Jon Serl painted everyday life as if seen on a stage. The theatricality of his compositions, in which elongated costumed figures join gatherings and celebrations, was influenced by his own itinerant youth in vaudeville. Although he drew on his memories for his dreamlike works—their nostalgic moods that alternate between joy and melancholy enhanced by the fluid colors from his process of painting over paint that had not yet dried—others were more surreal. Monstrous creatures lurk in the bold brushstrokes of his most fantastic works; others seem to grapple with the fluidity of identity, something Serl experienced as he performed in drag and shifted through various careers and lifestyles. Across the decades of his art practice, he experimented with making his own pigments and applying oil paint directly from the tube. He used canvas and Masonite as surfaces, but preferred the durability of scraps of wood. (As he explained in a 1989 interview with the Los Angeles Times, “When I was painting on canvas, I wound up putting a knife through most of my work.”)
Born Joseph Searles in 1894 in Olean, New York, he traveled the United States with his family’s vaudeville troupe, performing as a dancer, singer, and female impersonator. His later nomadic travels brought him to Los Angeles, where he worked as a Hollywood extra and took on odd jobs such as picking fruit. He rotated through different names, including Slats, Jerry Palmer, and Ned Palmer, before settling on Jon Serl. He started painting seriously in the late 1940s while living in San Juan Capistrano in southern California. As he told the story, he was inspired to cover a blank wall in his adobe home. He initially worked on landscapes and portraiture before expanding to his more narrative and frequently autobiographical work.
The Municipal Arts Department of Los Angeles organized the first touring show of Serl’s work in 1970. He moved to Lake Elsinore, California, in 1971, and with increasing attention to his work, he became a colorful public persona, even appearing with his art on the Johnny Carson show. Although he was for years reluctant to sell his paintings, he later changed his mind so that, as he told the Los Angeles Times in 1984, “people 100 years from now will know what it was really like in the late 1900s.” He died, age ninety-eight, in 1993.
Allison C. Meier, 2025
Text written as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
