The Paintings Nobody Wanted : Amateur Castoffs Have Their Day in the Gallery in Shaw’s O.C. Show

“This is a twisted view from the warped edge of America--not exactly the Dan Quayle version,” says artist Jim Shaw, describing the paintings he bought at thrift stores and swap meets and organized into a successful traveling exhibit that opens here Friday.

“Thrift Store Paintings,” at Laguna Art Museum’s South Coast Plaza satellite, contains 175 works by anonymous hobbyists and amateurs that Shaw has collected the since the late ‘70s. In digging “through the recesses of America,” he sees himself as an anthropologist of popular culture.

An artist who says his own work is not “exactly tasteful,” Shaw amassed still lifes, portraits and nudes, pictures of animals, interiors and famous people (“Platinum Blonde Woman in Red Dress in a Blue Room” offers a spitting image of Nancy Sinatra) and surreal, abstract and psychedelic images.

From one painting of a single roll of toilet paper, to another in which Neptune and two nude nymphs ride the waves atop sea mammals, the works have all the charm of the decor at your typical Howard Johnson’s.

Some are as hilarious as the purely descriptive titles Shaw has given them. “Pink Elephant With Bottles and Eye in Cocktail Glass,” for instance, depicts a pachyderm that seems to have dropped an eyeball into his martini. “Man With No Crotch Sits Down With Girl,” brings back memories of genitalia-less Ken (as in Ken-and-Barbie) dolls.

Shaw’s favorites display the greatest “potential for perversion,” he said in a recent interview at the museum gallery, and give a new meaning to family values.

One, in which a uniformed maid uses a garden hose to spray clean a second-story window as she stands on the lawn below, seems to convey her suppressed desire to annihilate the crazed, obstreperous kids who stand behind the window, waving their arms. A demure little girl serves some sort of beverage to a much older man in another disconcerting scenario that seems to have dark, sexual overtones.

That’s all conjecture, of course. No one knows what message the artists intended to send. “But something weird is going on,” said the 40-year-old Shaw, and it’s a weirdness he can relate to, despite the fact that he had “totally normal parents” who are still married.

“I wasn’t abused, nobody stuck my hand in boiling water,” he deadpanned with characteristic wryness. “It’s just that life doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. Hell, I grew up in an all-American family and it was hell. Norman Rockwell didn’t show that agony and suffering, (but these paintings) show a little more of that tweaking through.”

A stoop-shouldered, self-professed workaholic, Shaw hardly paused for breath while hanging his show and talking to a visitor. Wearing a ponytail, baggy olive pants and a Hawaiian shirt, he explained how the project came to be after folks at the Brand Art Library gallery in Glendale suggested he do a show there.

He didn’t think his own work was right for an institution fond of watercolor shows, he said. (His projects at the time mixed Minimalism, Pop and conceptual art, and earned him critical praise at last year’s Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition. His most recent works--paintings of friends--are “meant to be hung in a totally mixed-up fashion” so they congeal into abstraction, he said.)

Shaw decided his thrift store collection would be perfect for the Brand. He’d built up a sizable stable by then, and friends had been urging him to go public with them. The show opened in March, 1990, and went on to San Francisco, Santa Barbara, New York, Chicago and Hawaii, claiming major popular and critical success--much to his surprise.

Shaw doesn’t mind the “good fortune,” but he said that he wasn’t out to make a statement--or a big splash of any sort--and felt that some critics imbued the exhibit with more depth and meaning than he ever had in mind.

“The assembly effortlessly jams the circuits of common expectation, creating a cognitive dissonance that turns out to be refreshingly insightful,” wrote Times art critic Christopher Knight.

In the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: “The thrift store show is a vivid social document on a par with television soap operas or romance magazines. It casts an intermittent light--kind of a strobe effect--on such constants as sexual mores, humor, fantasy and sentimentality.”

Said Shaw: “In New York, the show took on an aura of importance which maybe it didn’t deserve. There is a theory that it’s a big conceptual art statement. It’s a pretty vague conceptual art statement, if indeed it is one. . . . I was not after that. . . . I don’t know if there is a point (to it), really. The meaning is pretty much up to the individual to determine.”

A collector of “all kinds of crap” when he was a teen-ager growing up in Midland, Mich., Shaw said he now typically pays $1 to $5 for his thrift-store paintings, and rarely goes over his $25 ceiling for an individual work. He’s found them all around the country; some he’s borrowed from artist friends, Robert Williams, Ann Magnuson and Brad Dunning among them.

Speculating about the meaning of any work or the unknown artists’ lives is part of the appeal, said Shaw, who has a master’s degree from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

There’s the guy who painted space-age tableaux that Shaw thinks were designs for movie sets: “I figure he’s probably a harried commercial artist who (never) had enough time because some are nicely painted and some are not so nicely painted,” Shaw said. “I’m an anal-retentive collector. I have to search for reasons why people do anything.”

He’s also drawn to the paintings because he believes they were made “out of a pure” need for expression, he said, rather than financial gain or career advancement. In the curatorial statement he wrote for Brand Library, he admitted that not knowing any of the artists, such an interpretation is based entirely on assumption.

Still, Shaw said he had no intention of thumbing his nose at the art Establishment.

“I don’t think you accomplish much (by doing that) except making yourself look like a charming rebel,” he said. Besides, he added sarcastically, “If you’re going to attack the Establishment, you should just blow it up.”

“Thrift Store Paintings ,” Oct. 9 through Jan. 3, Laguna Art Museum satellite at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bristol St., Suite 1000, Costa Mesa. Hours: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday. Free. (714) 662-3366.