Jery’s mother inspired him in a perverse way. He holds her responsible for his heightened sensitivity, which he believes fed into the strong sense of fantasy he developed as a child.
“Her way to control things was to shriek and then get hysterical and then make melodramatic appeals to attention,” said Jery, recalling a trip to the Connecticut coast and an argument between his mother and stepfather where she threatened to throw herself off the cliffs.
“It effected my imagination,” he said.
Jery, an artist, has made a living from his imaginings – illustrations, cartoons and comic strips – since the early 60s. More recently however, the 68-year-old depends on his social security stipend to offset living costs.
On 131st Street and Broadway, down the few steps to a basement warehouse that he shares with a bar refurbishment business and two cats, Tigger and Blackie, Jery stores years of work among the dust and miscellany. He has another storage space on in Mill Island where he keeps his books.
He has been “bouncing around” since he was forced to leave his studio space on 44th Street and 10th Avenue three years ago because of the rising rent. The threat of being evicted from another space inspired his most recent project: a visual interpretation of the Columbia expansion, with Bollinger represented as red devil gobbling up the Manhattanville neighborhood.
The warehouse, which smelled of lacquered wood and dust lies thick on all available surfaces, Jery pulled open the metal drawer of what he called a “flat file,” but what looked more like a tool storage unit. Inside the drawer piles of disorganized papers filled files and envelopes — drawings and designs, ideas and concepts — perfect fodder for a scrapbook. But Jery Is not the scrapbooking type.
Dressed in black jacket speckled with dust, Jery stooped over a open drawer and flipped through the contents of a large brown envelope. Some were fragments of his own career; others were articles of work by his peers or images he found interesting. All were kept for posterity.
A wispy white ponytail curled around his neck and he lifted his violet tinted clip-on sunglasses as he continued to study one of the papers more closely. “Oh good,” he said, separating it from the less important papers. “This is an East Village Other cover.”
First published in 1965, EVO, as it was commonly abbreviated, was one of the first countercultural newspapers in America – renown for its psychedelic full-color covers and outlandish content.
“In terms of publishing – EVO really revolutionized that,” said Jery. “Visually, they changed the way covers were made newspapers.”
Jery, who illustrated some covers for EVO in the 60s and 70s, described his artistic career an accident. He had started out studying science at the University of Connecticut, but having missed one week of the calculus class, was unable to catch up. His decision to attend the Rhode Island School of Design centered on the fact he could probably miss a week and still do all right. At art school he had majored in sculpture, dabbled in drawing, but preferred film.
In 1965, Jery left Rhode Island without graduating art school and moved to New York City. He settled in the Lower East Side, intent on becoming a filmmaker. He settled in the Lower East Side, which he remembered being “a very poor, junkie-infested neighborhood.”
A brief hiatus from New York in the late 60s involved a trip to San Francisco, where he recalled “all that madness in Golden Gate Park.”
“I suppose if I’d have been smart I would have stayed there and become famous,” he mused, since San Francisco had been the home of the alternative comics industry. “I wanted to come back and continue doing comics and illustrative magazines here.”
After a failed attempt to produce and distribute his own comic, Yo-Yo, Jery got by doing freelance editorial artwork for newspapers and magazines.
“This is one I did for the New York Times,” he said, pulling out a thick piece of paper out of the flat file. On the page was a grey pencil sketch of a wizard who wore a cloak with many symbols of the cosmos. In his right palm he held a potted plant and in his left, an electrical cable. Weirder examples of his work include a comic strip featuring a disembodied eye, and another chronicling the adventures of Mung, a rodent creature who materializes to during an acid trip.
Jery names hallucinogens and artistic rivalry – in the same breath as his hysterical mother – as his chief sources of inspiration. “I felt the need to compete with all the other guys,” he said. “When you’re young you’re like, how can I be more weird, how can I draw more attention.”
In the basement warehouse on 131st Street, stowed in a nook behind a church pew, is some of Jery’s other work – three large acrylic on canvas paintings. One is an unfinished landscape called “Jerusalem” that he started 8 or ten years ago. It is not protected by any plastic wrapping, but is covered with dust that has fallen from the cobwebs overhead.
“Somewhere along the line I’ll dig through all this and get it framed,” he said, sliding the canvas back into the corner and flicking off the light.
