A stream of pop surrealism

GLENN BARR refers to his art as “B-culture surrealism with a kind of regionalism to it,” and looking at his latest work featured at Culver City’s Billy Shire Fine Arts gallery, that sounds about right.

Among the pieces is a painting of a young woman perched on a ledge and serenely sipping a drink with a knife wedged in her back. Then there’s the pencil drawing of “Judy Jetrash” lighting up in a seedy bar, and on another wall hangs a decapitated angel riding an overripe atom bomb against a mustard yellow background.

Whatever you want to call Barr’s work, he’s created an eerie postindustrial world of muted colors populated by cartoon characters, femme fatales, devils, angels and everything in between.

“Glenn has a wonderful liquid style that reeks of the romance that embodied the girlie magazines from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, but it also has a lot of forethought and intelligence to it,” says artist and Juxtapoz magazine founder Robert Williams. “When you see four or five of his images together, you can see his syntax and vocabulary, and what a brilliant artist he is.”

That’s no small praise given that Williams is also one of the founding fathers of the lowbrow art movement (now commonly referred to, much to Williams’ chagrin, as “pop surrealism”) that encompasses the likes of Gary Panter, Mark Ryden, Coop, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Camille Rose Garcia and Barr. Although much of the movement originated from and continues to thrive in Southern California, Barr steadfastly calls Detroit his home.

Barr’s 2,000-square-foot studio resides just off largely unoccupied and sometimes unsavory Michigan Avenue, and it’s from that vantage point that he draws much of the mood and inspiration that permeates his paintings.

“A lot of my art has to do with where I am -- it’s like folk art to me,” says Barr, 47. “The city has a great texture that I try to inject into my paintings.

“You paint what you know,” he adds. “I used to be a musician and hang out at all the local watering holes, which is why for several years I depicted a lot of bar scenes.”

In addition to his immediate environs, Barr is also heavily influenced by early pulp novels, science fiction, animated characters from his youth and 1970s blaxploitation films. More recently, he has begun to add ancient mythological figures to his palette, all of which are often juxtaposed against urban blight or post-apocalyptic scenes.

“I like to include a dichotomy of images in my work -- something alluring with something repelling,” he says. “Any artist can render; I think that’s easy to do. The hard part is trying to keep it interesting.”

Barr pushes that doctrine to the limit with his current show’s centerpiece, a 5-by-8-foot commission that depicts a sphinx, the three Fates and even Foxy Brown among the ruins of a carnival midway.

“That giant painting is my take on the underworld in a modern setting,” he says. “Everyone is so fanatical about religion these days that I took it upon myself to make my own.”

The piece is titled “Eternah: First Floor,” which “means that I have several floors to go,” he says, hinting about what works may lie ahead.

Barr has come a long way from his days as an aspiring comic book artist in the early 1990s hawking his sketches at Midwest comic conventions. Though he managed to complete the art for the four-volume DC Comics graphic novel “Brooklyn Dreams” (a four-year undertaking), by 1993 he began contemplating trading in his ink quill for a paintbrush.

It was then, while in the midst of an eight-month stint working for “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi designing backgrounds and color schemes for his TV show, that he first visited the La Luz de Jesus gallery.

“I had never been to an underground gallery like that before, and to see the art celebrated like it was by tons of people, including celebrities, really affected me,” Barr says. “After that, I came back here and just started painting.”

A few years later, Barr came to the attention of Billy Shire, the proprietor of the La Luz de Jesus and Billy Shire Fine Arts galleries who is often referred to as the Peggy Guggenheim of lowbrow art.

“From the time I first saw Glenn’s work some 10 years ago, I thought he was one of the more original people doing the kind of pop surrealism genre -- he had his own voice and style and was not beholden to the Robert Williams kind of look, which was prevalent at the time,” says Shire, who first showed Barr’s work in 2001. “In addition, he was, and still is, a really good painter in terms of his brushstrokes and techniques.”

Given Barr’s four years of formal training at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, his proficiency with the paintbrush doesn’t come as much of a surprise. What may be a bit of a surprise is that Barr doesn’t exactly take his time rendering his paintings, likening his technique to stream of consciousness.

“I like to paint fast, and, in fact, I often use a hairdryer to make it dry faster,” he says. “I want to get my ideas down on canvas before the idea escapes me -- I’m always trying to capture that original primal spark that got me interested in the painting in the first place.”

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Glenn Barr

Where: Billy Shire Fine Arts, 5790 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and by appointment

Ends: Aug. 19

Info: (323) 297-0600, www.billyshirefinearts.com