Robbie Conal’s animal instincts

Robbie Conal is known for his darkly satiric illustrations of politicians and public figures, often seen as posters slapped up in Los Angeles’ public places.

When he perceives an abuse of the democratic process, he says, “It’s like the thermometer in the cartoon. When the mercury hits above a certain level, above boiling, I pick up a paint brush or a piece of charcoal and I get to work.”

But another side of him is revealed in the new book “Not Your Typical Political Animal” (Art Attack Press), a collection that shows his warm and definitely fuzzy side: It is a book that features some of his personal animal drawings and paintings.

Working on those makes him feel “liberated from my angst about bad guys taking the planet along with them to their doom,” he says. “Whatever animals are, they don’t pretend to be anyone else, they’re not jiving us.”

These works transport him to a more mellow space. “In trying to represent their particular soulfulness, I have to get my act together, for I can be a crabby wiseguy,” he says.

His wife, Deborah Ross, had long urged him to publish some of his many drawings and paintings of animals. “I realized no one’s ever seen this side,” says Ross, a graphic designer, “and wouldn’t it be cool to pull it all into a book?”

So she decided to make it happen, and over the last year she helped produce and publish the book, which was launched last week at a book signing at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Its pages include both cuddly animal portraits and pictures in which not-so-flattering connections are drawn between man and beast. A couple hundred friends and fans showed up at the museum to buy the book and browse the prints.

A couple of days later, in their Gregory Ain home in Mar Vista, Conal and Ross are still glowing. “So, our friends still like us,” says Conal, 65, in his deadpan manner. He wears a T-shirt featuring his drawing of Smilla, one of his two cats. The shirt is frayed around the collar, custom-made that way by the museum, he says, because he’s known for his schlubby look. (Regular, non-frayed T-shirts with his designs are available at the museum.)

In his political work, Conal pulls no punches and takes jabs at both ends of the political spectrum. One cartoon featured Condoleezza Rice with the words “Black Hawk Down” across her heavily freckled face, another showed a squinting, thick-necked Al Gore bearing the label “Tongue in Geek.”

The book features a similarly unsparing series of drawings in which he paired public figures with their pets, both proving the maxim that owners look like their pets and suggesting that pets are the innocent accomplices to not-so-innocent owners.

Thus, the notoriously paranoid and bug-eyed J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI, is next to his bug-eyed Boston terrier. A guffawing President Lyndon Johnson is next to his beagle Him, and a startled President Clinton, hand to his cheek, next to White House cat Socks, who is slyly licking his paw.

Nor does the artist spare himself. In one drawing, Conal, with his brows raised, is next to his scowling cat Tyrone.

Conal was born and raised in New York City, where his parents were labor organizers. In the 1960s he came west to attend San Francisco State and later attended graduate school at Stanford University before moving to Los Angeles in 1984.

Two years after that, he convinced a friend to accompany him on his first guerrilla poster foray. These days he gets eager volunteers. On his website ( www.robbieconal.com) he provides detailed how-to instructions and lists advantages of the activity: 1. “mass distribution of our message,” 2. “counter-infotainment” and 3. “empowerment.”

Conal’s relationship with animals has long been close -- he writes of being “raised by” his family’s Siamese cats. Since then he’s always had pets, generally adopted from shelters. Currently, there are two wandering around the house -- Smilla, an elderly Siamese, and Bodhi, a perky striped tabby. (Tyrone has since passed away.)

Animals appeared in Conal’s works early on -- they were sometimes drawings for himself, sometimes posters for environmental nonprofit organizations and sometimes part of his political rant.

In recent years, he’s been working on a series of large paintings that sum up the decades; each incorporates an animal motif. The first painting represents the 1950s and is dominated by the head of J. Edgar Hoover wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat. On the left panel is a scene from the 1954-1960 sitcom “Father Knows Best,” on the right a scene from the McCarthy hearings. A couple of scrunched-up frogs are the featured animals here.

The latest decade painting is still hanging on the studio wall, and it’s Conal’s replay of the ‘90s. In the triptych Hillary Rodham Clinton, her mascara running, is on the left; a scene from “American Beauty” (Mena Suvari in a bed of rose petals) in the middle; and Bill Clinton, flanked by Monica S. Lewinsky and Newt Gingrich, on the right. Some tadpole-like creatures are swimming out from Clinton’s head.

What is the animal in the ‘90s painting?

“It happens to be sperm in this one,” Conal says.

“Are you calling us animals?” Ross banters.

Conal tosses her a conspiratorial look, a knowing smile on his lips.

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