The Valley Is His First Louvre

Monet had the French village of Giverny. Gauguin had Tahiti. And Jeffrey Vallance has the Valley.

Other artists have painted the Valley. California Impressionist William Wendt recorded what it looked like before the tract houses blossomed and the malls rose up. And Edward Biberman produced a marvelous painting of an unlikely Valley subject--the Sepulveda Dam--now owned by a wealthy Encino collector. But Vallance spent 37 of his 40 years in the Valley, and Canoga Park seeped into his bones and his art as well.

Vallance was recently named best L.A. Artist in the ‘Burbs by Los Angeles magazine in that Westside-snotty voice they affect. And Vallance recently published a piece in Art issues magazine called “My Life With Dick,” tracing his lifelong obsession with Richard Nixon.

Nothing much happens to Vallance that doesn’t have a Valley angle, and so it is with the artist and Nixon. Vallance recalls his first memory of the man he dubs “St. Dick, the patron saint of impossible comebacks.” Vallance was 5, and his parents had volunteered their house on Stephanie Drive as the official Canoga Park polling place for the 1960 presidential election.

Little Jeffrey watched as the living room furniture was dragged out and replaced with curtained voting booths. “At the time,” he recalls, “I was under an erroneous conception about the term ‘NIXON LODGE,’ believing it was an alpine log cabin where Mr. Nixon went on vacation.” Vallance didn’t know that Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. was Nixon’s running mate.

In 1968, Vallance, by then a fanatical collector of political buttons, broke into an empty Nixon campaign headquarters on Reseda Boulevard and “looted an entire set of ‘Nixon’s the One’ buttons in 24 languages: Nixon Numero Uno, Nixon Is Fearrde Tu, Nixon Jest Jedynny, Nixon Is Der Mann, Nixon Taata Maitai Ete Numera Hoe , etc.”

And so it goes, as Vallance recounts a lifetime with Nixon, mostly in and around Canoga Park.

Although he does not actually live there anymore.

Why would a man so immersed in the Valley ever leave? Reached by phone in Las Vegas, Vallance says he finally moved there this year because he could no longer support himself in Southern California by his art alone.

“In the ‘90s, it almost became impossible to do that, not just for me, but for everyone. The economy for art just hasn’t come back yet, all over, but I think it’s especially bad in L.A,” he says.

Vallance studied art at Pierce College, Cal State Northridge and the Otis Institute of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He lived for a while in Koreatown, but “it was like living in a war zone,” he recalls. He got especially tired of having his car broken into. So he moved back to Canoga Park, renting the house he had lived in as a youngster.

“I had a studio in my garage, and I had a little gallery off my garage called the Valley Gallery, where I had little shows,” he says.

“I loved living in the Valley,” Vallance says, “because you could just disappear. I rented this house and nothing ever happened. I could get a lot of work done.”

The only problem was getting people in the Westside art world to make the trek over the hill. The Valley, he says in the deadpan fashion in which he describes everything, “has a stigma, for some reason.”

Vallance’s work had begun to catch on in Europe, and European art people didn’t mind coming to Canoga Park to see his work. But Westsiders balked.

“Once I applied for a grant from LACMA or somebody, and they were supposed to come visit your studio, but they told me, ‘We don’t want to come out. You’re in the Valley.’ ”

Vallance didn’t just live and work in the Valley. The Valley is what Vallance’s work is all about. You have to see it to understand fully. But you can get an idea from reading his book, “The World of Jeffrey Vallance: Collected Writings 1978-1994,” published last year by Art issues Press.

It all starts, really, with Blinky, the Friendly Hen. On April 27, 1978, Vallance, then 23, went to the Ralphs supermarket at the corner of Roscoe and Topanga Canyon boulevards and looked at the frozen chickens. “I picked out a nice one and named it Blinky,” he explains in his book. “Next, I drove to the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery to bury Blinky.” The headless and rapidly defrosting Blinky was laid to rest in a powder-blue casket with a pink satin lining.

Vallance drew pictures of Blinky in a style obviously influenced by comic-book art, and his musings about chicken anthropology and mythology are part of his “Blinky, the Friendly Hen” art piece, as is a videotape of Blinky’s exhumation a decade later. But as Vallance explains, “one piece always leads into another.” And, with Blinky as his muse, he has been traveling all over the world, studying the things that interest him, notably power and powerful institutions such as museums.

And wherever he goes, he takes the Valley with him.

When he went to Tonga, for instance, to see the King of Tonga and present the king, who weighs 462 pounds, with a custom-made pair of XXL swim fins, the Valley was there. That was in 1985, and Vallance was celebrating the end of the strictly observed Tongan sabbath with a trip to the movies. And the movie happened to be “Valley Girl.”

When he told people he was actually from the Valley, they asked what it was really like. “I told them Hollywood had got it all wrong,” he reports in his book. “I explained, ‘The Valley is not really like that--it’s more boring.’ ”

That suggests that Vallance is a Valley-basher, but that’s not really true. His work is funny, but he doesn’t poke fun. You inevitably find yourself thinking seriously about the things--often Valley things--that he chooses to make art about.

For instance, in 1985 Vallance did a piece called “Avenue of the Absurd” that documents some of the odder structures of the western San Fernando Valley. He did drawings of and wrote about the Aku Aku Inn, a Polynesian-themed motel on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills; the nearby Chateau, a commercial building that is a replica of the Chateau Severne in France, built in 1789; and even the Calabasas pet cemetery where Blinky rests.

To Vallance’s delight, many of the drawings were snapped up by the Walt Disney Co. “They were hanging in Michael Eisner’s office,” he says with visible pleasure.

In Las Vegas, Blinky continues to inspire him, and he continues to pursue his odd interests, including religious relics. (There is a Shroud of Blinky, and that led, inevitably perhaps, to Vallance going to the Vatican, where one of his drawings is now in the Pope’s personal collection.)

Vallance’s most recent work was a show for the Debbie Reynolds Museum in Las Vegas. He invited artists from around the world to contribute works on the actress. “I did a beautiful portrait of Debbie,” he says.

Actor Rip Taylor is a business partner of Reynolds’, and the portrait includes “Rip Taylor’s face forming in the clouds behind Debbie.” It’s almost as if God is looking down on Reynolds, he explains, “but it’s Rip Taylor.”

And that imagination was formed in Canoga Park.