Here’s a Sculptor Who’s Broken the Mold

Preposterous things pop up in Rick Oginz’s drawings. His indoor-outdoor views of studios where he has worked over the last 21 years portray the life of his mind as well as his actual surroundings.

“Bizarre,” he said, pointing out a few vignettes in “Broadway--Proposition 13,” a 1978 drawing of his former downtown L.A. studio. Most of the space in the drawing is devoted to the view from three large windows. Looking across Broadway into tiny windows of other buildings, one discovers such scenes as a woman nursing a miniature cow, while the bare foot and lower leg of a giant looms ominously behind her.

Windows of a nearby high-rise are chock-full of peculiar goings-on, including a man leaning out of his office window to fondle the woman lodged below. Meanwhile in the sky--above a chaotic parking lot that resembles a wrecking yard--a plane pulls a banner saying “13 unlucky,” in reference to the 1978 California state proposition that cut property tax, a major source of public school funding.

This is only a sample of the sensibility at work in “Richard Oginz: Drawings From a Sculptor’s View,” opening Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The exhibition of 23 drawings consists of pencil and ink works on paper done since 1976, when the artist settled in Los Angeles.

As the show’s title suggests, Oginz is primarily a sculptor. Best known for representational objects that pull off startling shifts of scale and comment on social issues, he also makes unorthodox furniture and funky household items. Among works in his living room are a carved and painted sculpture of the Earth, a set of mechanized ocean waves and a pair of gold-leaf panels incised with two female nudes, a Barbie doll and an ancient fertility figure. He calls the diptych “The Venus of El Segundo and the Venus of Willendorf.”

It isn’t unusual for a sculptor to draw well, but few have developed such a consistent body of drawings over such a long period. Although Oginz’s drawings are related to his sculpture, they have taken on a life of their own.

“I’ve thought a lot about drawing during the two years that I’ve been getting ready for this show,” Oginz said. “Almost every piece of our physical culture starts with a drawing--cars, roads, cities, every object that’s manufactured--so I think it’s a vital language. I also think of drawing as being the biggest and the most immediate window on our imagination, more than written or verbal language. The imagination can express itself quicker and more profoundly in drawing.”

His highly detailed drawings generally take more than a week to complete, but he can deal with a whole slew of ideas in the process. “I have more ideas than I have time to make things,” he said.

Some of these notions--including images of fish that drive around his studio in motorized aquariums--come from actual experience. “When I had my studio on Broadway a friend who went away for the summer left me her fish,” he said. “He was a little tiny feeder fish, but I threw him into a big tank.

“He liked it a lot, so much that he grew and grew and grew. And he was very smart. He was aware of what I was doing. He watched me work. I named him Gefilte. He gave me the idea of building an aquarium with wheels and a motor, so the fish could drive around to look at the things he wants to see. It’s an exact equivalent of scuba diving, where we adapt ourselves to the wet world, to go down and look at it. The fish is adapting itself to the dry world.”

Other drawings fall in the art-about-art genre, with Oginz carrying on visual conversations about his own work and that of his contemporaries. He also fantasizes about owning ethnic art. In a drawing of a fireplace at his former house in Echo Park, he depicts an array of Anasazi pottery on the mantel. “If We Sold Our House to Ernie Wolfe” portrays a room full of African sculpture, like the material found in Wolfe’s gallery at Bergamot Station.

“This is my way of collecting,” Oginz said. “I think of drawing as a kind of empowerment. If you draw a picture of something, you gain power over it. That began in the very dawn of human life, in the very first artworks. I think that magic still works.”

Oginz, 53, was born in Philadelphia and spent most of his youth in Alexandria, Va. During his high school years he took classes at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington and discovered his talent for modeling from the figure.

“That’s pretty much what the study of sculpture was at that time,” he said. “It was terrifically satisfying to make a volume out of inanimate material as you try to exactly copy a person. The distinction between what’s alive and what’s dead is so poignant in that exercise. But by the time I got to art school, I began to realize that’s not what sculpture is.”

After completing undergraduate work at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. “When I got there, I was doing organic work that looks much like what I do now,” he said. “But I got taught out of it, into Minimalism. I did Minimalistic work for the first five years of my career. Not hard-core, but certainly no modeling or carving and no direct reference to the figure.”

Accepting an invitation from a British visiting professor at Wisconsin, Oginz lived in England from 1968-76, teaching in several colleges and taking a fellowship at the University of Leeds. “I was quite successful,” he said. “I had quite a few one-person shows--the most interesting one was at the Serpentine Gallery in London--and I sold several pieces to museums. But I began to think, ‘Do I continue doing this work, or is it time to rethink the situation?’

“I decided to rethink, and I didn’t make sculpture for a year. I turned my studio in Leeds into a life class, hired models and went back to modeling figures. After a year, I knew I needed to deal with the figure and what I had to say as an artist had to do with people.”

He had another moment of artistic truth on his way to England, while traveling on the Queen Elizabeth. “When I was in New York, getting ready to leave, I looked at that ship from the highway and then along the docks, and it seemed enormous--bigger than many buildings. But when we crossed the Atlantic, there was a storm and waves came over the bow of the ship. The crew thought it was no big deal, but the ship that had seemed so huge when it was docked suddenly seemed very small compared to the sea. That identified the issue of scale for me. My early works dealt with the manipulation of scale, and that continues to be a major part of my work.”

Oginz began drawing during winters in London. His unheated studio was too cold to make sculpture, so he drew at home or worked in a corner of the studio where he had a small heater. He has always worked exclusively in line, either bearing down hard and embossing the paper with lead in a lead-holder or, more recently, using a pen. For him, line is definite and physical, like sculpture. “It would never occur to me to use a watercolor wash because that is atmospheric,” he said.

By 1976, Oginz was homesick for America, but he didn’t want to return to places he had lived. He had become infatuated with Los Angeles on a weeklong trip while he was in graduate school, so he wrote to every college in the city in search of a position. The best offer came from Otis College of Art and Design, where he taught until two years ago.

What he loved about L.A. was Watts Towers and the possibility of tailoring personal spaces to suit individual preferences and fantasies. “You can have a Tudor house next to a French chateau,” he said. Or, in his case, install yourself in a less pretentious space and put your own spin on your surroundings.

His current digs are in Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, Lori Starr, director of public affairs for the J. Paul Getty Trust, and their two young sons. Being a parent has been an important influence on his work, said Oginz, who also has two grown daughters from an earlier marriage. “There’s a kind of accessibility about my work,” he said. “My sons’ friends sometimes say, ‘Rick, you’re really a great artist.’ That’s a very satisfying part of my creative life.”

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“RICHARD OGINZ: DRAWINGS FROM A SCULPTOR’S VIEW,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Ends May 18. Prices: $6, adults; $4, students and seniors; $1, children 5 and older. Phone: (213) 857-6000.