[Special Thanks to Tyler
Mitchell & Jeff Huebner of the Chicago Reader]
Theodore Burns Mitchell, known by many as Mitchell Caton, was born
in May of 1930 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Young Caton was always
fascinated by music, jazz and art. He began drawing and painting
when he was six or seven years old and was a natural talent. Caton’s
mother encouraged her son to draw and paint but his father was not
quite as supportive. When Caton was in high school, his father burst
into his room and threw all his canvases and paintings out the window.
His father brandished a fist full of money and told his son that
this was all that mattered in life, essentially telling his son
that his dream of becoming an artist was bullshit. Tyler believes
his father carried this incident with him subconsciously throughout
his entire life and that it inspired and motivated Caton even more.
 Caton
grew up on the south side of Chicago and attended DuSable High School,
which was famous for producing some great artists and musicians
the likes of Nat King Cole, famous saxophonists Johnny Griffin (who
played with Thelonias Monk) and John Gilmore (notably of Sun Ra’s
Arkestra), bassist Richard Davis, and too many more to mention here.
Caton dropped out of high school, returned to high school, and eventually
graduated.
When Caton was drafted to serve in the Korean War, he refused to
go, declaring himself a conscientious objector, and was imprisoned
by the U.S. government for 18 months. While in prison, Caton learned
to paint portraits of his fellow inmates. After he was released
from prison, he was awarded a commission to paint a portrait of
Sidney Sanders McMath, then Governor of Arkansas. That commission
led to an art scholarship at the University of Little Rock, and
he later attended the School of the Art Institute and the Art Student’s
League in New York.
Caton was a member of the so-called ‘lost generation’
and a contemporary of the beatniks, poets, musicians and artists
that defined his time. Caton was an eccentric and private man whose
life was full of as many artists, writers and musicians, as it was
everyday street folk and hustlers. Caton researched and read thoroughly
on his subjects. “When he worked on a piece he would always
call it a ‘study’,” his son Tyler recalls. Caton
interacted and submerged himself within the very same underground
culture that he depicted in his art.
In 1955 Caton settled down in Chicago and married his wife Betty
Bradford, with whom he would later have two children, Lynda and
Tyler. The couple moved into the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago,
which at the time was predominantly white and not yet integrated.
 Whenever
a feast of friends such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Max Roach
would play in Chicago they would come visit Caton and purchase his
art. Caton once sketched Coltrane while he slept in their living
room butterfly chair. The drawing, now in Chicago, depicted Coltrane
asleep with his saxophone strap still hanging from his neck. Caton
was more sociable and extroverted during this period than he would
be later in life.
Around 1957/58 Caton began working as a mail-sorter at the downtown
post office where he would meet future artistic collaborator and
muralist Bill Walker. Caton never stopped painting while he worked
his full time day job at the post office, often taking days off
at a time to concentrate on a particular piece and work in the natural
light that was only available during the daytime. [Most of the paintings
at the current exhibit at OM were created during this period.] He
was taskmaster that was always hardest on himself, often awaking
at six in the morning to begin painting before work and continuing
long into the night after he returned home. “At one point,”
Tyler recalls, “every room in our house was his studio.”
But Caton found himself tired and unsatisfied. So Betty, who began
working at Delta Airlines in 1969, asked him to please quit the
post office and concentrate on what he really wanted to do. From
that moment on, Caton would completely dedicate himself to his work.
In 1969, at Walker’s behest, Caton was chosen among a group
of several artists to repaint sections of the Wall of Respect in
Chicago, which had been created two years earlier by a group of
20-odd black artists. The outdoor mural kicked off a nationwide
movement. By 1970 Caton had joined the insurgent Chicago Mural Group
(now the Chicago Public Art Group). He began doing more public works
and eventually received the first of many grants from the National
Endowment of the Arts to continue painting community murals. Caton,
who until this time had been a very private, underground and largely
unknown artist except to his friends and colleagues, now quietly
began to earn notoriety among the artist community.
Tyler describes his father as the “anti-sellout”. The
only exhibition Caton ever did was when Tyler was just a baby. But
his father would work as if he were always on commission. He never
tried to sell his art. He didn’t exhibit his art. He simply
settled for the love of the art. “It was merely a labor of
love,” Tyler says, “We never really had any money, but
he lived like a king. He made it work. I never once saw my father
go to the store and come back with a bag of art supplies. He got
something from here, something from there. He never went ‘shopping’
for art. He didn’t buy an easel or come back with a bag of
paints. He would paint on a cardboard box or whatever.” Walker
would later say at the funeral of his friend and collaborator, “He
could have been greatly recognized, but he decided on anonymity.”
Now that he was no longer working at the post office, Caton was
a non-stop painter. He did murals every summer and was always working
on paintings at home. He once said to Tyler, “When I look
at my paintings, I look back at the years, to see how my time has
been spent.” “He just did it because he loved to do
it,” Tyler commented, “He was just a natural, man.”
