He Fights for Freedom, One Oversize Painting at a Time

If, as French cubist Georges Braque once said, art is meant to disturb, Mike McNeilly is on the right track.

He’s got the city attorney’s office after him, half of Westwood in an uproar and the ACLU coming over the horizon waving a fiery sword of civil righteousness.

He is either an artist or a doodler, a patriot or an opportunist, a 1st Amendment hero or a self-serving huckster.

But love him or hate him, you sure know he’s there.

McNeilly is the guy who paints giant murals on the side of the 12-story medical building in Westwood. Sometimes it’s a movie ad, other times a tribute to America.

He does the commercial stuff, he says, to pay for the patriotic art, which is currently a pouty, 60-foot-high armed female Marine who stares down Wilshire Boulevard as if she’s ready to make war on anything west of the 405.

The city attorney’s office says, more or less, that it loves America, too, and the flag and the Statue of Liberty and all, but McNeilly’s “super graphic” violates city codes and he’s got to take the bloody thing down.

McNeilly has been fighting city hall and its codes for almost three years with lawyers of his own, and now he’s got the American Civil Liberties Union on his side, hoo-boy!

There hasn’t been this much excitement in Westwood since the Chaucerian Chowder Society held a medieval read-off at UCLA.

At one time or another, L.A. has gone after street vendors, street musicians and anyone else who has threatened to add a little fun to the city. I’ve always suspected that the reason for the fuss is that we’ve been burdened with leaders who are essentially totally gray themselves, including our current ace, Little Jimmy Monotone.

And now the city has declared war on a man who dares to brighten up a corner of L.A. once noted for nothing more attractive than a graveyard.

I called McNeilly, who agreed to meet me at his studio. I expected it to be in a rented room furnished with a bed, a wooden table and an easel, like that Van Gogh painting of his place in Arles. Maybe there’d be a skinny dog curled up on the floor next to the bed.

But I should’ve known that any man who paints things on the sides of buildings probably isn’t a starving artist.

McNeilly’s studio is one of two houses he owns on an acre of land in the hills above Benedict Canyon with a spectacular view of just about everything. The second house is the office of two women who work for him. A third building on the property is being remodeled into a photo studio by a crew of workers.

Not bad for a guy who, says a city attorney spokesman, makes more than $1 million a year breaking the law.

McNeilly waves off the comment. “There’s always someone trying to control art,” he’s says, showing me around his studio/house. He’s a tall, amiable man with shoulder-length hair and a kind of ambling manner. He wears jeans and a T-shirt that says “Don’t Drink and Draw.”

“They want final say over not only content, but the message and the medium too, if you know what I mean. I say the government has no business being involved in art, and I’m lucky enough to have the means to fight them.”

We walk past a gleaming, gold-leafed fiberglass sculpture of a woman lying atop a simulated crypt, past other sculptures, religious paintings, posters and cartoon sketches, and enter a room containing three computers. Here he creates virtual-reality figures for television and paints some of the pieces transferred onto vinyl as murals.

“I call this lethal art,” he says, gesturing to an oil painting with real bullets glued to its surface. “I used to use live ammunition, but sometimes when the resin got hot, the bullets exploded. I’ve had 14 rounds go off on one piece of art. Now I use blanks.”

Oklahoma-born, McNeilly has lived in L.A. for most of his 48 years and has been an artist since, at age 8, his dad gave him a copy of Playboy magazine and said, “Draw.” He’s been doing just that ever since.

He makes money doing stuff for the entertainment industry but won’t sell or exhibit his own paintings, which are piling up in a garage and two other storage areas. The city attorney’s spokesman says they’ve offered to help McNeilly display his art legally, but he’ll have none of it.

“I’m a street artist, and the street is my gallery,” he says, standing beside a sculptured horse and rider of the apocalypse on a deck that looks out toward a misty Beverly Hills. “I used to do posters for bus stops and construction walls. Now I do murals.”

Two years ago a court ruled that his Statue of Liberty painting on the side of the medical building was a legitimate expression of free speech, but the city just keeps citing him. Nevertheless, McNeilly promises to go on painting murals, whether it’s on the deck of an aircraft carrier, which he’s done, or on the side of that building in Westwood. He’s not sure what the next one will be. “Whatever moves me,” he says.

Whatever moves him will also move the city attorney’s office, the ACLU, his own attorneys and half of Westwood. I’m lobbying for a nude portrait of Osama bin Laden as his next mural. We can call it “Vulnerability” and defend it as fair comment. That’ll light somebody’s fire.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He is at al.martinez@latimes.com.