may be wrong to belong to anything," he said." But if I belong to something outside of a big art school, it would be Anchor House." Kevin's caseworker had referred him to the gallery, years ago. “I felt that I was wasting all my time before that,” he said. “And I got a really good feeling when I went to Anchor House. It was like, there was something to do, bring my pictures and show them off. When you don’t have a wife, you don’t have many friends, you don’t have the ability to get along with people very well…it fills a big hole there. And it’s enjoyable, it’s very enjoyable."

Kevin paused, then said, “I could become attached to a big art school, somehow. I suppose I could get funding, somehow, because I’ve had a disability. Maybe I could become part of a big art school somewhere, like maybe New York City, or Boston.”

“Is that something you’d want?” asked Michael.

“It seems like…it would give me something to do other than just sit around,” Kevin said. “I have to have something to say, or something to show, that's out of the ordinary. Because--- my life is very mundane, my life, with grocery shopping, and just…reading books and stuff…"

Kevin stopped to survey the walls. “I used to have a lot of dreams,” he said, lost in thought. “Dreams in which I saw scenes that I painted, or tried to paint. But even if it doesn’t come out like the dream, I’m glad that I did it. My idea now is to work with textures, and to just see what the texture looks like, and turn that into what object it is, or something like that. And put in all the shadows at the same time…’cause I’m good with abstract reasoning. That one,” he said, pointing, “the shadows are not correct, I realize that. The horse up there, the shadows are coming closer together in the foreground instead of farther apart.” He paused, then said, “I wanted do all these paintings outside, with the easel, but I’ve become much more withdrawn in recent years, into my dreams.”

***

A day later, Michael and I were in one of the gallery's back rooms. A new artist, someone who wasn't mentally ill, wanted to lease the largest of the rooms to use as a studio; the deal would provide Anchor House with some income. As we hauled out the trash, we began talking about the origins of Anchor House and Michael’s place in it.

Michael’s involvement with the mentally ill dates back to his teenage years, when he volunteered for a drug hotline. After college, he did social work and worked in a halfway house. He once worked in Northampton State Hospital; his job was to determine whether incoming patients needed to be institutionalized.

“My history and the artists’ histories are wrapped together,” Michael said. “Everyone’s been in the Valley a long time.”

There’s a binder full of clippings, photographs, and publicity materials that document Michael’s work since the late 80’s, when he first started working with artists. Michael began by working with prisoners in the Hampshire County House of Correction. He spent several months at the jail, helping inmates construct life-size, idealized, self portraits. The project was called, "Here I Am Remaking Myself".

“At the end of the project, CNN came down and filmed us and my Mom saw it on TV and called me,” Michael said.

Throughout this period, Michael met artists who would later show their work at Anchor House. Many of them had been patients at the State Hospital. By the mid-90’s, Michael was working steadily with a small group of artists, promoting their work in local galleries. Then Michael's parents died.

In February 1997, Michael sank all the money he’d inherited, as well as a $300 grant from the state, into a permanent space for the artists--- “Just to see what would happen”, he said. That's how Anchor House began.

***

I asked Kevin what inspired him. He began drifting away, back into his past.

“I can make it happen," he said. "But it takes time. I can decide to have a dream, or vision, in which it’ll all come together, and then I put it on canvas right away… I used to draw a lot of rodents when I was a little boy. Like animals, not just rodents, but wolves, and tigers, and people, and…outer space pictures, and…underwater, like diving divers and stuff. A lot of cartoons, I made up these cartoons…farmers, and…rats robbing the bank, rats eating all the other animals on the farm, then regurgitating. All these silly, humorous pictures…

“When I was a little boy, I was the least popular in my family. So I read a book on Beethoven, and I wanted to be in the art field, you know? Everybody was rejecting me…I used to be a very sore loser…I always had to play my game, or not play. I was pretty selfish, ‘cause I always wanted to do it my way, be the leader of the gang.”

“Did Beethoven have problems like that?” asked Michael.

“He had an unhappy life," Kevin said. "And yet--- he got a tremendous amount of praise for his music and his performances. So, he compensated for what he didn’t…he didn’t have a wife, he always wanted to marry…that’s what they say anyway.”

***

Anchor House has a strong, personal meaning for Michael. When he was 14, Michael experienced a period of confusion. He was hospitalized for a short time.

