Bosch and Blitzstein

On a good day, Harry Blitzstein will step outside his Fairfax Avenue art “museum,” look up and see happy white poodles in the clouds. Other times, though, he sees only creatures--”leering, grotesque creatures.” And they’re not just in the sky. They may also appear in the yarmulke of a rabbi walking down the street or in the center of a racetrack pastry from Diamond Bakery.

“It’s endless,” says the 59-year-old artist, who opened the Blitzstein Museum of Art two years ago amid delis, kosher butchers and menorah shops. “Everywhere I look, I see faces.”

Yet Blitzstein is hardly a heart-of-darkness type. In many ways, the amiable artist is just another shopkeeper on the avenue, albeit one with a fondness for Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon. After all, his roots on Fairfax run deep--43 years ago, his father’s Fair Shoes store moved from Boyle Heights to the very same location that now exclusively houses hundreds of Blitzstein’s paintings.

Step inside, and you, too, will see the white poodles, grotesque creatures and other absurdities that flow from Blitzstein’s brushes and imagination. “If a painting doesn’t have eyes or something that depicts the soul, and if it doesn’t have humor, it just doesn’t click for me,” he says. “Humor or pathos, sometimes the two come very close together.”

After Fair Shoes closed in 1984 following his father’s death, the space housed, among other things, a butcher shop, ironically memorialized on the signage out front: “Formerly Moe’s Meat Market.” “Where I paint now used to be raw carcasses of beef, and I’m a vegetarian,” Blitzstein says.

When he first hung his paintings, he had no intention of opening the doors; he simply enjoyed the subversiveness of displaying his whimsically creepy creations. “It was just an exhibition to try and antagonize the burghers on Fairfax,” he says, half jokingly. “I did it for the shock value, to see what response I’d get.”

At night, though, he watched the street transform into a hipster enclave. The sensibilities of the musicians, writers and actors who traipsed down Fairfax matched that of the artist. Blitzstein began seeing groups of people peering in, looking “as if the place just fell from the moon.”

Still, sales are hardly brisk. “Young people in the arts have been the rock of support as far as buying and encouragement,” he says. It certainly beats the grind, expectation and disappointment of the one-man gallery show, of which Blitzstein’s experienced a few. “This is an artist’s dream because I have a wonderful place to show and no one can tell me what to hang,” he says. “Every night there’s a new possibility.”