Her Burlesque Act Is on Canvas

As a child, Blanca Apodaca was fascinated by the pinup girls painted on the noses of fighter planes in photos collected during World War II by her father, a veteran. Today the 31-year-old artist illustrates children’s books, but she also pays homage to those cheesecake ladies in oil portraits of L.A. bohemians--dancers from the neo-burlesque Velvet Hammer troupe, which then included designer Maria Basaldu and journalist Hope Urban.

The artist’s pinup-style “Dream Girls” series celebrates cartoonishly sexy babes in retro-style fantasy scenarios--decorated with tattoo art motifs such as skulls and roses--and has been reproduced as a calendar available on Apodaca’s Web site, www.blancaapodaca.com. Apodaca emblemizes a new phase in lowbrow, the raunchy upstart art movement that gestated among surfers, custom car designers, cartoonists and tattoo artists in postwar Southern California. Today Apodaca and other female artists are reveling in the hot rods-and-hot-babes imagery long seen as men’s fantasy territory. “I know that, to some people, exaggerated superhero female curves are sexist,” says Apodaca, who grew up in El Segundo, Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley. “But I see that as a matter of [lowbrow] style, along with bulging eyeballs and impossibly twisted cars.”

Robert and Suzanne Williams, the artist couple who co-founded lowbrow art bible Juxtapoz magazine, encouraged Apodaca to submit the “Dream Girls” paintings for “Hot Rod Mamas,” a group show of female artists March 16 at the Burbank store 8 Ball. The exhibit, which includes several Apodaca works, showcases female lowbrow artists, who have often participated in the alternative art scene more as cheerleaders, models and girlfriends. Another benchmark is “Vicious, Delicious and Ambitious: 21st Century Lady Artists” (Schiffer Publishing), due later this year, which features several Southern California lowbrow artists, such as Stacy Lande, Liz McGrath and Suzanne Williams.

While Apodaca thinks it’s high time lowbrow’s female talents won exposure on the other side of the canvas, she acknowledges that their output doesn’t veer far from the genre’s basic (some might say base) joys. “Exaggeration is a major component of the appeal,” says Apodaca. “It’s not about reproducing some comfortable reality.”