Perched on a bar stool at the Whistling Oyster under a battered fedora of indeterminate age, John Kefover looks like a worn and weathered Walt Whitman pondering the silence.

An ancient and almost legendary painter of the Baltimore Barroom School, Kefover has come out of his West Virginia hideaway bearing art for his annual Fells Point show here. In his vintage herringbone jacket, plaid flannel shirt, brown sweater, corduroys and boots he could have been at the Lapin Agile waiting for Picasso.

He surveys the Whistling Oyster with clear, searching, hazel-colored, painterly eyes. Calm and comfortable this cool fall afternoon, the long, narrow Oyster has remained relatively unchanged for two decades, like Kefover a survivor from an earlier, earthier Fells Point. His paintings glow with color against the bar's old brick, intense, poetic, spiritual. Kefover was visionary long before that label was hung on unconventional artists.

"I write with my eyes," he says. "Painting is, actually, a visual poem."

He rises a little creakily from his stool. He's 60 now. He guides a bar-mate through the show like a docent disbarred from the Walters Gallery.

"This, sir, is of great importance to me," he says, sounding a bit like W.C. Fields playing the bank dick. "This, sir, is a painted pun, the study of a plum, a plumb bob."

He's painted his plumb bob hanging over a purple plum, with a hammer, a level and a square brushed in beyond a screen of centering lines.

"That painting I could take anywhere in the world because it speaks a universal language of the simple truths of square and plumb and level. It's a common language among men."

He next pauses before a portrait of a young blond woman with almond-shaped blue eyes. Kefover's women have a kind of frontal Modigliani simplicity.

"This is a wild child who came up to my house on a motorcycle. Given to indulgences, though. She was a swimmer," he says, somewhat mysteriously. Kefover sometimes speaks in Delphic non sequiturs. He's got a mellow Burgess Meredith voice that sometimes takes on the burr of a brogue.

"Let it be known," he proclaims, "that I'm a principal of the Baltimore Barroom School of Art, like the Ashcan School, or the Hudson River School, or the Barbizon School, or all the different schools. There are about 10 principals, like Charlie Newton, Jim Joyner, Glenn Walker and the others."

He kindly identifies the characteristics of this school.

"We've all been running the bars for the past 30 years," he says, "doing art and selling our art out of the barroom scene. Let's establish that school so we can all get rich and famous before we die.

"It'll be good for the collectors," he says, not without irony.

He comes by a certain fondness for the odd brew or a dram of the spirits honestly enough. He's the scion of a Uniontown, Pa., family that owned a brewery closed down during Prohibition.

" 'Labor Beer,' " he recalls. "The last act of my grandfather was to get up to vote for repeal of Prohibition, then he went home, laid down and died."

But at the Oyster Kefover actually sips coffee. These days he drinks alcohol mainly for its salutary medicinal effects, perhaps a glass or two of wine or a beer a day.

Kefover grew up in Reisterstown and he likes to call himself "a Hopkins man.

"Just one year," he qualifies, "but I can relate to being a Hopkins man."

For another year or so, he studied architecture at the University of Arizona. Then off and on he drove cabs in Los Angeles and dealt blackjack in Las Vegas. He's basically a self-taught painter.

In his work "Intuitive Sun," he captures a sunset behind dark trees in brilliant reds and yellows and oranges laid on thick and rich with a palette knife and saturated brushes.

"It's a study of the intuitive nature of the sun, done from my house. The sunset is a particularly dramatic time."

The rural life

He owns 24 1/2 acres near Elkins, W.Va., inherited from his mother when she died in 1969.

"Just the forest, the wilderness," he says. "So I went out and carved out the log house up there [from trees on the place]. Two stories, 70 feet, a playhouse, I built."

But he didn't put in a telephone or electricity or running water.

"I run to get it," he says. "I draw water. I have two springs on the place. The water's sweet and good. It's still pure water up there."

He lives up there with his wife, Joan Toy Brown Kefover.

