ART : Llyn Foulkes Dusts Off Chip on His Shoulder

“I’m sure you guys want to know who the hell I am,” Llyn Foulkes remarked in his engagingly rambunctious way to the audience assembled for his recent Newport Harbor Art Museum lecture.

At 60, Foulkes--an unclassifiable artist who has painted rocky Western landscapes, faceless torsos and tense scenes of social dysfunction--is represented by three works in the museum’s ongoing permanent collection exhibition.

He has racked up three decades of shows in California, New York and Europe, and in 1967 he represented the United States at the Biennale in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Younger viewers may know his work best from the “Helter-Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” exhibition at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992.

But underneath the slightly edgy charm, Foulkes has a big chip on his shoulder about the art world.

“Art has become this little game totally divorced from people,” he said tightly. “So long as you can keep it separate, you can keep the price up.”

During the 1960s, some commentators lumped his paintings with Pop Art because he used grids of repeated images and painted in a flat style resembling photographs.

“I was doing serial imagery at the same time as (Andy) Warhol,” Foulkes said with a bitter laugh. “But of course I never got noted for serial imagery. It became Warhol’s thing.”

For a while during the ‘60s, Foulkes was having great success with large paintings of cows, which he swiftly copied from photographs with the help of an overhead projector.

“(Noted art dealer) Irving Blum brought Warhol to see (the paintings). So he did his cow wallpaper. I guess I should have been flattered by it. But I saw it as something else. Pop Art was mostly about image and advertising techniques. Warhol, (James) Rosenquist, (Ed) Ruscha--they were all in advertising school.

“My direction was, I had feelings about photographs. . . . I just want to get it straight--I mean, (Warhol’s) was the thing with the multiples, OK?”

The ease of making large-scale, photography-based images that were snapped up by such exalted places as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Chicago Art Institute began to nag him. “You get an image and hold onto it, and you don’t struggle anymore,” he said.

Even the size of paintings in the ‘60s still seems to disturb him.

“Museums built huge white spaces, and everyone started doing big paintings,” he said. “(But) Dali’s ‘Persistence of Memory’ is only this big.” Foulkes outlined a modest rectangle in the air.

As a moody young man, his interests had revolved around art, music and psychology. At Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles in the late ‘50s, he discovered Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, whom he considers “the last of the great painters.”

Foulkes’ own paintings from the early ‘60s were images of the rocky outcroppings of the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles, in which the landscape resembles a human or animal profile. After a one-man show of these images at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962 and a praise-filled article in Artforum, Foulkes--who had been driving a cab and working for a schlocky assembly-line picture factory--was offered a teaching job at UCLA.

*

In those days, he also played drums in a rock band. But “music was starting to get loud,” he said, and producing the requisite volume gave him bloody fingers. So he started making funkier sounds with a contraption he fashioned out of a multitude of horns, washboards and soup kettles. Foulkes’ new group, the Rubber Band, even got a gig on “The Tonight Show.”

*

But then the bottom dropped out of his life. The band fell apart; his secure teaching job ended, and he went into therapy. He divorced and remarried. “All of a sudden, the painting changed,” he said. “I had this part of myself--” he broke off abruptly. On the screen was “Who’s on Third,” a 1973 painting of a man’s head partially covered by a large, clinging object. Blood-soaked hair runs down on his shirt collar.

That painting was the first of many enigmatic human images in which the faces were obliterated, bloodied or obscured by geometric shapes. (Foulkes once told an interviewer he had seen a corpse in a mortuary whose skin had been cut from his skull and flipped back over his face, leaving his hair hanging down over his eyes.)

“The art crowd didn’t like me doing this,” Foulkes said. “I was totally rejected. . . . I also blame it on the fact that art magazines were following a fashion. People compared me to Francis Bacon,” the English painter known for his raw, screaming figures. “That’s as far as they could go with their knowledge of what I was doing.”

There were other strange pieces, the bitter fruits of long-simmering rage at the art establishment. “The Arm of Art,” a sculptural, gnarled arm with blasted, arthritic fingers, is a reinterpretation of God’s gesture to Adam--Foulkes demonstrated the gesture with one lanky arm--in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting.

“The Arm” is now in a private collection, and Foulkes said he doubted the owner knew that the arm actually came from a dead possum. After preserving it “in a little case for years and years,” he said, the day came when he needed cash: “I painted it with white plastic and put it in a glass case and sold it for $1,500.”

Hotly debated social issues also keenly concern Foulkes. In the mixed-media painting “Double Trouble,” a man holding a gun has a superimposed woman’s eye. His open mouth holds a real fetus, Foulkes said, to shocked murmurs from the audience.

During the ‘80s, Foulkes lashed out at capitalistic greed with such images as “Money in the Bank,” in which a male figure’s face is labeled “A MR,” with letters cut from a BankAmerica card. Foulkes turned the frame back-to-front to reveal the fingerprints of the craftsmen who made it in Mexico.

“Nothing happened at all in any art magazine during the ‘80s,” Foulkes said. “There was no reaction (to my work).”

*

Still, he continues to make works of social commentary, retaining cartoon characters in his work not because he is a Pop artist but because they embody archetypal American values. In response to the Gulf War, for example, he painted an image of Superman reading a newspaper with a banner “WAR” headline. A thought balloon reads, “Where did I go wrong?”

Incidentally, Foulkes fans will be pleased to know that Marilu Knode, curator of the Huntington Beach Art Center, has organized a retrospective of his work, supported by the Fellows for Contemporary Art. It will be at the Laguna Art Museum from Oct. 27 through Jan. 21.

* “Permanent Collection: Object and Image,” through June 18 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday; Noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. $4 adults, $2 students and seniors, free for children under 12, free for everyone on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.