To Live and Create in L.A.

Los Angeles art schools have always attracted an impressive pool of applicants. In the 1960s, the recipe for success was simple: Get to L.A., get a degree, get a cheap studio in Venice and get to work. With a little luck, careers took care of themselves.

Things changed in the ‘70s. As enrollments grew, the art-market slumped. Graduates moved to New York in increasing numbers, beginning a migration that continued well into the ‘80s.

Then things changed again. Upon graduating, more and more artists stayed in Los Angeles. Some rose to international prominence, putting to rest the idea that living in New York was necessary for success.

The art market flourished, reaching all-time highs. Then it crashed in the early ‘90s, and artists educated in L.A. stayed put. As the economy improved, an unprecedented development has occurred: Artists with advanced degrees from schools in other cities began moving here.

Currently on view at the UCLA Hammer Museum, “Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles,” a survey of works by 25 young artists who live in Los Angeles includes paintings, sculptures and drawings by four who came here just because they thought L.A. would be a good place to be an artist. Although Mari Eastman, Thomas Eggerer, Robert Stone and Amy Wheeler based their decisions on unique mixes of personal and professional reasons, they generally agree that low rents, great weather and unsurpassed career opportunities give L.A. an edge over other cities.

“I can’t imagine any young artist choosing to move to New York today. It’s so hard to make a living there. I really can’t see it,” Eggerer says. At 38, he is the oldest of the four.

Born in Munich, Eggerer graduated from his hometown’s art academy in 1994, when a grant from a German academic institution allowed him to move to New York. He recalls, “After I got that grant for my paintings, I stopped painting. Being a young gay painter, I felt that my work was trapped in an ‘80s format--big and basically abstract. I needed something else.”

For three years in New York, he made installations, wrote theoretical essays and was a member of Group Material, an activist collective whose politically oriented work took art out of the gallery and into the street. “The New York art world is less accessible to newcomers,” he says. “It’s more stratified, more dominated by the gallery system. I worked hard just to make a living. I was a waiter in a celebrity restaurant. I enjoyed it for a while, but eventually it was not satisfying to spend so much time doing that.”

The desire to paint returned. “I hadn’t abandoned painting out of frustration or anything like that. I always liked to paint, and I still love looking at paintings. It had just felt right not to do it for a while.

In 1997, he moved back to Germany, this time to Cologne. Living expenses were lower, and Eggerer could spend more time in the studio. He started painting modestly scaled pictures of loosely rendered figures whose contemporary settings often dissolve into abstract forms. Depicting such leisure activities as soccer practice, tennis lessons and sightseeing trips, his acrylics-on-linen are suffused with the intangibility of daydreams.

Eggerer describes Cologne as “a breeding ground for artistic existences, a small place with a very high concentration of very informed, very smart and very weird people--the likes of which don’t proliferate in New York.” But he also found its small-town feeling claustrophobic.

Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles. His Silver Lake apartment, which overlooks Glendale Boulevard, doubles as his studio. Attributing his decision to his “unrestful character,” he says, “I was attracted to L.A. for the simple reason that it is a big city. While I knew that there was an art scene--I guess it’s necessary to have that--I didn’t care about it being hyped as the next big thing.

“I’m generally suspicious of such fanfare. I always have been more interested in a group of middle-aged and older artists, Conceptualists like Ed Ruscha, Larry Johnson, Stephen Prina and Christopher Williams. I’m surprised to see that their work doesn’t seem to connect to a lot of the painting and photography that gets shown. Right now, L.A. is so L.A.-oriented. It is self-obsessed to the point of being unaware of its own history.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I like to do my own thing. I like that in L.A. you don’t have to have the intense, day-to-day exchanges that you do in Cologne, hanging out in the bars, socializing and drinking. Plus, the art world has become so international that it doesn’t really matter that I live in Los Angeles. Of course, it helps that I had a gallery [Daniel Buchholz in Cologne] when I arrived. That made getting a gallery here [Richard Telles Fine Art] so much easier.”

All the paintings in his L.A. solo debut sold. Since he moved here, he has been able to paint full time. Looking to the future, he says, “I don’t know where I’ll move next. I don’t move for the sake of moving. I just get stuck in some way and then I know it’s time to go. And right now I’m not stuck. It’s good to be in Los Angeles--as far as it’s good for an artist to be anywhere. Because you’re always stuck in the same old horrible situation--of having to face your work--no matter where you live.”

If Eggerer came to L.A. to put some distance between himself and surroundings that had become overly familiar, the other three artists came for the opposite reason. Having met in Chicago, where Eastman and Wheeler were students, they all had felt the lure of L.A. for years.

Although they all moved here separately, Wheeler and Stone now live together, renting a roomy house with a large yard in Highland Park. Eastman and Wheeler have rented a windowless loft in Boyle Heights, which they have divided into separate studios.

By the time Eastman, 31, graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a master’s in fine arts in 1996, she knew she’d eventually move here: “It was pretty much L.A. from the beginning. I didn’t think New York was a viable option.

“I was from California,” she explains. “My parents live in Japan, and my father works as an attorney in both Tokyo and Los Angeles. At the time, he was here every other month. Eventually he rented an apartment in Mid-Wilshire. That’s where I live now.”

Born in San Francisco, Eastman moved with her family to Singapore and Japan. After high school, she departed for Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s in studio art from Smith College.

After a year of working as an illustrator in Tokyo, she was off to Chicago for graduate school. She recalls, “I really loved Chicago. When I was living there, it was just the best place for me at the time. There’s an amazing music scene and an amazing art scene--in terms of what the students and emerging artists are doing. There’s just no collector base, and it’s a little provincial.

