Laughter and tango: Wilfred Sarr and his dancers
Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr Eight decades in, Wilfred Sarr has learned a new dance. The painter some regard as the South Bay’s Van Gogh (if Vincent had a sense of humor, danced, and lived through the 1960s) comes from a decidedly non-dancing people, religious Midwestern farm folk who took life altogether too seriously to let loose on a dance floor. Sarr rejected such seriousness while still a child. “Being raised as a hard core primitive Southern Baptist, I became leery of ‘seriousity’ early on,” Sarr said in an interview last week. “I said, ‘There is just something wrong with this.’” Dance was rebellion, and so was art. Naturally, as a rebellious teenager, Sarr combined the two. “I was born on a farm in Iowa, spring of ‘36,” Sarr wrote in an artist’s statement accompanying his newest show, “Tango,” at Gallery 381 in San Pedro. “By age five a readable sense of perspective was noted in my drawings. By age 15 the ‘dancers’ first appeared, harbingers of the dance-of-life theme, dominator of so much of my life. Electrons dance, planets dance, clouds dance…Does not even death have a dance?” Later, as a young man freshly returned from a strange stint in the military (he had his artistic…
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