THE WIZARD OF ECHO PARK : Hometown Recognition Finally Comes to Artist-Designer Peter Shire

Long before the brilliant colors and bizarre shapes of Memphis design burst onto the avant-garde art scene, Peter Shire worked quietly in his Echo Park studio, turning out whimsical, one-of-a-kind ceramic teapots.

His exuberantly colored creations cost $65 back in 1975, and their cartoonish design often obscured their utility. At his first solo show, at the now-defunct Janus Gallery in Hollywood, the teapots sold out quickly.

In 1979, Shire’s teapots caught the eye of Italian architect/designer Ettore Sottsass and his band of brash young Italian designers. The ensuing collaboration coalesced as the irreverent, innovative design line known as Memphis.

Shire’s work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, and one of his 10-foot pastel sculptures of painted wood and metal is in the Museum of Modern Art in Lodz, Poland. A Shire desk sits in the West Wing of the White House. McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas has commissioned a monument-sized sculpture. The Art Institute of Chicago is negotiating for a piece of functional furniture.

But, ironically, Shire, a fourth-generation Angeleno whose style has been termed archetypally L.A., is better known outside his hometown than in it.

This month, however, his ceramic teapots, fantasy furniture and comic sculptures will be on exhibit here in “L.A. Creates,” a four-man show organized by the Pacific Design Center for its Westweek convention. The show will be open to the public from March 27 to April 3.

ATC Distributing, which imports and makes haute fashion plastic laminate, Italian tile and flooring, has also asked Shire to design several furniture pieces as part of a concurrent 11-man show called “Superfici Architettura” at the Pacific Design Center. Finally, Shire is preparing for an August retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park and a fall show at the Saxon-Lee Gallery in Hollywood.

“Shire has gone past just the Memphis stuff and is doing wonderful watercolors, sculptures and environmental installations,” says Francesca Garcia-Marques, special programs director for the Pacific Design Center. “He is one of the most interesting creators working in Los Angeles.”

At 40, Peter Shire is an unpretentious guy who revels in pop-art colors, squiggly shapes and wacky forms. His works have precarious balance and wry humor--an apt description of Shire himself. To many in the design world, he is like a welcome draft of fresh, irreverent air. He also exemplifies the growing phenomenon of artists who are crossing over into different disciplines. Today, artists design furniture, architects paint and designers draw.

“He’s really a wonderful designer . . . one of the stronger lights in the whole furniture movement,” says Denise Domergue, who included Shire in her 1984 book, “Artists Design Furniture.” Jan Turner, who represented Shire between 1975 and 1985 at the Janus Gallery, calls the artist “unique and influential. He’s used as the paradigm. People say, ‘That looks like a Peter Shire.’ ”

These days, the paradigm is branching into sculpture. Metal sculpture. Colorful, kinetic, towering sculpture. But furniture is a mainstay. In 1987, Shire did 15 large, private commissions--up from three in 1983. His artwork graces the corporate collections of such blue-chip firms as IBM and such fashion-conscious ones as Saks Fifth Avenue.

Life in Shireland is good. The artist has always lived in Echo Park, a sleepy old community of barrios, winding roads, palm trees and eclectic hillside architecture. The Shire home--a prewar bungalow shared with his artist wife, Donna, and 6-year-old daughter, Ava--is painted pink and lime green, with lavender trim and a yellow door.

Another home Shire owns--which photographer Tim Street-Porter described as “a giant Shire teapot” in “Freestyle,” his book about radical new Los Angeles architecture and design--sits up the street. Walking inside the teapot house is like falling through the looking glass. Some of the highlights include the tile bathroom--a mosaic of purples, yellows, blues and pinks fired in Shire’s studio kiln--and the kitchen, with pink and green zebra-striped bar stools and pantry portholes through which one can see a nautical tableau with boat and lighthouse.

Shire has liked bright colors since the age of 15. “Before that, I was overwhelmed by good taste,” he says. On a recent winter day, his rose T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt of red, blue, green and yellow patches and paint-splattered overalls conjure up an image of the biblical Joseph, with his coat of many colors. A yellow bandanna knotted at the neck sets off his black hair and beard.

Americans, he believes, are enslaved by aesthetics. “In Third World countries, people say, ‘I’m going to paint my house green. It will make me feel better,’ ” Shire says. “In the United States, it’s, ‘Oh, what will the neighbors say?’

