The Brooklyn Rail

2014-06-01

For 20 years, from 1947 to 1967, a man by the name of Forrest Bess ran a bait camp on a tiny spit of land 100 feet offshore Chinquapin Bayou on the Gulf Coast of Texas. By day, he trawled for shrimp and sold them to fishermen for bait. He had the word “BAIT” painted in big letters on the side of his wooden skiff and fishermen would honk their horns or shout from a small shaky pier. Bess would get in his boat and sell them the shrimp. At night, in the two-room shack he built out of lumber salvaged from the hull of an old tugboat, he painted his visions on tiny canvases, many of them smaller than a sheet of typing paper. He claimed to have had his first vision on Easter morning when he was four years old. He devoted himself to painting them in earnest after his first breakdown when he was 33, and was haunted his entire life by the fear of madness.