Uncovering Bob Vido -- 1915-1995
by Jonathan Ward
This is an obsession.
Space ships landing on beaches, large portraits of matronly women, and banshee-wailing music to make your hair curl…this is the world of the mysterious Robert Zaprian Tchomoneff Vidoloff, aka Bob Vido, outsider artist and musician.
A couple of years ago I found a staggeringly wonderful, privately issued record by “Bob Vido -- One Man Band”, and decided to scour the city in search of any other information about this person. After poring over court records, finding discarded paintings, driving through seedy neighborhoods and contacting relatives, two years later I can’t say that I’ve gotten very far. Mysterious and contradictory, the life of Robert Vidoloff is rife with question marks. Here’s what I do know:
He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, February 24th, 1915 to Zaprian and Anna Vidoloff. The family immigrated (under Diplomatic status) to the United States on June 1st, 1921, arriving on Ellis Island onboard the SS Olympic. Robert's father was a minister, and after living in both Washington D.C. and New York, they settled in Chicago in the 1920s, later moving to nearby Oak Park. Robert turns up next in the 1940s in Los Angeles, settling into a small bungalow where he would remain for the rest of his life.
What happened in those in-between years? What did he do? Virtually the only published information about Robert Vidoloff appears in the 1993 edition of Who’s Who In Entertainment: a short bio obviously supplied by Robert, himself. He claims he was in the ROTC from 1928-1931, and then a photographer for Paul Stone-Raymor, a Chicago glamour photo studio. From 1935-1941, Robert claims he was an artist for Buick, Ford and GM, presumably in Detroit or Chicago.
He also claims that he had his own film production house (Vidoloff Films), was an actor for MGM, Paramount and 20th Century Fox, was a show producer for the Canadian National Exhibition, was a friend of Mickey Rooney and Liz Taylor, was a designer for Lockheed, Hughes and Douglas, and received a Nobel citation!
Closer to the truth, is that he indeed worked as a commercial artist, but also eked out a living as a portrait artist for hire, a “one-man-band”, and perhaps even a street musician or entertainer. While he may have been in films, he never received a screen credit. If he did work for the Canadian National Exhibition, they have no record of him, likewise at Ford. Alas, anyone can receive a Nobel citation as long as you fill out the proper forms.
Judging simply from his music, artwork, and writing, Bob was a tireless artist and had a great, if corny, sense of humor. It seems he had a strident drive to succeed and a need to showcase his work no matter what, things that most people give up pretty early on in life when other needs crop up. Deluded? Probably. But Bob kept going, painting and painting, chanting and singing about spaceships, people who live on the sun, preaching Rhizology, astrophysics and whatever else drove him.