Halloween : Pumpkinheads

In dreams--and sometimes nightmares--Carl Figuls finds the images that appear in his artwork. Humorous surrealism is how he describes the style of his drawings, which often start with a mundane situation--a job interview, a dinner date. Then, Figuls says, “things turn progressively stranger.”

For a time, Figuls worked out these thoughts on large canvases meant to be shown in galleries. But he recently left the world of fine art to return to the medium he loves most: the comic strip.

Born in Venezuela, but raised alternately in Culver City and Costa Rica, Figuls was influenced both by the Latino literature his relatives sent up from Central America (“in Latino culture,” he says, “graphics are so pervasive”) and by American pop culture.

As a kid, he went through a superhero comic book phase, then discovered ‘60s underground comics and eventually started drawing his own strips.

“Along the line I got art-damaged and started doing paintings,” he says. “But I missed the immediacy of doing comics. There were too many steps, and too much distance, between me and the people who come to see paintings. Comics are more intimate. And with comics art you control both the words and the pictures--you can’t do that with anything else.”

The strip he’s currently drawing, called “Mystery Box,” is full of characters that have beat-up features similar to the face on his Halloween pumpkin. “I think my work is naturally creepy,” he says. “For reference, I like to look at silent movie stars, so everything is pretty exaggerated. I tend to overdo the gestures on purpose--I like to be over the top.”

Figuls also works as an actor with the Cameo Mystery Players, a theater ensemble that stages productions at the Onyx on Vermont Avenue in the Los Feliz area. Tomorrow night and Saturday night, the group will perform a reworking of Orson Welles’ “The War of the Worlds.”

Figuls’ work can be seen in the current edition of the comic book anthology, “The Ho!,” sold at most comic book stores, and in the same anthology’s newest edition, to be released in December.

PHRANC

It’s barely 11 a.m., and the artist Phranc is eating cold pizza and commenting on the crust (“not good”), when someone asks her opinion of the pizza box.

“Well,” Phranc says, “if it didn’t have grease on it, it’d be really nice.

“You know why?” she continues. “Because it’s thin, really pliable and a good size.”

Phranc is something of an expert on cardboard boxes. She started painting on them several years ago because if you’re an artist struggling to pay the rent, cardboard is more practical than canvas. “It was cheap--OK, free,” she says, “and I just fell in love with the way it looks.”

Of course, this was during a time when Phranc was becoming better known for her music than her paintings. An early participant in the L.A. punk scene, Phranc, raised in Mar Vista, has become best known as the woman who calls herself an “all-American Jewish lesbian folk singer.”

She’s planning a new album and hopes to revive “Hot August Phranc,” her twisted tribute to Neil Diamond, as a limited run in a small theater. Lately, though, she’s been concentrating on art.

About a year and a half ago, Phranc got a glue gun and, as she puts it, “went three-dimensional.” Now, instead of simply painting pictures on cardboard, she folds it and scores it and rolls it and steps on it, all to make it easier to manipulate. She can, for instance, turn a piece of cardboard into a cherry pie--or even a couple of pumpkins.

Phranc’s work can be seen starting tonight through Nov. 28 at the Highways Gallery in Santa Monica, as part of “The Perilous Night,” an exhibition of work by lesbian and gay pop artists.

TIM SMITH

Tim Smith doesn’t see the world the way most people do. Growing up in Escondido, he’d go to the beach, look at the surfboards lying on the sand and see not just a cool way to ride a wave, but the perfect canvas. He started collecting surfboards so he could paint on them--first typical California guy stuff such as a ’69 Ford Mustang. But Smith, who thinks that the shape of a surfboard may look better in a church than it does in the sea, quickly began icon-blending--mixing images from religious history and pop culture. That’s how he ended up painting Mary, Mother of Jesus, and Mary Tyler Moore on a surfboard. When Santa Monica’s James Corcoran Gallery held an exhibit of surfboard art in 1990, he showed the work he calls “Jesus Christ, Surfer Star.”

“I think of those pieces as a cross between Eastern Orthodox church icons and surf folk art,” he says.

Recently, Smith moved inland to Atwater, away from his long-time home in Venice. These days, surfboards figure less and less in his work. “Now I’ve been finding frames and doing pictures to fit them,” he says.

