Concrete canvas

Perhaps it was inevitable: In a region dominated by the car, the humble parking garage had to become, as New York subways once did, the art world’s new frontier.

In May, sound artist Hugh Livingston built an ambitious installation in a garage in Santa Monica; in June, Shepard Fairey designed two walls inside the parking structure at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And over the last few weeks, Kenny Scharf has been spray painting the garage under the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

“I was looking at the garage and thought, ‘This space is kind of

Scharf came to the museum last winter to consider bringing an exhibition of his work there. He came back to spray paint some life into it. The 10,000-square-foot garage, whose paint job will be permanent, will be the centerpiece of his first solo exhibition in California.

Today, Scharf surveys his work -- a series of futuristic characters, a fantastic city and the re-creation of life after a bomb blast -- and wants to step outside to discuss it: Thanks to the fumes coming off the freshly painted walls and the carbon monoxide pumped out by a hovering U-Haul, the artist needs to get some air.

“It’s really fast; it’s really big,” says Scharf, 45, who if not for an intense stare could be a grown-up skate-rat with his shorts, sandals, plaid shirt and deep tan. “That’s why it’s so great for me to have this project.”

Although he has pieced together a story to describe his paintings -- something about the world being destroyed and then re-forming -- Scharf admits there’s neither a master narrative nor intellectual concept behind it. And that, he says, is its great virtue.

“I really didn’t make a plan,” he says. “Part of the fun of spray painting is the immediacy. Not really knowing, just letting things happen. I always liked spontaneity and chance. It’s exciting just to see what happens.”

The style comes naturally. Although Scharf moved back to Los Angeles in 1999 -- the Valley native now lives with his wife in Culver City and has two grown daughters -- he remains associated with the New York art world of the 1980s and with friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of whom used graffiti to express their exuberant inner worlds.

“I hung out with a lot of graffiti kids,” says Scharf, the sole survivor of the trio. “I picked up my spray painting technique from them. But I never considered myself a graffiti artist; I never had a tag. I came from an art background.”

Yet he enjoys the outlaw connotation the word “graffiti” still packs, and the process -- as he toils on the garage for hours at a time, much of it in the evenings -- brings back good memories.

Exhibition opening

Scharf first visited the museum at the invitation of art consultant Merry Norris, who curated his show. She had visited his studio and seen his psychedelic, customized Pace Arrow motor home parked outside. Norris, a member of the museum’s board of directors, said she wanted to drive it somewhere and hold a party inside.

“All the other ideas for the show,” Norris said, “came from that motor home,” which will be part of the “Kenny Scharf: California Grown” exhibition. The show opens with a reception at 8 tonight and will include two early-’60s Cadillacs, as well as Scharf sculptures and assemblage pieces in the gallery.

While Morrissey sings from a boom box, about sipping tea that tastes like the River Thames, Scharf uses an aerosol can to paint whimsically curving lines that create a clownish face. Then he uses the rose-colored spray paint to fill in the lines.

“There’s the main character that all the other guys will come off of,” he says. As the day goes on, he’ll have more faces coming out from behind the central image, and he’ll model the completed section by adding a painted light source and shadows.

Appropriately enough for an artist whose early work included “Flintstones” and “Jetsons” characters, Scharf mixes his outer-space characters with prehistoric landscapes. “I like extremes and opposites,” he says. “Past and future. Micro and macro. Extremes create excitement and drama.”

Scharf himself got a study in extremes by moving from the highly bureaucratized world of animation back to seat-of-the-pants spray painting.

“You have the power to get your work out there to the bigger world,” he says of working with animation studios, a dream that brought him back to Los Angeles in 1999 after six years in Miami. “But you can’t just do what you want when you want to do it. You have all these higher-ups. They’re more concerned with keeping their jobs than making a great project. And there’s no common courtesy -- even business courtesy. ‘Next! You’re nothing!’ ”

Along with his ambivalence toward Hollywood -- he’d like to do more work there, despite its abrasive style -- Scharf has a love-hate relationship with his native city and its car culture.

“I remember why I left in the first place,” he says. “The biggest problem is the transportation. It stifles the city as a city. Everyone is alone in their cars. It’s isolating; the cliques don’t mix.”

But he acknowledges his eye was profoundly shaped by growing up in Southern California.

“In the early days in New York, I espoused fun,” he says. “And I got a lot of flak for it. ‘Art can’t be fun.’

“I’m going to say it right now: ‘Art is fun!’ Suffering and art are supposed to go together.” And perhaps remembering his time with the paint fumes: “Even if it’s fun, you can still suffer.”

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Kenny Scharf: California Grown

Where: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E. Union St.

When: Noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays

Ends: Sept. 19

Price: Adults, $6; seniors and students, $4

Contact: (626) 568-3665