The Enigmatic Artist is Resurrected in The Form of Elmer Presslee

What happened to the artist? I’m not talking about modern-day gimmicky artists looking to go viral and clout chase on Musk’s internet, I’m talking about the true blue artist. People who pour their souls into their work and birth a new life into popular culture. The enigmatic, sometimes unappealing, making us reflect inward against our own will, artists. Think Keith Haring or Edward Hopper. While all hope might seem lost, the last true artist is alive and well, and his name is William Robbins a.k.a. Elmer Presslee. 

This interview is unlike any interview I’ve conducted thus far in my SLUG career. Presslee is hard to follow, and I don’t mean in terms of talking — we bounce from room to room in his gorgeous home/private art studio while we talk about LSD, aliens and government conspiracies. We ascend up a ladder to a loft filled with art of big-eyed children, David Bowie portraits, sad clowns caressing monkeys and even an original print of the (slightly racist, as Presslee admits) haunting mural from the original Terror Ride at Lagoon before they painted over it. His living room and kitchen are adorned with a wall of old-school Simpsons figurines and Presslee’s own art. He has an old tube TV that he modified into a fish tank and a Garfield coin-operated mall ride that’s still functional. While we walk and talk, we are followed by his loving and adorable bambino hairless cat, Ziggy. To say I could’ve stayed there for hours would be an understatement. 

“I love Hieronymus Bosch, so there’s definitely a reason he bleeds into my work. I’m obsessed with the guy.”

Presslee started his career in art like most of us: “High school art class, more than likely,” he tells me. “I did go to school for industrial design, but I never really much incorporated that into my life. Clay was always my muse, for sure.” When I ask about whether he plans his pieces beforehand or if it’s based on random items he finds, he informs me, “The thrift store dictates a shitload. I’m working on something right now that I got from the thrift store — that big camel, I don’t know if you saw it sitting up there in the house.” When I inform him that I did not, we walk and talk to another portion of the house: his workspace where he creates his weird and wacky art. 

When researching Presslee, I noticed a common thread of comparing his work to Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch oil painter known for his macabre religious scenescapes. I ask him his feelings on the comparison and it throws him for a loop. “No fucking way, I am definitely not worthy of him. I love Hieronymus Bosch, so there’s definitely a reason he bleeds into my work. I’m obsessed with the guy.” He adds, “That’s the most interesting thing about him, nobody knows a thing about [him].” He also cites Basil Wolverton and Ed Roth: “I practically copied [Ed Roth]. I owe him some fucking royalties or something, I thieve from the man.”

Though Presslee considers himself to be a “hack,” he’s had a fair amount of success in his career, especially in Germany. When I ask about his most challenging piece, there was no doubt in his mind that it was “Mid-Life Crisis Middle American Olmec Style,” a massively intricate and delightedly grotesque head. It was so huge that he couldn’t transport it back to the U.S. — instead, he left the installation in a random train station which led to the Berlin government calling a bomb squad. When the trash men came to haul the head away, a journalist bought it off of them and toured it around the city, where it eventually made its way onto a popular German TV show, Countdown, and earned the moniker “Kult Kopf.” To this day, it currently resides in the center of a club in Cologne. 

“The thrift store dictates a shitload. I’m working on something right now that I got from the thrift store — that big camel, I don’t know if you saw it sitting up there in the house.”

When not pursuing art, you can find Presslee spinning his immaculate Christian Marionette record collection at The Green Room with none other than Robin Banks, where Presslee refers to himself more as a curator of playlists as opposed to an actual DJ. When I ask him to elaborate on this endeavor, he replies, “The only way I can even call myself a DJ — one time I went and played records with Robin and I said, ‘Hey, pay me a dollar so I can say I’m a professional.’ It’s not really DJ-ing, it’s more like playing one sequential record.” Or you can find Presslee at the local thrift finding long-lost photos of George A. Smith, Joseph Smith’s first cousin. 

Presslee is currently working on a web series that follows a ribbon and two puppets finding God through UFOs. Follow him at @elmer_preslee on Instagram to keep up on all things in the wonderful wacky and grotesque world of William Robbins.

Read about more weird and wonderful art:
NCECA 2025: Salt Lake City Welcomes Nation’s Largest Ceramics Conference
“Where Art and Community Meet”: The Curatorial Ethos of Michelle Pace