High-Voltage Personality
Dave Archer built a successful art career using a 2 million-volt Tesla coil as a paint brush, and that's not even the most colorful chapter in his story.
Story by Dick Baltus Photos by Thomas Boyd
Deftly balancing a cigar the size of a yam between her lips, the young brunette sauntering up the sidewalk in San Francisco’s North Beach district was difficult to miss — especially if a guy wasn’t trying to miss anything. And Dave Archer wasn’t.
Dressed in cowboy boots, Levi’s and leather vest over a chambray shirt, the stranger was aimed straight toward the door Archer was manning in front of the Fox and Hound coffee house. As she shortened the distance between herself and his door, Archer found himself thinking, “This is about to get interesting.”
On that day in 1961, Archer had no idea who she was, and neither did she for that matter. The whole world would eventually, but right then she was just a girl with a goal.
This is not her story, it’s Dave Archer’s. But when his story includes a friendship with one of the greatest rock-and-roll singers of all time, you don’t bury the lead.
You also don’t get too far ahead of yourself, though, so let’s back up to today and a traditional ranch-style house on Buckhorn Road east of Roseburg with a non-traditional two-story addition towering over what once must have been a garage.
Now we’re in Archer’s art studio, and it’s a slightly unsettling place to be, at least to any fan of old horror movies. In one corner of the high-ceilinged room sits a tall metal cabinet with vintage-looking dials, meters and knobs. In the room’s center is a table of sorts, a large square sheet of glass supported by four thick ceramic legs.
And hovering forebodingly nearby is an electric coil, and not the Westinghouse range kind. Oh no, we’re talking the Frankenstein kind.
2 million volts "influencing" paint
The artist at work
The young adventurer and friend
Fellow artist Brent Durand ungrounding himself
There’s only one thing missing from this scene, and it’s Boris Karloff. In his place stands the lanky, amiable Archer describing how he creates unique other-worldly paintings using the power of this 2 million-volt Tesla coil, that sheet of glass and his own creative talents.
When electricity fired from that coil is directed at glass, Archer explains, it flows in random, jagged directions over the surface. Hence, if one covers the glass with a liquid, such as paint, it will be, as Archer says, “influenced” by the electricity.
This, of course, begs the question: How did this activity become a thing? More specifically, how did this thing, in Archer’s hands, lead to artistic results that would wind up decorating the walls of the Starship Enterprise and gracing the covers of Isaac Asimov science fiction books and getting him featured in Omni magazine and National Geographic articles?
Also, how did he end up in Steve Martin’s autobiography?
It’s now 1940s San Luis Obispo, Calif., where Archer grew up. His father would die before Archer graduated from high school. Later his mother would date Pedro Armendariz, one of the best-known Latino America movie stars of the time (From Russia With Love).
The young woman with the oversized cigar had pulled it from her lips just long enough to confront Archer, the doorman, with her suspicion.
Meanwhile, Archer was pursuing a dream.
“I had wanted to be an artist for a long time,” he remembers. “In junior high, my art teacher one day just announced, ‘Yellow is a bad color.’ I raised my hand and asked, ‘Why?’ She said to the class, ‘Look at Dave. He’s an artist.’”
After high school, Archer headed 30 miles up the coast to Cambria and the California Watercolor School, where he had earned a scholarship to study with its well-known founder Phil Paradise. There, Archer not only would learn about art under a master, he’d also gain important insight into the business side of the art world.
His next stop was Santa Rosa Junior College, though it was an abbreviated one. Archer had always had an adventurous streak, and he wasn’t going to satisfy it in a community college classroom. So he talked two friends into helping him deliver some Italian motorcycles down to Tucson, then continuing south for a summer cycling excursion through the Mexican desert.
“We forgot it was going to be kind of hot,” he remembers, laughing.
Soon he was back home, looking for his next adventure, in some new setting where he wouldn't be the only artist he knew. He found it farther north It was only a couple hundred miles north to be sure, but a world away from where he was.
“I hear you hire sangers.”
The young woman with the oversized cigar had pulled it from her lips just long enough to confront Archer, the doorman, with her suspicion.
“Sangers?” Archer responded. “Where are you from?”
“Port Arthur, Texas,” she responded, “but you don’t want to know about that.”
Thus began the friendship between Dave Archer, the artistic doorman, and Janis Joplin, America's first female rock star. Archer had been drawn to San Francisco by the prospects of joining the Beat Generation, the influential literary movement that had sprung organically from the city’s creative scene. He wanted to be a beatnik.
