Under the radar

In a low-slung brick building on Washington Boulevard, across from Joe Boone’s Barbershop and within smelling distance of Rick’s Fish & Chips, Charles Garabedian drapes two recent paintings over the billiard table in his studio. Other works -- colorful squiggles on large sheets of paper -- are tacked to one wall. Hanging opposite them is his endurance piece: a painting 13 years in the making.

“It was really a lousy painting. There was a lot of bad thinking in it,” he says. But he’s transforming it, slowly, into something better. Even good.

Maybe when you’ve been painting for four decades, it’s easier to take that long view about achieving success. Garabedian, who has a survey of his works on paper on view at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery through Dec. 20, will turn 80 this month. In his years, he has earned honors most artists just dream about and suffered periods of obscurity longer than some careers.

“He has always been a very independent artist,” says Henry Hopkins, former director of the UCLA Hammer Museum. “He paints for himself.”

That may be why Garabedian is not particularly famous. His work “always slipped under the hipster radar,” artist Benjamin Weissman wrote in an essay accompanying the Luckman exhibition. Or, as Julie Joyce, the director of the Luckman Gallery puts it, Garabedian is “one of L.A’s most notoriously under-recognized artists.”

His motivations for painting remain personal, not commercial.

“I don’t think I line up well as a mainstream thinker. I don’t mind mainstream art -- if it’s good, it’s good -- but I just can’t do it,” he says in his cavernous industrial studio, where sun streams in from skylights. “You want to know who you are. You look over the body of your work, and say, ‘That’s who I was, and who I may become.’ ”

Garabedian’s work has a distinct narrative element; during the last 20 years he has been especially inspired by the Illiad and Greek mythology. Some of the pictures from this period depict bodies strewn across a landscape, the seeming aftermath of a battle.

Although the slain figures are bloodied, they wear seraphic expressions on their faces, notes Nevin Schreiner, the co-curator of the Luckman show. Not completely conscious, “they are both hapless and happy,” he says. “As if they wanted to be doing exactly what they were doing, by dying.”

Garabedian is coy about any connection between the violent, if also serene, images and his experiences as an airplane gunner in North Africa during World War II.

“The figures were always kind of just there -- just victims of their circumstances,” Garabedian says.

His own circumstances might seem the stuff of drama, but he doesn’t make a fuss telling his life story. He starts, for instance, “We had a relatively happy childhood.”

The painter was born in 1923 in Detroit to Armenian parents. When he was 2, his mother died, and his father -- disabled after an accident and unable to care for three small children -- placed Garabedian and his sisters in an orphanage.

Seven years later, his father and uncle (who didn’t speak English) retrieved 9-year-old Charles and his siblings. Cramped together in a Buick, this family of five strangers drove across the country from Detroit to East Los Angeles, where the young Garabedian grew up, in his words, “on charity.”

After graduating from Garfield High School, he enlisted in the Army. The war rather suited him, he says. “The danger, it didn’t dawn on me.”

After the war, on the GI Bill, he studied literature at UC Santa Barbara, then transferred to USC, where in 1950 he got a degree in history. It was in the early 1950s, when he was a freight clerk for Union Pacific Railroad, that he met Ed Moses, who introduced him to drawing and painting.

Until then, Garabedian thought painting just meant illustrating stories. He was 31 when he began “messing around with this oily stuff.”

“Painting,” he says, “saved my skin.”

He was accepted at UCLA, where he studied with painter William Brice, and in 1961 received his master of fine arts degree. He taught there throughout the ‘60s and in 1965 had his first gallery show. (He married Gwendolyn Morris in 1963, and they have two daughters and several grandchildren.) Several exhibits in Southern California followed. But it was his solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976 that introduced him to a wider art audience.

He won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1977, and a Guggenheim Fellowship three years later. The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art did a survey of his work in 1981, and he had a midcareer retrospective at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts in 1983. Throughout the ‘80s, his work appeared in high-profile shows and museums -- the Venice Biennale, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington -- and solo gallery shows.

‘A potent antidote’

But like the stock market, the art boom of the ‘80s was coming to an end.

Though he worked relentlessly, gallery shows became more sporadic. Sales slowed. “It’s not important as a sign of success. But it’s important to buy groceries.”

These days, his workweek is fairly regimented. He travels from his Santa Monica home to his studio every day except Wednesday, when he plays golf. One day each weekend is spent at the racetrack.

(Garabedian used to own race horses with artist Robert Irwin, who famously supported himself early on with his track winnings. “Bob,” Garabedian says, is a “calculating guy. He took no nonsense from those horses.”)

His work is resurfacing and gaining attention again. Doug Harvey of the LA Weekly, reviewing a show at L.A. Louver Gallery last year, called Garabedian’s paintings “quintessential modern paintings, engaging playfully with the entire history of art in a spirit of experimentalism.”

The Luckman show was chosen as a critic’s pick in Artforum magazine, and art reviewer David Pagel wrote in The Times that his “accessible art is a potent antidote to fickle fashions and flash-in-the-pan sensations.”

But his friend of 50 years, Moses, sums up Garabedian as a painter’s painter. “He makes no compromises. He works on the paintings, not as a vehicle to get rich or famous. He’s just into the painting as painting.” And as an instrument of self-discovery and self-creation.

“Painting has made me human, which is what you want to become.” Ultimately, what matters is the “hope that my grandchildren will be proud of me. I think my daughters are and my wife is.”

Beyond the family, fame is fickle anyway.

“The real issue is: We painted. Whether we painted well or not, we’ll never really know.”

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Charles Garabedian: Works on Paper, 1965-2001

Where: Luckman Gallery, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles

When: Mondays-Thursdays and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.

Ends: Dec. 20

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 343-6610