A few years ago, John Kefover, one of the old masters of the Baltimore Barroom School of painters, dug himself a grave along the tree line overlooking the clearing where he built his beloved West Virginia hideaway more than a quarter-century ago.

This week his ashes are to be interred in the grave.

John Kefover died early Sunday after cardiac arrest at the Veterans Administration hospital in Clarksburg, W.Va. He went into the hospital with pneumonia.

He would have been 61 Jan. 4. Friends and admirers will gather for a wake on his birthday in Elkins, the nearest big town, at the Jabberwock bar, an appropriate venue for a memorial to a man who honed his art in the barrooms of Baltimore.

He was celebrating a sell-out show that closed Nov. 30 at the Whistling Oyster, a Fells Point tavern that was one of his favorite rest stops in recent years.

"Let it be known that I'm a principal of the Baltimore Barroom School of Art," he proclaimed during an interview at the Oyster. "We've all been running the bars for the past 30 years, 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 said, ironically. But he didn't mean to be prophetic.

Mr. Kefover was a visionary artist before the genre was born. He was virtually self-taught as a painter. He stabbed paint on his canvases with a palette knife or splashed it on with a saturated brush. His paintings glowed against the raw brick of the Whistling Oyster bar. They might be as simple as a 3-inch-square painting of a radish or as complex as the symbolic painting of the square, level, plumb bob and hammer in a web of intersecting lines.

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

Mr. Kefover sometimes declaimed with the comic wit of W.C. Fields playing the bank dick or with a bit of a brogue like an off-key Sean Connery. He liked to think he looked like the aged Claude Monet, but he was a whole lot more scraggly. He believed his painting improved as he aged.

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

Although born in Asbury Park, N.J., Mr. Kefover was a scion of a Pennsylvania family that owned a brewery closed down during Prohibition. So he came by a certain propensity for strong spirits honestly enough. In these late years, he limited his alcohol consumption to a salutary medical dose.

He remained a great believer in the medicinal properties of marijuana, beneficial qualities he defined very widely indeed.

He grew up in Reisterstown, and he liked to call himself "a Hopkins man.

"Just one year," he said, "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. In between, he batted around the bars of Baltimore.

Mr. Kefover moved to West Virginia when he inherited 24 1/2 acres near Elkins from his mother when she died in 1969.

"Just the forest, the wilderness," he said. "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."

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

"I run to get it," he said, laughing. "I draw water [from] two springs on the place. The water's sweet and good."

Survivors include his wife, Joan Brown Kefover of Elkins; a

step-son, Joseph Brown of Elkins; a sister, Mary Kefover Kelly of Arvada, Colo.; and a brother, Charles Kefover of San Diego.

Pub Date: 12/24/98