“She said she was going to be a keypunch operator. When I asked her why, she said, ‘Because I can’t make a living singing.’” —Dave Archer
“I was seeing all these photos of artists and beatniks, and they were all in North Beach,” Archer says. “I had to get up there, and when I did it was it was a wild scene. Everybody was coming there, and Janis was one of the first people I met.”
Archer remembers her singing "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" that night, standing alone on the stage, strumming a borrowed guitar. She’d play there often, usually paid with a hamburger and whatever change she could shake out of customers’ pockets and into a hat. The audiences loved her, but her stardom would have to wait.
“She went back to Port Arthur for a while,” Archer says. “She said she was going to be a keypunch operator. When I asked her why, she said, ‘Because I can’t make a living singing.’”
By the time she returned to North Beach, the Fox and Hound had changed its name to Coffee and Confusion, but the doorman remained the same. Archer and Joplin would become close friends, eventually living in the same apartment building and hanging out routinely.
She wasn’t the only future megastar he would meet, either. In time, an unknown comedian named Steve Martin would start making appearances at Coffee and Confusion, testing the few jokes he had on audiences that Archer would lure in with the promise of free coffee.
“Back then, Steve was really a banjo player with a few jokes,” Archer remembers. "He’d show up in a white suit and red suspenders. The kids loved him, but he only had about 10 minutes of material.”
That only sort of mattered, given he wasn’t yet packing houses, as Martin himself explained in his autobiography, Born Standing Up, in which Archer makes an appearance only 10 pages in:
“The night of my first appearance, Gaylord the bartender came to me and said it was time to start. ‘But,’ I said as I waved my hand to indicate the stone-empty club, ‘There’s nobody here.’ So? he implied. Dave Archer, the amiable doorman, seconded him, telling me this was the way the evening always began, so I went onstage and started talking. To no one.”
This isn’t Steve Martin’s story, though, it’s Dave Archer’s.
Now it’s 1970, and Archer is painting on canvas, using a piece of glass as his palette. After finishing, he’s about to throw out the palette, but first he flips the glass over and sees it looks like “a Japanese dance thing.”
Instead of tossing it, Archer frames it, enters it in an art show in Santa Rosa, and wins the best in show award. That success motivates an artist friend to suggest they should start exploring reverse-glass paintings.
“We got a studio, and right away the electric coil came into it,” Archer recalls. “A friend had one and suggested I try to paint with it. He said I could get media attention if I did.”
Archer started experimenting, directing the arcs of electricity around paint on glass, making unique patterns and occasionally shouting, he recalls with a laugh, “It’s alive!”
Soon, another acquaintance was calling TV stations, explaining what Archer was up to, and suddenly he had a career. “Whenever someone from the media heard about what I was doing, they wanted to do a story. And I was making a living.”
In the years since, in galleries and online, Archer has sold scores of his paintings, which often resemble Hubbell telescope images of dust clouds and galaxies and have been snatched up for thousands of dollars. He completes the galactic look by adding hand-painted planets and other objects.
“I have certain ideas what I want to do with the coil, but electricity is going to do what it’s going to do,” Archer says. “You have to work quickly because the paint dries really fast. You usually get your best stuff in the first minute.”
Today in his Roseburg studio, Archer’s apprentice, Brent Durand, is lacing on a pair of boots that, well, Frankenstein would have returned to Amazon for being too roomy. When you’re working with 2 million volts, it’s a good idea to not be grounded, and these rubber clod hoppers serve that purpose. Archer moved to Roseburg in 1999 to take care of his ailing mother, and 10 years later he took Durand under his wing to pass on his technique and, in time, his equipment.
In addition to his studio, the space serves as a gallery of Archer’s life. The cluttered walls above a cluttered work bench are covered with photos of his paintings and the TV shows and movies they were featured in: Star Trek – The Next Generation (the TV show and movies), Terminator Genisys, and Howard the Duck.
And there are more photos signed by celebrity friends, among them James Doohan from Star Trek and Mark Hamill from Star Wars and another rock star, Grace Slick, among them.
But this isn’t their story, either; it’s the electrifying artist Dave Archer's, and we’ve only just skimmed its surface.
To view or shop for Dave Archer's art, visit etsy.com/DaveArcherArtistShop.
