A More Sophisticated Palette

Artist Jeff Gillette takes heart that he’s not alone in melding his fascination with pop culture and fine art.

His idol, he thinks, would approve.

“Robert Williams was my introduction to art, period,” said Gillette, 41, a Cal State Fullerton graduate art student.

Williams, an underground comic-book illustrator of the 1960s, crossed over to the fine-art world as a painter, taking his “low art” to new heights and paving the way for like-minded artists.

In the last decade he has permeated the Orange County scene as local artists, venues and collectors embrace his paintings. His work resonates in the land of surf culture and hot rods.

Its influence can be seen in Gillette’s paintings that juxtapose religion, sex, cartoons, philosophy and Mickey Mouse. Artist Josh Agle, a.k.a. Shag, has been compared with Williams too. Agle paints crowds of swank swingers in lounge settings.

“I was influenced by Williams and artists like him, to an extent, because I did try to pattern my career as a painter after what they had done,” said Agle, 38, of Orange, a former graphic designer and illustrator who now paints full-time.

Williams’ new series of 18 oil paintings are on exhibit at Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. The show, “Best Intentions,” comes after a New York debut at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. The West Coast premiere kicks off the center’s second anniversary and Williams’ 58th birthday.

“He’s an artist who has gained a cult following,” said Grand Central director Mike McGee.

Williams’ collectors read like a Who’s Who list: Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio and Yoko Ono among others. His name catapulted into the “high” art world in 1992, when his paintings were shown in the controversial exhibition, “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” at the Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

He has since been featured in Orange County: the 1993 “Kustom Kulture” group exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum; a 1998 solo show, “Robert Williams: New Work,” at the Huntington Beach Art Center; and now the Grand Central show.

Williams’ oil paintings are playful, graphic and fantastical but they also address such matters as evolution, human foibles, sex and violence.

“It’s hard to call his work mature because it has so much adolescent verve bursting at the seams,” McGee said.

There is nothing subtle about Williams’ style. The lines and shapes are exaggerated, and incongruent images are placed together. The paintings don’t just grab your attention, they assault the eyes.

Blame it on the psychedelic ‘60s with its liberating, even dizzying, use of color schemes, Williams said. A color theorist’s worst nightmare, Williams is known for his bright palette. He layers cool, turquoise-greens next to warm, orange-reds. He uses grays and muted contrast hues to make the colors appear to leap off the canvas.

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This cartoonish, surrealistic style of exaggeration seems to undercut the lifetime Williams spent studying form and color theory. His paintings also have distinctive broad-hatch brush strokes that are easily missed; his keen attention to technique is reminiscent of classical painters of the Renaissance and 19th century.

He expertly fuses comic-book and pop-culture influences with an academic style, McGee said. “He’s an excellent draftsman and his paintings are refined and elegantly painted.”

McGee said Williams borrows figurative forms, light and mood from masters such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Bosch, Turner and Delacroix. Salvador Dali is Williams’ favorite 20th century painter.

“You can’t deny the fact that Williams played a role in reviving the figurative and representational,” McGee said.

Williams’ knack for developed story lines came from his budding days as an underground cartoonist with Zap Comix in the 1960s. The paintings tend to overstate a point. Each has three titles, including an obtuse scientific, academic-style name, a colloquial reference and “bar room” name.

“I realized when I was younger that if a painting had more than one title, then it offered people different ways of looking at the painting,” said Williams, who lives with his wife, Suzanne, in North Hollywood. “I’m trying to make the art that is fun for people rather than to pass off bogus intellectuality.”

While painting, Williams honed his comic-book skills. He learned about “timing,” a technique that brings a sense of movement to the canvas.

He still uses cartoon techniques such as bubble captions and breakaway panels that serve as visual asides or vignettes, elaborating on the dominant subject. Completing each painting can be so taxing that it takes him from one to four months to finish.

“My paintings have to compete with radio, television and all these electronic things that move and keep your attention, and a painting has to have that kind of energy and movement,” Williams said.

Williams, who detests the “I” word, as in “illustrator,” has made a living as a fine artist for 31 years. The Chouinard Arts Institute (now Cal Arts in Santa Clarita) dropout said he was disillusioned by instructors who told him he was an illustrator when he wanted to be a fine artist.

He understands the struggle of young, emerging artists firsthand. He remembers being so poor during the 1980s that he would paint on jute, a coarse fiber similar to burlap. Those first paintings were inspired by the punk-rock scene and portrayed “people in nightclubs at 2 a.m. who were drunk or on drugs.” He called the series “Zombie Mystery” paintings and sold them for $400 a pop. They drew fans but also fueled feminists and others who were outraged by the gratuitous images of sex and violence. Williams has since toned down his provocative content.

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Realizing he was not alone in creating art that championed cartoons, storytelling and pop culture, Williams wanted to find a way to pull artists of his ilk together. So, he founded Juxtapoz magazine in spring 1995.

The 70,000-circulation publication features works by three generations of artists influenced by Williams.

Though the magazine is based in San Francisco, it is co-founded by art collector Greg Escalante of Surfside.

“It was a new way of thinking about art,” said Escalante, 45, who has served on several art museum boards. Escalante curates for the magazine, selecting the artists to include and coordinating with writers who provide the texts.

“It used to make me mad when I wanted to learn more about art but I couldn’t understand it from reading an intellectual art magazine with its hard-core art theory, as if the writers were writing to show how smart they were,” Escalante said. “Juxtapoz is a magazine that was created as an introduction into the art world with a facet that showcases popular, edgy art not shown anywhere else. It was a niche that we knew existed.”

The title refers to images that may appear mismeshed or misaligned. The eclectic magazine, which started as a quarterly and went bimonthly in 1999 to meet demands, is distributed at local bookstores as well as internationally in Italy, South Africa, England, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Australia and other countries.

Designed for disenfranchised artists, Juxtapoz presents a mixed brew of street art: comic books, psychedelic art, skate, surf and hot-rod art.

Orange County is home to small outcroppings of such counterculture. “[Here] you have the right people at the right time and art establishments that are small enough where they can take a chance to validate the art rather than to wait for art to be validated,” Escalante said. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t find alternative art anywhere in Orange County.”

Laguna Art Museum exhibitions curator Tyler Stallings, who has organized several shows that connect consumer culture with art, said he isn’t just focused on mainstream artists, because people grow up with two different art histories.

“[There’s] an official version learned in school, read in course books and seen in museums, and a more informal, self-taught history that derives from comic books, television, pop music and movies,” he said.

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The latter may be sources of inspiration for an artist’s creativity but aren’t necessarily integrated into an official art-history context.

“As a curator, I’m interested in bringing together those two art histories, or artists who struggle between the two histories,” Stallings said. “Robert Williams is the prime example, and younger people know that.”

Art collectors say the Juxtapoz sphere is easier to relate to and accessible. Scott Fletcher of Costa Mesa owns an original painting by Williams, “Vanity of the New,” which was shown in MOCA’s “Helter Skelter.” The painting hangs in Fletcher’s bedroom and after seven years, he still finds details he hadn’t noticed before.

“The Juxtapoz artists make themselves so approachable and easy to talk to,” said Fletcher, 46, an office manager who grew up reading MAD and Zap comics. “It’s not like the New York art scene, where the artists are completely inaccessible.”

Williams’ sheer energy and the rebellious nature of his work has been a phenomenon felt throughout the art community, McGee said.

“I like that Williams challenges conservative notions in terms of what’s acceptable for fine art and art derived from popular culture. I find that very exciting.”

* “Best Intentions,” Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Gallery hours: Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Artist presentation and book signing, April 21. Show ends April 29. (714) 567-7233.