“The way I was treated as a kid, it wasn’t all good being an artist,” Michael said. “I was treated with some suspicion…the art I made interested the therapists who were seeing me. They saw me as a troubled kid. That led me to believe that I better cover it up. So… I became two people: Michael--and Michael the artist. It’s taken me all of my adulthood to integrate those two…I'm still working at it.”

***

One morning, a few weeks later, Michael and I were at the Nacul Center in Amherst. Nacul is housed in a former church; the building’s been renovated, but a faint smell of frankincense still lingers in the air. We were mounting an exhibition of drawings by Jonathan Stark. Jon constructs elaborate designs from single, continuous lines, with obsessive attention to detail. In many of these drawings, it seems as though the viewer is looking down on an impossibly intricate maze, winding back on itself, shifting in colors.

I measured the width and height of each drawing and made calculations and pencil marks, so that they were evenly spaced and the center of each was exactly 56 inches above the floor.

Jon had been milling around, occasionally standing back to look around the room, while Michael and I made measurements and hammered pegs into the walls. When we finished, I sat down with Jon and asked him about his drawings.

Jon was wearing a white shirt with suspenders; his face glistened with sweat. He sat hunched forward on his chair, twiddling his thumbs. As we talked, he stared at one of his first drawings he'd ever made. It hung on the wall beside us. He'd done it back in 1993.

“It’s more a result of…at one point in my life, I was so worry free, and isolated," he said." To tell you the truth, I was attracted to this particular person…you’ve got to find a way of communicating…. Drawing is a part of my day…but sometimes I get carried away and work through the night. The motion is therapeutic…this is who I was born to be – it makes the rest of my life make sense. I see my childhood problems a lot more objectively. I mean, anyone who does this has got to be a little…” he said, nodding towards the drawing on the wall.

Jon said he began drawing in grade school. “I made little enclosed shapes, which always had borders,” he said. “Then, one day, I thought, ‘What would happen if I just left them open?’…Drawing's my way of joining in God’s creation, the making of something beautiful,” he said. “But you can only get so close to beauty."

***

Michael surrounds himself with people who are in the act of creating. His goal is to make it feasible for them to carry out their projects. But – he has his own driving need to express himself.

“Making art is a floodgate of creativity that overtakes my life,” he said. “It makes it hard for me to provide for the immediate needs of my own family--of the really important people in my life …it’s really hard to hold a job." Michael does hold a job, though. In addition to running Anchor House--with all its demands--- he works as an Assistant Professor at a community college.

“I thought about this place for a long time before opening it,” he said. “I wanted to see the full potential of these people by making a space for them. I thought that by opening Anchor House…it would be so close to doing artwork, in a way that wasn’t teaching, that wasn’t being a bureaucrat, that --- somehow-- I'd have studio time, like I had when I was younger. And lo and behold, the organization…I am the organization.”

Michael's married. He has a 13-year-old son and a 21-year-old daughter. He has little time to work on his own sculptures. Seven years after Anchor House opened, it struggles to survive in a fickle market for “outsider” art.

“My father was a businessman,” Michael said. “I’ve learned…business organization…even though I’m not a capitalist. I’m not. I’ve made some good deals, but not in real successful ways, you know?”

***

Michael’s sentences sometimes trail off, to be concluded a while later. One day, while we were running errands, he misplaced his keys, then, once he'd found them, he drove with his windshield wipers on high ---despite the lack of precipitation--- then slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop just as a pedestrian crossed in front of us.

“When I’m driving in the car, my life feels awfully fragmented,” he said. “Right now, I’m busy with a bunch of different things that each have their own details. You strike this place when you’re so spread out, you think, ‘Am I really getting out of life what I need to get?’ or ‘Do I need focus here?’ In which case-- there’s some giving-up.” Michael paused, looking ahead.

“I’m not very old, I’m 51, but I am at an age … I’ve had friends die from age-related problems…when I was younger it was drug-related problems. And I’m a good man, a healthy man… I have this feeling, that I’m gonna be around until my 90’s. I have that kind of constitution, that kind of genetics. But still, life goes by really fast…"

After we reached Anchor House, I sat with Michael in his office, putting labels and stamps on postcard announcements for a new show.

Michael knows that some of the difficulties he deals with are unique to his line of work.

“The artists are tremendously engaging… sometimes they have…radical kinds of problems…that draw you in,” he said. “People want you to be a rescuer; they want anyone to be their rescuer…

“If I could be here 50, 60 hours a week, I wouldn’t mind it at all. But--- I want to put my kids through college. And---I want not to die in total poverty.”