His newest work is a series of portrait sets of black leaders and country western singers. Of course, Elvis also figures in some of Smith’s work. He’s been known to impersonate The King at art openings. And for his Halloween pumpkin, Smith turned to the Kennedy legend and created his “Jackie O! Lantern.”

“The Kennedys are like the royal family of America,” he says, “and Halloween is practically a national holiday.”

BRIAN GRILLO

Some people dream of owning a big home, driving fancy cars, wearing expensive jewels, or maybe having their name put on some imposing civic building. But if Brian Grillo were suddenly wealthy, he would want his own traveling carnival.

“Not like Disneyland or anything,” he says, “but an old creepy, broken-down carnival. It’d be 90% haunted mansions and fun-houses. And I’d build all the rides.”

Carnivals and freak shows are where Grillo finds inspiration for his artwork, which might be sculpted papier mache , Day-Glo figures on poster paper, or paint on canvas.

“Lately,” Grillo says, “I’ve been using lots and lots of layers of paint on canvas and scratching things in the pictures, things I feel at the moment.”

Some of his recent work is currently on display through Nov. 20 at the Watts Towers Gallery--Grillo is one of 60 artists in the show “Transcend AIDS” who either have AIDS or are HIV-positive.

“I fall into the HIV-positive category,” Grillo says, “so a lot of my stuff has to do with anger and frustration and trying to find some hope out of it all.”

Humor is one way Grillo works out his anger--and he usually keeps himself too busy for self-pity. His band, Extra Fancy, is working on a record; his fanzine, Extra Fanzine, should go to press with its second issue at the end of November. He plays percussion for performance artist Ron Athey, and this Halloween, Grillo’s “atmosphere work,” as he calls it, can be seen at the one-night club Pandemonium Maximus at the Variety Arts Theater downtown.

“I’m making really kooky, crazy, scary things,” Grillo says. “I’m going to make a lot of monster characters like the one on top of the pumpkin, only they’re all going to be flying through the air. It’ll be really cool.”

He is, in other words, building his own fun-house.

VIRGINIA HOGE

Virginia Hoge paints on lampshades, tablecloths, velvet, even collages of images from old magazines--but hardly ever on plain canvas.

“I can’t stand to paint on something blank and brand-new,” she says. “I like to work with things that have a history.”

She might take an abandoned lamp from a dumpster, fix it up so it works, and then paint an idyllic scene--say, women making Jell-O molds--on the lampshade. Or she’ll go through a stack of ‘40s linens at a thrift shop, find a souvenir state-of-Colorado tablecloth, then add her own painted images, which often parody the chamber of commerce optimism of old tourist-bureau brochures.

“I think a lot of what I paint,” Hoge says, “is directly related to being born in the ‘50s and immersed in suburban Los Angeles culture.” Hoge was raised in Pasadena and was part of the downtown L.A. artists’ scene through the mid-’80s. She started the art space Galleria by the Water in an industrial building near the L.A. River. When she moved to New York, she ran Minor Injury--a gallery in Brooklyn’s arty Williamsburg area--and started Lost Modern Press, where she produces limited-run and one-of-a-kind books.

Even away from Los Angeles, Hoge finds herself returning to the images of Southern California suburbia. “Except now,” she says, “the raw materials are gleaned from Baltimore thrift stores, which I visit as if they were museums.”

BARBARA MALOUT

As Barbara Maloutas wandered the produce stands of the Sunday farmers market in Hollywood recently, she had an epiphany about pumpkins. Maloutas was used to seeing orange pumpkins, and that’s what she was shopping for. But that Sunday, as she looked through a pile of green pumpkins, she was struck by their shape. The segments that made up each gourd looked to her like skulls. That’s when she decided to buy a green pumpkin, paint it white and decorate the segments with Day of the Dead-style skulls.

Normally, Maloutas’ art shows up on paper--in small-edition books she crafts herself. Some of her books include original poems--she likes to create both text and images. And often, the books will include scanned pictures from her collection of family photos from the 1880s or the early 1900s.

In her art classes at Otis Parsons, near downtown Los Angeles, Maloutas tries to impart a reductionist point of view. Her students might, for instance, be asked to create an accordion book that illustrates movement from the words static and dynamic , using only lines, dots and space.

