by M. Mitchell  Marmel
with illustrations by Stu Shiffman
 

"I HAVE DRANK MORE, FOUGHT MORE, DRANK MORE, seduced more girls, drank more, threw more wild parties and drank more than anyone else on Spontoon, but like that guy in Hollywood said, no such thing as bad publicity, right?" slurred Chauncey Fleetik, the "Spontoon Gauguin", who reputedly devised the ubiquitous kitcsch icon, the green felt painting, and whose work is the subject of "A Rapscallion in Paradise," a small retrospective at the Casino Island Art Center.

Fleetik moved to Spontoon in 1933 when a friend offered him a job painting craps and roulette tabletop patterns for his gaming establishment.  The nightclub went bust, but Fleetik stayed on, using baize left over from the failed venture to paint portraits of the natives in his spare time between sign painting jobs.  When a friend, "Mahalo" Fred Elder, an ex-pilot and something of a marketing expert, began selling Fleetik's work out of a small gallery in Honolulu, original Fleetiks were fetching upwards of 10Gs a pop, which wasn't hay in the 1950s (and still isn't).

Under Elder's guidance, Fleetik developed the facility of exact mass duplication, a talent little known in the art world up to that time.  "Give me three Number Thirty-Eights and five Number Twenty-Nines!" a radiotelegram from Honolulu might read, and Fleetik would set to work.  For some odd reason, though, the mainstream art world kept getting the catalogue numbers wrong, referring to all of Fleetiks works as "Number Two".

Nonetheless, Fleetik built a huge huge villa with the profits, replete with a rotating cast of drunken, sycophantic freeloaders, and applied himself to his legend as an epic debaucher.  Few in the Nimitz Islands alive at the time can forget the time when Leetik, heavily in his cups, induced Serafina Perreira to pose wearing only her dobro and proceeded to paint her picture on the surface of the #3 billiards table at the Club Haole (said table fetched a tidy sum at a recent New York auction).

His reprobate lifestyle of excessive chemical indulgence, fisticuffs and the bedding of the dusky wahines of Polynesian lore did not prevent Fleetik from churning out two paintings a week, often duplicates of his (or some other artist or photographer's) more popular images, until his death by misadventure, flung from the back of a flatbed delivering taro root in 1953.  The means of Fleetik's death were particularly ironic, considering his oft-boasted claim that "Hey, I didn't just fall off a turnip truck!" Near enow, Mr. Fleetik, the critics agree.