"We've been together 30 years," he says. "We've been married three weeks. My neighbor's a preacher and he has a hill overlooking the valley and we got married there."

Kefover gets around out in West Virginia in his "Black Widow," a 1977 Chevy truck with a new motor and four-wheel drive. He cuts firewood and sells it, and he picks coal.

"I break it out of the seam with a pick and throw it on the truck and go sell it," he says. "That's how I've made my nickel-dime money, my survival money, for years."

He returns to Baltimore mostly when he's got paintings to hang somewhere. He finds Fells Point "ever constant, ever changing. I see it as basic Baltimore."

On the wall at the Oyster, his "Study of Gladiolas and Lemons" is a Van Gogh-esque splash of colors stabbed onto the canvas with his palette knife.

"Beautiful flowers from up at my place," he says. "They were growing there in the garden. I keep a garden."

Little things

His garden, in fact, has inspired a whole harvest of small paintings for this show.

"These are my little miniatures. I did really well with them," he says, a doting father showing off his offspring. "They're not really miniatures. They're individual studies of things."

These charming paintings include a radish, a potato, a squash, a pepper, an acorn and a dozen or so more things.

"I take a pepper and set it and study it. I make the canvas of a size that the pepper will fit into just so. The painting is not miniature. It's just that it's a smaller space.

"People take something this size, call it miniature and try to paint a landscape in it. What's that? You put a garlic in it. The shoe that fits. That's what these are.

"I love these guys," he says. "I love the smaller ones, they're fun. People like them, too.

"I mean who else has an oil painting of a radish!" he cackles.

He rolls a cigarette from a can of classic Bugler tobacco and hacks out a few coughs. He's undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Clarksburg, W.Va., about 35 miles from his log house.

He was treated for cancer of the throat a couple years ago at the VA hospital -- successfully, he says. His lung cancer is in remission. He has nothing but praise for the VA hospital.

Still, he smokes his specially treated twists of tobacco.

"I cure it. I use lemon juice and golden seal and echinacea and myrrh and I put it through a curing process and it makes an excellent cigarette, a really good, sweet smoke. I would never touch those factory-mades."

There's a burning cigarette in his painting "Burn One XXI." "I guess for the sake of the newspaper you could call it a cigarette," he says. But it's not. Smoke curls up from its glowing ash past the golden seal on a black slab, then splits into a V over two banks of dark green shapes. They look vaguely like brussels sprouts. But they aren't.

"This is bud, real good bud," Kefover says, meaning marijuana. "But the smoke breaks out into the intuitive and kind of hits the spot with intuitive freedom."

"That's what happens when you smoke the herb. It acts as a sedative and it loosens up the intuitive awareness. Where the ocean is. Where the happy child is."

He is, obviously, a passionate advocate for the medicinal use of marijuana.

He declaims in his finest W.C. Fieldian manner: "A man should be entitled to his medicine. They let people brew enough alcohol for personal consumption. They should let a man grow his own medicine for his personal consumption. It should be a basic freedom

His decision

"It's my medicine. I'm a veteran, I should be entitled to a little bit of it. I don't make a business out of it, but it's a medicinal thing for me.

"I'd love to do a photo of Clinton and Janet Reno side by side and caption it: She never did and he never didn't. People like that are going to sit in judgment on my behavior in my adult life?! No thank you! Freedom does not have that in the game plan."

Despite such passion, John Kefover has achieved a certain stoic balance as he's aged.

"I feel as an artist, my work's maturing," he says. "This is some of my best work. My pallette has opened up, and lightened. The work deepens in character with maturing."

And he continues to find his truths in the simple elements of his daily life at his log home in West Virginia.

" 'Cabbages and potatoes' for dinner tonight," he says, looking into another of his paintings, as if he were looking out his window at the West Virginia hills.

"Some days are lean, is what it's saying. But they can be good, too. Lean days can be good days."

Pub Date: 11/28/98