Wanna Buy a Painting?

Each of the collectible cars parked in the gracious curve of Len Aaron’s Beverly Hills driveway is loaded with paintings, ready to go. There are two canvases in the trunk of the blue 1987 Zimmer, and three more in the back of the Jaguar. There are probably a few stashed in the rear of the Testarossa, too.

Eighty-four-year-old Aaron, the co-founder and former president of Aaron Bros.--purveyor of frames, framed art, prints and art supplies to the masses--has returned to his business roots. In the 1930s, he got his start selling frames door-to-door. This time around, he’s hawking paintings. His own drippy, spattered, splotchy, canvases.

“They aren’t Renoirs,” he points out. “I don’t kid myself.”

No, they are not Renoirs, or Rembrandts. And much as Aaron likes to make the comparison, they are not even Pollocks. But, as so many in this town have proven, if you’ve got money, a dream and a silver-tongued publicist, you can reinvent yourself as just about anything.

Aaron has never taken an art class in his life and hasn’t read much about art, either. He saw the movie “Pollock, “ and it seemed to leave a strong impression. “He used to drip paint down, crawling around on his hands and knees,” Aaron said. “Personally, I do it from upstairs.”

In the backyard of his mansion, the wild-haired former cowboy film extra spends his days creating what he calls “primitive abstract mixed-media” paintings by pouring colors from atop a jungle gym ladder onto canvases below. If the gardener accidentally spews grass clippings on a canvas, or a wayward squirrel skids across a still-moist patch of blue goo, Aaron just incorporates that into the chaotic whorls of the works-in-progress that litter his house, yard and pool area.

Aaron has no highfalutin notions about art. He’s not trying to make a statement with the paintings. “What they are is just color,” he says.

It’s hard to tell if he is making a mockery of the artistic process, celebrating it or just trying to cash in on it. Maybe all three.

Aaron says he sells his paintings, which are churned out at a rate of about 10 a month, for between $150 and $5,000. (More sell in the lower range than the high.) He estimates he’s sold about 5,000 pieces in the course of his career. His work is available at select Aaron Bros. Art & Framing stores and through some art wholesalers. But many of his sales are consummated during nightly rounds to his favorite watering holes--places such as Rooke’s Restaurant in Santa Monica, the Kibitz Room at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax Avenue and Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood.

That is the mission this Monday night. Aaron sits, amid foie gras and french fries, on a barstool at La Brasserie on Wilshire Boulevard, sipping Scotch and peddling paintings to friends, business associates and anyone else who will listen. He is accompanied by Oscar Jimenez, 36, a photographer and friend who works as his assistant two or three times a week.

Looking like a saloon cowboy caught in a time warp, Aaron wears a black 10-gallon hat, a string tie and black pointy boots. On his fingers, he wears huge rings of amber, turquoise, and what appear to be the bones of some wild animal. “I gotta look like an artist,” he says.

Aaron got his start during the Depression when he and his older brother, Allmore, a photographer, began selling picture frames out of a Model A Ford in their home state of Wisconsin. Customers usually bought the frames for prints and photographs. Hard to imagine today, but in the 1930s, paintings were a luxury available only to the wealthy.

The brothers opened their first store on La Brea Avenue in 1946. The frame business grew, and eventually they began filling the empty frames, mostly with prints of country scenes that were in vogue at the time.

After a while, they began to sell paintings, too.

Aaron Bros. began working with interior decorators, wholesaling paintings and frames to hotels. Artists would paint to order, fast, and in whatever color scheme was demanded. Some were very good, capable of selling a single painting for $5,000, Aaron said. “But if we needed 100 paintings, we would pay them $10 a painting.”

Michaels arts and crafts stores purchased the chain in 1996 and still operates 125 stores under the Aaron Bros. name in seven states. Allmore Aaron died in 1997.

It was after the sale to Michaels that Aaron’s “artistic passion bloomed,” according to a press release, which also promotes Aaron as the “Jackson Pollock of the blue-haired set.” “As much as I occasionally exaggerate for a living, I actually had to rein it in on Len,” says Peter Berk of Crier Communications. “He is just a real oddball sweet character. All he ever wanted was to sell his paintings.”

Although he was financially set for life, Aaron couldn’t believe how much some artists were making. “You go into a great hotel, you walk in and you see a big wall with a little dot in the middle,” he says.

And?

“I think it’s exciting that someone would buy it.”

This, quite simply, is what drives Aaron as he climbs his ladder each morning to drip oil and water; it is what propels him into the city’s bars at night, peddling paintings from his car du jour.

“Never in the history of the world has it been so lucrative for an artist of some ability,” he repeats from time to time, a personal mantra of sorts.

For those who don’t get it the first time, he elaborates: “In the old days, you got a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. Today any artist with some ability is making it while they are still alive. This is a great time to be a painter.”