Caton’s straightforward subject matter was a departure from
the images of black pride that dominated African-American murals
at the time. Jeff Huebner of the Chicago Reader wrote of Caton’s
work in 1998: “his stylized, curving lines and his use of
cubistlike collage and brilliant, almost musical color. The African-inspired
imagery suggests that redemption lies in discovering one’s
cultural heritage. The mural stings—but it sings, too.”
One of Caton’s principal influences was a local Chicago artist
named De Lafayette Porter. Porter was a man of diminutive stature
that turned Caton onto an abstract style that is pervasive in much
of his work. Porter was a pure painter who didn’t draw before
he painted, he would just straight up paint. Porter was an older,
poor and even more underground artist than Caton. But unlike Caton,
he would sell his work in a heartbeat for close to nothing. “People
would get him drunk and rip him off a lot,” Tyler recalls
of Porter. But there was something about this artist that Caton
admired. Porter’s patterns, colors and concepts really inspired
Caton to experiment further. Although Caton associated with many
much more famous artists of his time, he maintained a deep respect
and reverence for the unknown Porter.
Caton was frequently offered money for his work, but he rarely parted
with it. “He didn’t know what price to put on it,”
Tyler says. “He wasn’t really about the hustling. It
was a labor of love. He didn’t really care. He told me on
his deathbed, ‘I ain’t going to have no money, this
is all I’m leaving you. I don’t have no inheritance
or nuttin.’ He didn’t want to try and sell his art.
He knew how good he was. When he got sick and was dying of cancer,
he was mad, man. He was also sad. He had all his most recent pieces
gathered around his bed and on the walls beside him. He knew he
was dying. He said, ‘Nobody is going to work as hard as I
do.’ He attributed everything to hard work. Hard work. ‘And
nobody is going to work as hard as me.’ If you see the detail
in some of his work, that’s really like patience, man, care.
I don’t think he had a problem parting with it. I think he
thought it was worth more than people were willing to pay. He didn’t
really put the effort into making publicity for himself. He really
didn’t care about that shit.  It
didn’t matter. He just wanted to create a new thing. Let
me create a new blue-green. Let me put black crayon all over it,
then let me take a razor blade and carve out a negative. Painting
on rocks, vases, wine bottles, floors, and the other sides of
paintings. He wasn’t really crying or complaining either.
Sure, he was a bitter about the system [being part of the counter-culture
era of the 50’s and 60’s]. But he never complained.
Even when he was broke, he wouldn’t sell his art. He wouldn’t
sellout.” Tyler recalls living with his father, together
broke in New York City, and his father refusing to sell prints
of his portraits of Malcolm X and other paintings to art collectors.
“He just figured he was going to get ripped off.”
Caton’s refusal to sell his art, was a source a conflict
between him and his son Tyler. Caton was content being a poor,
unknown artist, as long as he was producing. But Tyler saw they
were both poor and struggling, and felt his father missed opportunities
to prosper both financially and critically. This led to some minor
arguments between father and son. “He thought I was a sellout
for taking money to play music, but we was broke man! It wasn’t
so much a philosophical choice; it was a lifestyle choice.”
His father was an old school hipster that lived like the street
hustlers he depicted in his paintings. “He was hip, but
hip with control,” Tyler commented. “He had a lot
of discipline. He could stretch a dollar till the eagle grinned.
He was offered exhibits every year at the Hyde Park Festival and
Lake Meadow Festival and he turned them down. “It wasn’t
that he was crazy, he was intelligent, he just wasn’t really
interested in socializing or publicizing.” On a video filmed
in the 1980’s that depicts Caton’s work, you can see
a sharply dressed Caton waiving the videographer away from him.
“He was sayin, ‘It ain’t about me,’ and
point to the art.”
Caton would sell his art on occasion, but felt he was ripped off
one too many times, and began to feel bitter about selling his
art. He would say, “Everyone loves art, but nobody wants
to pay for it.” Tyler recalls his father’s stoic attitude
with regards to his art. “One time this guy was going to
pay my father a lot of money to paint a mural on the ceiling of
his porch. My father spent weeks painting that mural. And when
he was done, this guy wouldn’t pay him. So my father got
up early one morning, bought a bunch of white house paint from
the hardware store and whited the mutherfucka out. His wife begged
him not to, but he wasn’t hearing it.”
Later in his life Caton got to travel with the assistance of complimentary
airline tickets provided by his wife Betty. He had the opportunity
to travel to places like France and Africa and he realized that
they were nothing like he had imagined. “So he did a lot
of before and afters of the places he painted,” Tyler commented.
He visited Tyler on tour in Japan and China, and began painting
portraits of Mao Tse-tung and other political figures. “He
got more political as he got older. He painted a lot of hip shit
when he was younger, but later on he got more serious with messages.
Politically, he was always an outsider. He was anti-system. I
wouldn’t say he was pro-Communist, but he was always left
leaning and involved in the Civil Rights and Black Panther movements,
he was totally hip to it.” During the 1960’s Chicago
was one of the epicenters for both of these movements. “My
father was no racist or nothing. He lived in Hyde Park. There
were too many people to hate. In Chicago, everything is separated,
that’s the biggest difference from New York.”
