By Nicole Kidding
You know him simply as Carmel artist McAllister “Mickey” Whiney, manufacturing customized masterpieces from his charming cottage-like production studio (i.e., a Volvo) parked quietly next to the Jiffy Lube. But like most artists, his story is anything but simple.
His humble beginnings took place in a modest, million-dollar bungalow in Carmel, where he was forced to set up shop in the garage between his parents’ Porsche and Jaguar, his creativity stifled with his parents’ cries of “Don’t you dare get paint on those cars!”
He often went hungry, his parents limiting him to five meals a day, with caviar restricted to weekends only. While begging for French fries, he became a self-proclaimed graphic designer for McDonald’s at age 4. But his talents were not appreciated and his parents were sued by the fast-food franchise after he ate his first art show, “What’s for Lunch?,” a brilliant abstract sculpture of fries colored red and gold (with ketchup and mustard).
Never one to be discouraged by a total lack of talent, he was always outspoken about his genius. He recalls that at the age of 5, he threw crayons at his teacher, screaming “I told you I need the 65 box, imbecile, and this crayon sharpener is complete crap-what do my parents pay you for, anyway?” At age 10, he was expelled for using these very same crayons to create his “Mural of Turds,” an anti-academic statement ahead of its time.
Sent to the elite boarding school “Our Children of Sorrows” at age 16, he sat in a vineyard contemplating his life: “These peasants have nothing to teach me!” was one epiphany. A period of creative constipation ended with the creation of his obscure piece of mixed media, “Turds on a Canvas,” made from happy cows of California. But the world was not yet ready to receive his art, perhaps due to its abstract nature, as onlookers often said, “This is nothing but crap!” To which he proudly corrected them: “It is not crap. It is turds.’”
His struggles for respect continued. When his parents refused to give him the house when he turned 21, he became homeless, and attempted to commit suicide by sniffing permanent markers. (The effects were temporary.) He spiraled downward, at last hitting rock bottom: accountancy. But his book-keeping career was short-lived due to an inability to add.
His passion for art once again began to dominate, taking him from a life free of financial worry to an unsteady existence as an avant-garde artist with an antipathy for “the norm.” His signature style, free-form use of bold, unrealistic colors arranged with seemingly no thought of composition, perspective, or subject matter whatsoever, was hailed as “disturbing” and “oddly ape-like.”
As with Van Gogh, people questioned his sanity: “You must be crazy to call this art,” wrote one critic. “Never have such frenzied colors produced such comatose works,” wrote another. But the more people doubted, the more he pushed the envelope to express himself creatively; in his painting entitled “#10,” a giant business envelope is addressed, “My gift to the universe.”
When his banker father cut off his allowance at age 30, in an act of angry rebellion he pierced his left nipple, which became infected and led to hospitalization. It was during this dark time that he developed the concept of “Nipplework,” using his healthy right nipple to create the smudges that led one critic to hail him as “one of the more disturbing painters of November, 1987.” “The smudges may not form actual ‘pictures,’ but they speak volumes,” he said to his detractors. “At least, they do to me.”
Like most master artists, he suffered from depression and mania (often at the same time), delusions of grandeur, alcoholism (he preferred Shirley Temples), drug addiction (it was said he was one of the first to take a Bayer aspirin daily, although this has been disputed), gambling (he often bets others that he will become famous after he dies, but acknowledges that if he wins, he can’t collect), sea sickness, and the desire to be taller.
In addition to being short, he was declared legally blind after a two-week binge of admiring his own works. Like vision, love also eluded him, but he seemed to realize that it was one of the personal sacrifices he must endure for the love of his craft; on the lonely road to fame, he must walk alone. “No one can love me like I do,” he was fond of saying. One of only two existing self-portraits, entitled “My Future,” consists of a blank canvas.
And his masochistic self-publicity didn’t stop there: he began experimenting in a friend’s recording studio after none of the local bars would allow him to perform simply because he didn’t know how to play an instrument or carry a tune (rumor has it he was even kicked out of a bar on karaoke night).
“The problem is, people’s vision and hearing is limited to convention,” he argued as part of his method of stressing subliminal messages over reality in art. “Often times,” he said, “the creation is a complete mystery, especially to me, but there’s a much deeper hidden meaning that no one will ever know, especially me, and that’s true art. Or something.”
This belief explains why he lets himself go, and explores painting, sculpture (his lost PlayDough pieces he predicts will someday be worth millions), writing, singing, and even acting. Recently, being the free spirit that he is, he spontaneously interrupted a play, leapt on stage, and began “air painting” in the nude while singing “Zippidee Doo Da.” Critics labeled his impromptu and unwelcomed performance “disturbing” and “oddly ape-like.”
In the second of his two attempts at a self-portrait, entitled “Complete Mental Nervous Breakdown,” he broke into the San Diego Zoo at night, and sat in the chimpanzee cage until the exhibit opened that morning. When asked upon his arrest to explain what prompted him to do this, he responded simply but honestly, “When I look in the mirror, I see a monkey.”