Margo Leavin, a nationally known dealer of contemporary art who owns a gallery on Robertson Boulevard, disagrees.

“I think that is awful to say,” she says. There is a critical distinction, she adds, between the world of commercial art and fine art. “In the fine art world, I think everyone still works very hard, and it calls for tremendous talent to absorb art history and push the dimensions of art even an inch forward.”

Commercial artists, says Leavin, those who “paint by the hour or have others helping them, or live in beach towns like Laguna painting sea scenes” are simply not on her radar. “There are artists who live extremely well doing that, and we don’t know anything about them,” she said. “When you think about it, how many great collectors are there? But there are lots of people who buy for condominiums, hotels. Those paintings are bought for simple decoration.”

At La Brasserie, Jimenez brings in a few paintings and props them up at the bar. The paintings provoke a conversation of which Aaron is happy to be at the center.

An immigration lawyer named Kaye Evans sidles up from the other end of the bar. She’s an old friend of Aaron’s and owns one of his paintings. “I’m from Jamaica,” she says. “It reminded me of a place there where there is a river. It’s a beautiful rain forest, and a bridge goes across. It’s not what he planned, but that’s what I saw.”

At the bar, patrons are crowding around an orangey, reddish painting slashed with bold black lines.

“It reminds me a little of a Picasso, without the people,” says Jimenez.

Georges Etesse, the owner of La Brasserie and a friend of Aaron’s, is noncommittal about the art. “His greatest masterpiece,” says Etesse, “is himself.”

Aaron is a fine salesman. He sold one painting to a guy who fixed his Mustang. He sold one to his publicist. He sold one to Aaron Spelling back when they were neighbors, after their dogs got in a fight.

He has paintings up at Dave’s Cut Rite Deli on Fairfax, and paintings for sale at Aaron Bros. in Santa Monica. The owner of Art Wave International in Burbank, who has a warehouse of more than 10,000 artworks he sells wholesale and retail, currently has about 22 of Aaron’s paintings.

“I’m trying to sell as many as he paints, but he paints more than I can sell,” says owner Ami Havivi.

Havivi evades questions about quality, content to call Aaron’s paintings “interesting.”

“Some people love the work. Some people say, ‘What the hell is this?’” Havivi says. “If it wasn’t for him, his name, I probably wouldn’t touch them. But he is the founder of Aaron Bros. For me it is a great honor to have his paintings. He is a wonderful person.”

Aaron jumps in his Range Rover. Puffing on his pipe and nearly driving onto the median, he heads to Canter’s Kibitz Room. Two guys are jamming on an acoustic guitar and a harmonica. Aaron orders a cognac with a beer chaser. He spots a friend, Francine Robbins. She’s a piano player and books bands Monday nights. “You gotta see one of my paintings,” he says.

Jimenez hauls a few in and sets them up in a booth. It’s hard to see by the light of flickering candles and neon beer signs.

“Wow!” says Robbins.

“If you want to feel it for the texture, go ahead,” says Jimenez. They run their hands over the cratered surface in the semi-darkness.

“I like that one,” says Robbins. “It’s wonderfully warm.” She plunks down $40 against the $150 price. She props it up on the coffee station for a better look.

A woman steps up to admire it. “I see houses. I see animals. I see a mushroom,” says one woman. “It has a little touch of Japan.”

Aaron tries to paint each morning. He sits in front of his blazing fire, puffs on his pipe, then dons his art boots, abstract masterpieces themselves. He heads out to the backyard where he will create for about two hours. “I can’t paint long, “ he says. “My concentration isn’t good enough.”

He pours paint from a height of about 5 feet, balancing on the ladder for a jungle gym slide. He lays two canvases on a patch of dead, paint-spattered grass. He spills a little white paint. Wind carries it in unexpected directions. “You see why I do two at a time,” he says.

He climbs down, kneels close to the canvas, then drips viscous goo. “The nice part is, if I don’t like it, I take the hose and wash it off and start over,” he says.

Later that night, after a few drinks (“All of the famous artists drank,” he says), he will take a fat magic marker to the canvas, eliciting shapes from the chaos.

He walks through the house, which he shares with the mother of his 15-year-old daughter. (He has two adult daughters by his first wife, who is deceased.) In the kitchen, he stops before a canvas that is a mass of brown slashes and black lines. “That’s as good as I’ll ever get,” he says. “If you ask me to do it again, I can’t.”

He was so elated by this creation that he painted its price right on the canvas: $2,200.

Rooke’s Restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica is the final stop this Monday.

At 11:15 p.m. the piano player is on her last song, and the bartender is shutting the place down. Aaron throws down a whiskey and water.

Outside, he pulls some paintings out of the Range Rover, just the way he used to pull frames out of his Model A. Cowboy hat pushed back, he leans a canvas against each leg and holds one in each arm. A final sales opportunity.

“Midnight special,” he yells to the cars zooming by. “Two for the price of one.”