“After graduation, I stayed for two years. It was the perfect amount of time. My work was included in several group shows, and Amy and I organized a two-person show for ourselves.”

But it was frustrating. “I always had to explain why I thought my work was good,” Eastman says. “If people came to my studio and saw a painting of a wolf, they’d say: ‘If you really like wolves, you should research them, and go out and study them like [L.A. artist] Diana Thater.’ And I’d be like, ‘If I really liked wolves, I wouldn’t be a painter! I’d be a biologist!’ I mean, I like wolves well enough, but that’s not really the point. I got tired of having my work dealt with at that level.”

In Los Angeles, Eastman has found the art scene more competitive than in Chicago. “But that’s because there’s actually something to compete for,” she says. “The best thing about L.A. is being able to sell your work. In Chicago, my peers were receptive to my work; here the interest spans generations.”

Depicting wild animals and dreamy landscapes, Eastman’s canvases combine the sweet allure of fairy tales with the harshness of life in the big city. She handles paint in a sophisticated manner, transforming scenes that might appeal to young girls into studies of what it means to grow up.

“Professionally, being in Los Angeles has been very good for me. When I arrived in October of 1998, [artist] Jorge [Pardo] had just finished building his house in Mount Washington and Laura [Owens] had a show at Acme. Both were fantastic. My first impression was that the caliber of the art here was really high. I was excited. I was also kind of scared--that I’d have to match that level. Now I realize that shows like those two don’t happen every month.

“I like L.A. a lot,” she adds. “It’s a city whose major industry is the making of culture. At some level, everyone here is trying to be an artist. It seems that people go to New York just to live in New York. Nobody comes to L.A. just to live in L.A. You come here because you’re ambitious and you want to get something done.”

Like Eastman, Wheeler, 33, received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. She had her sights set on Los Angeles even longer: “When I enrolled in graduate school, I already knew I wanted to move here.”

Born in L.A. and raised in a suburb of San Diego, she got a bachelor’s in art history at Reed College in Portland, Ore., and then spent a year teaching English in Japan. “At about that time,” she recalls, “it became clear to me that I wanted to go to art school in L.A. So I applied to CalArts, got accepted, but was offered a measly little scholarship. The Art Institute offered me a free ride. I was excited to go to Chicago, but I knew that when I finished I’d be moving to L.A.”

Wheeler works three days a week as a graphic designer for a shampoo company; in the fall, she’ll teach an advanced painting class at UC Irvine. Her abstract canvases have been included in several group exhibitions, and she has had two solo shows, one downtown at Post Gallery and the other at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica.

Based on her memories of fashion boutiques in Beverly Hills and New York City, Wheeler’s paintings are poignant meditations on window shopping. Fusing pleasure and melancholy, they give physical form to those exquisite moments when just looking at fine things is more satisfying than owning them.

Generally happy with the four years she has been here, Wheeler reflects on the differences between L.A. and Chicago. “There’s a purity to the community there. The people who go to openings are genuinely interested in the art; making money and becoming famous are next to impossible. In a way it was more friendly and fun and direct.

“I do miss that. But the community is small and it ends up being a little insular. L.A. is sometimes all of those things, but the stakes are higher here. You can actually make money; you can sell your paintings. But I’ve also been a little frustrated by the vestiges of provincialism here. When you go to New York, you see work by New York artists, L.A. artists, European artists. L.A. galleries predominantly show L.A. artists.

For his part, Stone moved to Los Angeles because he wanted his work to have an organic relationship to the cultural atmosphere he was familiar with. “Basically, the choice is New York or L.A.,” he says. “If you’re interested in high culture, New York is clearly the place to go. They have the best museums. I’m not interested in low culture as opposed to high culture; I’m interested in my culture.”

He elaborates: “I try to make work that is specific to a time and place. In a sense, the social and physical aspects of Southern California are my subjects. You have to have a deep relationship to a culture to do anything really elegant with it. I’m not interested in making art about culture, commenting on it from a false outsider position. I’m interested in actually getting in there and affecting the larger culture in some way.”

Born in Palm Springs, the 32-year-old artist holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from UC Berkeley. Upon graduating, Stone moved to Chicago, because he wanted a change from the Bay Area and because of his admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright. He got a job in an architectural firm and opened Automatic, a gallery that showed the work of emerging artists.

Like Eastman and Wheeler, though, Stone had L.A in mind all along. The first work he made here was a series of custom-designed parking blocks, those low concrete barricades that drivers often bump into when they park. At night, he bolted them into two lots. Over the next few days, skateboarders discovered his surreptitious sculptures, whose curves and edges served their purposes beautifully.

He explains, “I made my parking blocks look normal enough so the property owners wouldn’t notice them but distinct enough so that skaters would instantly recognize their potential. What had been ordinary parking lots became meeting points where people got together to do something they love.

“There are lots of places in L.A. that feel unowned. Of course someone owns them on paper. But if you use them, you can kind of claim them as your own. This attitude comes from being a punk in Palm Springs, trespassing and draining pools to skate in. Most consumers have similar relationships to products, using them and making them our own. That’s exactly how art functions. It just hangs there until you make it your playground.”

Stone works full time in an architecture firm and is studying to get licensed. Evenings are dedicated to his own work, which combines elements of product design, marketing research, architecture and art. He recently fabricated a sleek pair of strap-on subwoofers for the Mercedes-Benz SLK230. He is looking for investors for his latest project, a gold-plated and mirrored motel for Palm Springs. At once far-fetched and sensible, it captures the spirit of a time and place.

“Ultimately, I may be a bit of an outsider,” he says, “to both the architecture scene and the art scene in L.A. But I really feel the culture in my bones: This is who I am, this is where I have to be.”

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“Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles,” UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Through Sept. 2. (310) 443-7000.