When he was
9 Roy Tiger Milton had his first episode of strange visions. A decrepit, naked,
elderly man with a snake rolled around his right leg talked to him in the back
garden of his house in San Bernardino.
Is from
this time on when the young Roy starts drawing and writing.
His first works
are mainly drawings. Some of them are clearly based on his visions, others
portrait his own universe, a universe that very son will be a part of Roy’s
life.
Human
beings with supernatural features, beasts, fantasy animals, strange places,
spaceships, remote planets, etc. Characters that are constantly struggling to
escape, to run away from some kind of danger.
Little by little
Roy starts introducing phrases into his drawings that later on turn into longer
texts.
From this
first period we can highlight the comic Bernardino!
Bernardino!
In it a
little boy with arms on fire and his father go driving around an apocalyptic
San Bernardino.
All the
basic elements of this first period can be found in this little comic.
A fantastic
and tragic view of life, a universe that appears hostile and inexplicable.
Drawings and poems
(1960-72)
I’ve chosen
this date as the beginning of a new period because is in 1960 when Roy Tiger Milton writes his first poem. A love
poem written at age 15.
We don’t
know if it was his first love, but we do know that it was something that
changed dramatically the way he view human kind and everything that surrounded
it.
His tragic
vision stayed. Reality still lacked of meaning and man’s real goal is to
destroy himself. However it was then that a, until then hidden, sensibility
appeared in Roy. It almost seems like from then on he started to see a flicker
of beauty in the things that surrounded him, even in his tragedy itself.
All this
changes make a big impact that can be seen in his drawings and most of all in
his writing. Early poems as The Eyes of
Water, He's talking to himself, o
To God: I'm not a pessimist, show it.
On 1968, when
he was 23, Roy Tiger Milton got married to Latreece Milton in the newly built
church of Saint Bridget, Seattle.
From that
moment on Roy starts his most productive period.
His poetry
comes together with drawings that sometimes illustrate the poem itself and
other times just have their own separate meaning.
His writing
becomes more and more personal and his poems become passionate and deeply
romantic. His only theme is life itself, existence as something tragic and
meaningless. Roy takes pleasure from sadness as something beautiful and
sublime.
Is there
where the real talent of the poet lives, that is his greatest artistic virtue,
turning the most devastating reality into something extremely beautiful. This
spirit ends up overcoming disaster, changing everything and turning his work into
an ode to the beauty that comes from life.
Maturity: A dead body
(1973-80)
On 1973 Roy Tiger Milton writes A dead body. His longest, most complex
and most influential work.
We can say
that until that point in his life Roy Tiger Milton had carefully created, in an
unconscious way, his own mythological vision of the universe. And is finally in
A dead body where this mythology gains
shape in a completely conscious and organized way. A complex framework of
characters and places that give meaning to Roy’s world.
This time
drawings and poems came together hand on hand. Is like Roy’s work started to
gain shape as something homogenous, with its own direction and meaning.
In A dead body, life stops being a mystery
and becomes a mysterious place.
The main
theme of Roy’s work changes. Life is illusion, our senses, far from perceiving
reality, perceive exactly the opposite. Those things that we perceive with our
senses are precisely what reality is not.
In this new
scenario, Roy’s mission’s becomes full of meaning. To discover reality, to found
the real home of men, the promised land, the kingdom of heaven, Nirvana, the
final and true home of every human being.
In his
following works such as A better war
o Banana Sunflower, Roy continues exploring
the outside world, revealing the fraud that it is, the great lie that
represents.
Ultraviolet Crisis
(1980-1985)
From 1980 onwards
we can see the last stage of Roy Tiger
Milton career.
A profound
personal crisis affects the life and works of the peculiar artist. During this
period of time Roy Tiger Milton writes
only four works.
The first
is a series of pencil drawings in which the mythological world of Roy struggles
to survive.
The other works
are a part of the trilogy called Magnanimity!
In it the
author expresses his frustration for not being able to get out of the vicious
circle that takes him time and time again to the same place. A fantastic world
that creates a fiction that takes him to more fictions, A world that is
impossible to escape, because the only possible way would be another fiction
that takes you to a different fiction once again.
Immersed in
this destructive loop Roy ends up becoming sick. According to the doctors that
took care of him he suffered from MDD (major depressive disorder). According to
traditional medicine he suffered from melancholy.
On the
autumn of 1985 Roy Tiger Milton falls
into a coma after having a brain stroke. He is admitted into Northwest Hospital
in Seattle where he stays for a month and a half in the intensive care unit.
When he comes out of the coma in the beginning of December he goes back home
following his own wishes of dying in his own house.
Two days after
that Roy Tiger Milton has his last episode of strange visions, 26 years after
the last one, with his family around him.
A few hours
later he finishes his last poem; Ultraviolet Catastrophe.
After
finishing the poem Roy never wrote or draw again, and what is even more
surprising, he stopped speaking too. Only once he expressed himself writing
something about the origins of Ultraviolet Catastrophe, he then declared that
he did not know who wrote it or what it was.
Any work of
art, whatever the style must be valued considering the particular moment of its
creation, the period, historical, social and personal situation of the artist.
Taking all
these parameters into account we can say we are looking at a contemporary
American art rarity.
Ultraviolet
catastrophe is a composition of ten small poems that together form a bigger
poem.
In it the
poet talks in depth about his struggle to evade from this fictitious reality
and in this case it seems for a minute that he nearly gets there. In the poem,
he portraits himself, sometimes as a pastor that guides people to the promise
land and sometimes as the sheep that asks to be guided.
According
to Professor Winston Lilburne the end of the poem represents the end of Roy
Tiger Milton’s own spiritual and existential journey.
On his
deathbed the English born poet had finally reached a state that would in itself
solve all his conflicts; the disappearance of the core problem, the existence
of the ego.
Once the
ego that looks for the real world vanishes the search is over.
In this way
Roy Tiger Milton would disappear as an individual being, fading into the vast
immensity of the imaginary universe. Changing into the only possible reality,
as paradoxical as it may sound, the reality that contains everything.
The poem
uses Roy Tiger Milton’s characteristic language, a colloquial language
sprinkled with classical references whenever the author wants. His prophetic
and ambiguous tone, charged with symbolism takes us to other works of the
author. The drawings and collages that come with the poem, portrait the
fantastic, dark and mythological universe of the author.