“My stuff is carnival, circus stuff. There’s something very romantic about the Latin attitude toward color,” he says, recalling a visit to a Mexican village shortly after a summer rain. “They had just celebrated a festival. The whole town was draped with paper streamers, and the colors had dripped down the walls of the pueblo. It was marvelous.”

Not unlike Shire’s new kitchen floor, perhaps. The artist laid the multicolored tiles himself, picking out his favorite shades of reddish orange, lime and forest green, charcoal, white and blue.

On the stove, water for tea heats in an Alessi teapot by European designer Richard Sapper. As it comes to a boil, a harmonica attached to the spout bursts into a tune. Tea is served in Peter Shire mugs, on a Peter Shire table painted purple, orange and mint green. Although the dish rack reveals more custom crockery, Shire observes dryly: “We’re not so puritanical. We have Tupperware.”

But some things remain unpolluted by popular culture, including the sparsely furnished living room. “My wife wants a sofa,” Shire says with a sigh. “We have big fights. I keep telling her not to yield to her bourgeois instincts.”

Shire comes from a long line of nonconformists and artists. His parents were labor activists, and his father--a Pratt-trained illustrator--was also a custom carpenter, repairing famous houses, including several built by architect Rudolph Schindler. At 10, Shire learned his father’s trade. Today, he can lay tile, install windows, wire a house and weld, cut, saw and fabricate.

The artist studied ceramics at Chouinard Art School in Los Angeles--now CalArts in Valencia--and received a bachelor’s degree in ceramics in 1970. For a year after graduation, he shared an artist’s studio with a friend, then worked at the only mainstream job he would ever have: as a design lab technician at the now-defunct Franciscan Ceramics factory in Atwater.

But his employers thought the budding artist too wild and forbade him to dabble in design. “They were scared to death of me,” Shire recalls. “The director of the tile department said, ‘Don’t let him touch the Desert Rose,’ ” Franciscan’s classic dinnerware pattern.

After a year, he saved a little money and opened his own studio on Echo Park Avenue. Meanwhile, the Shire family opened the Soap Plant, a retail store in Silver Lake that sold Mom’s soap and Peter’s ceramics. The store, run by Peter’s brother, Billy, has moved to Melrose and expanded into books, jewelry, clothes, Mexican art objects, a modern folk-art gallery called La Luz de Jesus and Wacko, a card, toy and knickknack store.

In 1979, Ettore Sottsass and several associates from his Milan architectural studio saw some Shire teapots in WET, a Los Angeles-based magazine of experimental art and design. On a trip to the West Coast, the Milanese artists--who would form the nucleus of Memphis about two years later--looked Shire up. “They said, ‘This is your moment. We want you to do some things for us,’ ” Shire recalls.

Shire flew to Italy and spent a month designing furniture, making teapots and just hanging out with the group of designers, which grew to encompass some 30 people from eight countries. The only other American was architect Michael Graves. Their style movement was almost called “Mobile.” Inspiration for the name came from a Bob Dylan song, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”

Memphis exploded on the international design circuit in September, 1981, at an exhibition of new European furniture. Several of the pieces were Shire’s. With its flouting of convention, the Memphis style--whether one liked it or not--was a radical rethinking of design.

Popular culture embraced the new look. By 1985, Memphis had filtered into the mainstream and its once-avant-garde pieces could be found at Bloomingdale’s. Shire’s furniture could be seen in the sets for the hit film “Ruthless People.” Today, Shire says, “you can walk into Thrifty and buy pastel-colored socks with speckles. That’s Memphis.”

His own interests roamed farther afield. In 1980, Shire published a book about teapots and typefaces called “Teatypes.” In 1982, he designed the stage settings for a production of “Oedipus Rex” at the Hollywood Bowl. For the 1984 Summer Olympics he created fanciful, colorful designs for entertainment centers at the athletes’ villages.

Will Shire’s work stand the test of time?

Joan Simon, co-director of Kuhlenschmidt-Simon Gallery in West Hollywood, says that while Memphis and Shire have had an undeniable impact on contemporary design, their influence may be more transient when compared to other movements such as Bauhaus.

Shire concedes that Bauhaus was more serious. “It was dark and brooding and full of that Germanic stuff. My stuff is concerned with optimism and brightness,” he says.

“This is serious work, but I mustn’t lose my sense of humor and light.”