“Most artists are commercial artists,” Tyler comments,
“He was not a commercial artist. He couldn’t even get
a job. He’d probably be better off working at the post office
than working in some kind of commercial art collection or drafting
kind of shit. It didn’t really fit with his whole personality,
his character; it was like a solo thing. He was educated, really.
He was known as a book thief. He would borrow books a lot. I don’t
think he ever bought a book. He would get in trouble at a lot of
bookstores and later say, ‘They say I took this book—you
know they put that on me!’
Caton experimented with all sorts of different types of styles and
mediums throughout his life. “He would use all different types
of papers and inks, different kinds of washes. Two killer pieces
I wish I had: one was this piece—it’s in Chicago—it
was a painting of a piece of wood floor with two feet that never
wore shoes, ugly toenails, full of calluses, all done in pointillism.
One of the last pieces he did, and that he was so proud of, was
of a Stradivarius [violin]. That Stradivarius, when you see that
wood—it’s unbelievable man, I can’t even begin
to describe it!”
 Caton
was extremely private about his painting. “Even when I would
walk into the room sometimes, he would throw something over [the
painting] and smoke a joint or something. He was private even to
the death. He wouldn’t let me see it until he was done. He
was totally private and personal. It doesn’t get any more
personal than that. Your own son walks into the room and you cover
it. You knew it was going to be masterpiece, but you know its personal,
who are you are you trying to impress? Nobody. For real. If he was
like that, then I can see why he didn’t do art exhibits. If
he was alive today, we wouldn’t even see this shit, we wouldn’t
be able to do this, because he wasn’t like that man.”
The audience seemed secondary to Caton. All that mattered was the
work.
“We had paintings all over the house,” Tyler Recalls.
“That’s why I feel most comfortable at home surrounded
by his paintings. He would take one picture out of a frame and put
in another. All these pieces were framed at one time or another.
I have pieces from 1948/49 up until 1997. That’s about four
or five decades of work, man. He did a whole series on musicians.
He was based in Chicago most of the time and would visit me in New
York to hang out. But he would go back to Chicago and go back underground.
My friends were attracted to my father and I hung out with his friends,
despite the generation gap. He was a father figure to every cat,
and every cat older than him. Not like me at all.”
Caton continued to do public murals in high profile places. He collaborated
with other artists creating murals in the ghetto areas of Chicago.
He did a mural of Benito Juarez with Chicano artists on Maxwell
Street. He collaborated on a mural with a group from Thailand. He
did the mural in the office of the Chicago Defender, the local black
newspaper. He did a mural in the Museum of Contemporary Arts and
the Museum of Science and Industry. “He was like a perfectionist,”
Tyler adds, “Murals would start in June or whatever and they
were supposed to be done by say August, September. Sometimes he
would be working overtime, just to get it right, and he would go
until November. He didn’t make a whole lot of money from grants.
He was the Mural Master of Chicago. He did everything with care,
man.”
Caton’s collaborations with fellow muralist Calvin Jones,
another member of the Chicago Mural Group, gained him further acclaim.
Between 1976 and 1987, the duo painted a number of murals together
around Chicago, including the ground-breaking In Defense of Ignorance,
with it’s “explicit critique of the black middle class,
whose pursuit of wealth, the artists claimed, came at the price
of cultural self-knowledge and the abandonment of the race.”
[Huebner] Alan Barnett, author of the encyclopedic Community Murals:
The People’s Art, proclaimed Caton “among America’s
finest living painters.”
 Huebner
would later write of Caton: “Caton wasn’t a musician,
though he blew a sax for fun. Yet “Cat” could paint
like jazz. His complex, rhythmic compositions which graced more
than a dozen outdoor walls throughout the south side, brought American
mural art—and Afrocentric visual expression—to stylistic
heights in the 1970’s and ‘80’s, and his work
influenced generations of later muralists.”
“My father was a taskmaster,” Tyler recalls. “Even
when he came to see me play at Carnegie Hall, he said to me before
the show when we were rehearsing, ‘You stick around talking
that bullshit, someone younger than you is going to practice their
ass off and kick your ass one day. You ain’t gotten nowhere
inside that motherfucking bass yet!’ And that was before a
show! He never let up man!”
“They’re tough shoes to fill. I’m really at a
loss with him not around anymore,” Tyler reflects on his relationship
with his father, “He wasn’t just my father, the taskmaster.
He was like my buddy too. We used to hang out man. We did everything
together. He was hip, but was always, he wouldn’t get too
cool. He had that kind of attitude, that kind of authoritative vibe
with people. It wasn’t no ego. He was straight up. He might
be curt sometimes, but basically he had a formula that worked man.
I’ve never seen nothing like it. We could hang out until three
or four in the morning and he would get up at six to start painting.”
Theodore Burns Mitchell, known to many as Mitchell Caton, died of
cancer on January 30, 1998 at the age of 67. Many of his mural masterworks
still stand in Chicago, while many others have been lost by the
ravages of time and progress. The majority of Caton’s unknown
private works, hundreds of pieces, still remain in Chicago. |
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