Anyone who ever heard J. Alan Cumbey spin melodrama out of pop culture weeklies or read his imagery-laden columns peppered with witty, personal musings would not be surprised at the other-worldliness of his prolific trove of visual art. Those works breach the subconscious Fourth Wall with a cool glee, connecting worlds that are at once urban and desert, prehistoric and current, pornographic and naive, partnered and solitary, male and female, black and white — all rendered in rich, technicolor palettes.

Pictured above: (Left) Black Gods Late at Night, 1987; (Right) Rag Doll #2, 1992

Raised in rural Southampton County, Va., Alan was a gifted child with a penchant for drawing, reading, and firing off words that bewildered schoolyard bullies. He honed his dramatic tendencies in high school, and once wrote, directed and acted in a play that won statewide acclaim. His visual art was largely misunderstood in the conservative, small town environment, so he focused on writing. He was chosen to participate in an early iteration of the Governor’s School for the Gifted.

Alan was accepted into VCU’s Mass Communications program, but once in college, the urban setting, parties, dancing, alcohol, and the discovery of his lifelong love — cigarettes — were more interesting than classes. It wasn’t long before his folks found out he’d dropped out without telling them, causing a seismic rift with his dad, and disappointed judgment from his mom. He apartment-hopped, waited tables, discovered himself. Richmond was still too close to home, and reports of his “experimentations” with homosexuality were making their way back. He moved to Key West.

After a couple of years there, he returned to Courtland, ill and painfully thin. It took doctors nearly a year of chasing opportunistic maladies to diagnose him with Type I Diabetes, a disease that ran in his family. Tensions were thick, but he moved back home to recover, working when he was well enough at the hometown newspaper. Once his health was stable, he moved back to Richmond.

While working random day jobs for meager pay, he worked on his drawings in earnest by night. Materials, a function of finances, started out as inexpensive bristol, thick Flair pens, and colored pencils. He drew his pop culture interests … music, gay porn, urban artifacts, friends and boyfriends, toys and ephemera, nightlife, dancing, philosophy, fantasy… and practiced his self-made technique.

Alan got as many side jobs writing copy as he could find. His regular column, Mr. Theatregoer was featured in a publication called Throttle, and he wrote culture, local venue and music reviews for other indie publications like Night Moves and For Kids Sake. His biting wit and extreme fixation on words was evident in these hilarious, well-crafted and lengthy articles. He frequently revealed trivia about himself and his life in them.

Things he did not reveal, even to most of his friends, were the health struggles he endured. Weekly letters to his mom describe daily life — art, money, friends, movies —and then buried paragraphs of health travails that would have been horrifying to most, but were footnotes for him. One described losing his teeth while walking down the street, and what he had to go through, on foot, uninsured and under-employed, to get them fixed. He almost always ended these sagas onan upbeat note: “I’m FINE. I’ll be fine.”

By the mid-80s, Alan was the Classified Manager at Style Magazine, Richmond’s “city paper.” He talked the publisher into including personal ads in the paper — an entirely new concept for Richmond at the time — and created a much beloved, anonymous, persona called “Mr. Classified” who only spoke in italics, interjecting humor and commentary throughout the Personals. He also wrote regular pop music and culture reviews for the publication, and won several awards.

He was known locally as a writer, but continued to work privately on his art. He’d already amassed a large body of work, and as his health declined, he became more and more fervent, sitting up late drawing as often as he felt like it. Only his closest friends—those who came to his apartment—got to see the ever-changing gallery of drawings pinned practically floor to ceiling on a single wall. Occasionally, he’d gift his work to people he liked.

AIDS fears overshadowed everything. In 1987, Alan’s sister Lisa talked him into getting tested at the Fan Free Clinic. The news was devastating, but not surprising. His first hospital stay after the diagnosis was at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, where they covered the door to his room with a full sheet of yellow “danger” plastic. When she arrived one morning, Lisa discovered they’d left his breakfast tray on the floor outside of his room. Incensed, she worked to get him into Dr. Lisa Kaplowitz’s AIDS research program at MCV Hospital.

He spent the better part of the decade in and out of the hospital. If it wasn’t AIDS, it was Diabetes, and it was just brutal. He was a young man who looked like he was 60, and walked like he was older, even in his cool suits, skinny ties and pointed shoes.

His art, particularly from the mid-80s on, was a sublime combination of total fantasy and what was going on That Day in his or his friends’ lives. Former lovers became playmates in these scenes. A pregnant friend, a world event, a store his sister made him wait in, the pattern of a garment someone wore, the music he was listening to, all made it into the drawings.

White and slight as he was, he nearly always depicted himself as a buff African American man in his work. He said that he sensed he was living another life in a parallel universe "beyond the fourth wall," and that he was black in that other life. The representation of that persona changed over time, but viewing the work in order, it’s easy to see which one represents him.

Much of his art was created serially, as he revisited themes over many years: “Black Gods of the Metropolis;” “Animal Locomotion;” “The Vexations;” “Happily Ever After;” “Versatility Durability Performance;” “Moments in Love;” “Desertshore;” “Jealous Gods;” “Fear of God.” There are just two in the Rag Doll series, created two years apart, both horrific self portraits depicting the fallibility of modern medicine. In the first, “Self Portrait: Rag Doll,” he’s frustrated, trapped by his broken human body, exploding over repeated words, “I’m not your Raggedy Ann” as if he’s telling that to God. The second, sketched first from his hospital bed and redrawn when he got home, shows him as his African American alter ego, skeletal, lame, attached to dialysis, broken blood vessel in a picture frame, withdrawn and ready to go, but in his head, pissed at those who refuse to let him: “You can’t just treat me like a rag doll” is written over and over like a mantra with a couple of intentional smears, and a snake slithering toward him on the beautiful sheets.

Alan died at home on a Monday morning early. He couldn’t walk unattended at that point, and there were helpers and nurses taking shifts with his sister and friends. The Sunday before had been a particularly rough day, with plans to take him on a carriage ride scrapped because he was too weak. He called Lisa the night before and told her he’d had the evening shift volunteer put him in bed and she didn’t need to come back. As it turned out, that wasn’t true. He made phone calls, to his brothers and a few close friends, until late. Then he stayed up all night on his sofa, smoking cigarettes and finishing “Hieroglyphics #7: Pull Cord for Nurse.” He died at dawn.

A characteristically witty Last Will and Testament he mailed to all involved a year ahead of time outlined dispensation of “organs even I don’t want,” his “now homeless works of art,” and funeral instructions:

“I’d like there to be music and dancing, because you know, I’ve had a good time.” He was 35.