“I teach sophomores, beginning students,” she says. “And they often come into class with too many images in their heads . . . other people’s images. It’s almost as if they’re so bombarded by media images that they can’t come up with anything original. When they go back to the basics, however, then their ideas can be their own.”

Maloutas’ work--a few of her one-of-a-kind books--can be seen at Freehand on 3rd Street in Los Angeles through Nov. 12.

SEAN DUFFY

It was the bunny rabbit that cinched it--though the electric carving knife was crucial. Until Sean Duffy put the two together, he didn’t have a signature style as an artist.

Even before the electric bunny, however, Duffy knew kitchen appliances would become a big part of his work. He once made an owl out of an electric toaster. And he collects electric can openers. (There’s even one inside his Halloween pumpkin.) “They’re so geared down and basically useless,” he says. “But they make really great noise and there are lots of them out there.”

His other favorite appliance is the barbecue rotisserie. “It’s got a really slow-turning motor, and once you get the long pole off, it can spin parts--things like toy tiger legs--at a decent speed.”

Once he tried to make giant stuffed animals, on a bicycle-size scale. “But they were just too grotesque,” Duffy says.

“Most of the stuffed animals I’ve done aren’t as threatening as the original bunny,” Duffy says. “They lean more toward the pathetic edge, because I really don’t want people to be intimidated by them.”

He’d rather his work remind people of their childhoods.

“As a male in society, the first and only thing you’re taught to nurture is the stuffed animal, and right after that you’re given war toys,” he says. “My work deals with the transition between the two.”

Duffy’s latest stuffed animal series will be made from beer-can-panel hats, the ones held together with crocheted stitching. They will not be motorized.

“I get kind of wary of appliances sometimes--they’re really temperamental.”

STEVEN BAKER

Steven Baker has been sculpting wood since he was 11 years old. By the time he was 13, he could carve a bow for shooting arrows. “On some levels, it was among the most technically demanding things I’ve ever done,” he says. “If you don’t do it right, the bows explode when you pull them back.”

He’s still carving bows, but his work has become much more beautiful than it was when he was a teen-ager. Lately, he’s been making musical instruments, often with a bow--a cello bow--as a crucial element. Much of his work is made with found objects, mostly scavenged from industrial sites. “But I’m not a typical assemblage artist,” he says. “I look for objects that you wouldn’t necessarily recognize as a found object.”

When he decided to make what he calls his “cosmic pumpkin,” he had in mind the Deco Saturn lamps that were common in chic ‘30s clubs. He carved a cone-shaped base out of an old piece of Douglas Fir, and a ring out of Canadian maple plywood. The eyes are marbles he found in a toy shop.

Baker liked the fact that the assembled pumpkin looked as if it was wearing a fedora hat--except that the eyes, of course, were on top of the brim.

Baker also works as a set designer and art director for theater and film, makes custom furniture and sometimes helps refurbish interior spaces.

One continuing long-term project is the Cafe Club Fais Do-Do, in South Central Los Angeles, where Baker is helping restore the Art Deco-era structure fallen into disrepair.

The project fits in with his view of art and the world: “I’m totally into salvaging discarded things.”

LARKIN HIGGINS

For several years in a row, Larkin Higgins gave her sculpting students at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks the same seasonal assignment: Carve a pumpkin. But it wasn’t until this year that she carved one herself--if you don’t count the ones she made as a kid.

Higgin’s work, which ranges from performance art to multimedia pieces, can be seen in the permanent collections at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania, the UCLA Grunwald Collection and the Sioux City Art Center in Iowa. She’s taught sculpture, computer graphics, photography, design, layout, drawing, painting, photography. “I’m definitely a multidisciplinary artist,” she says.

If she were going for a grade on her pumpkin, she’d get high marks for her own analysis of the work.

“The fact that a pumpkin is rather segmented made me think about the segmentation of language,” she says, “how punctuation divides text into sentences or phrases.” She cut tiny pumpkins in half, painted punctuation marks on them and laid them across a larger pumpkin, attaching them with toothpicks. Then she painted and carved several stylized one-celled organisms on the side of the pumpkin--more thoughts about segments.

“Plus,” she says, “I think a pumpkin looks a little like a one-celled organism.”