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POSTER BOY: Conal, grappling
with Marley, usually skewers the high and mighty.
Alan Shaffer |
People who have never heard
of Robbie Conal know his work. For nearly 20 years,
bands of nocturnal volunteers have plastered the self-described
guerrilla poster artist’s portraits on bus stops,
brick walls, freeway underpasses and street signs in
cities across the country. He calls his art a street-level
protest against “people I think have too much
power and have abused it.”
The monstrous blemishes, wrinkles and baggy eyes wrought
by Conal, MFA ’78, look carved by the very sins
of their owners. There’s the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger
coupled with the words “Achtung, Baby!”
The California governor’s hair spikes upward diabolically;
his eyes flash blood red. Conal’s diptych of Jim
and Tammy Faye Bakker depicts the two criminal televangelists
flashing saccharine smiles over the words “False
Profit.” Conal has savaged both Bushes, Ronald
Reagan, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Donald Rumsfeld, Martha
Stewart and dozens more.
Many of the artist’s posters are reproductions
of his oil paintings—topographical marvels of
thick, gloppy brushwork—that have been shown around
the country in exhibitions like “The Art of the
Attack,” a 1993 show in Los Angeles. “His
work is important, because it has something to say that
is relevant,” says Jaime Villaneda, an education
specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
“I do believe that art should be political.”
But what if some of the attack goes out of the artist?
It happened to Conal on September 11, 2001, as he watched
more than 2,000 people die on live television. Not long
after, Conal found himself staring at a blank canvas,
trying to paint a different sort of subject. One of
his longtime collectors, similarly stunned by the tragedy,
had commissioned a triptych of Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai
Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.
Usually, the venom Conal feels for his subjects is
integral to his creative process. “I take all
that rage and righteous indignation thinking about what
these people are doing to everything from the institution
of representative democracy to the people, and I take
it out on them in the studio.” He hopes a dose
of humor and sarcasm lightens each work, balancing the
anger.
For the new portraits, Conal geared himself up to do
something else entirely. “It freaked me out to
try to apply my style of representation to a positive
image,” Conal says. “Here I am working on
this big Gandhi and pretty much shaking in my shoes.
I took all my gnarly and painterly techniques and I
used them to turn the painting into a facial topography
of everything Gandhi had come through.” Indeed,
these subjects bear the same deep facial contours and
ravines as his previous portraits, but they convey depth
and character, not hideousness.
An early indication that the technique worked came
one day when his wife, Deborah Ross, entered the studio.
“I just gasped,” says Ross, a Hollywood
movie titles designer who most recently won acclaim
for her work on Cold Mountain. “It was
this huge, audible, ‘Oh my God!’ ”
Ross gasps again as if the memory still rocks her. “It
took my breath away. It’s the emotional impact
of his technique and the straightforward, direct look
of the subject. [Gandhi] is a figure in our lives who
I care about, and I believe in what he stood for.”
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NEW WRINKLE: The September
11 tragedy inspired a heroic triptych.
Courtesy Robbie Conal |
When he was finished, Conal put the word “Watching”
underneath Gandhi’s face, “Waiting”
under the Dalai Lama and “Dreaming” under
Dr. King. Conal’s volunteers plastered posters
of the work nationwide, just as the country was preparing
for war.
About this time, film actor David Arquette was driving
along a street in Santa Monica and slammed on the brakes.
Passing an arts center, he’d spotted the original
Dr. King painting hanging on a wall. “I knew immediately
it was a Robbie Conal,” Arquette says. He parked
and went inside to ask if it was for sale. “It
was the first [Conal painting] that wasn’t a negative
character.”
Arquette had been a graffiti artist in the late ’80s,
tagging freeway overpasses and walls around Los Angeles.
He’d seen Conal’s posters everywhere and
recognized in them a kindred spirit. One day he stumbled
upon an exhibit of Conal’s. “Seeing the
paintings in real life in front of my face, it just
blew me away,” he says. “The flat image
(of the posters) reads almost like chalk or charcoal.
In real life, it’s so intricate, the depth and
the thickness of the brush strokes.”
It turned out that the “Watching, Waiting, Dreaming”
paintings were not for sale. But seeing them prompted
Arquette to contact Conal. The two men got to know each
other, and eventually Arquette asked Conal, a huge music
lover, if he’d ever painted musicians.
“That,” says Conal, “was a simply
beautiful question.” It gave him license to continue
experimenting in this new vein. Arquette commissioned
a triptych of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and Bob Marley.
Conal is painting the portraits on canvases six feet
tall and lingering over the experience. Before, people
had often asked how he could spend so much time with
subjects he loathes; Conal says it never bothered him.
However, he’s found real pleasure in making this
switch.
“It’s a great thing to come to work in
the morning, have a cup of coffee, read the papers,
go around the corner and spend the day with Gandhi or
John Lennon,” he says.
Still, he says he sometimes hears voices asking if
he’s selling out, abandoning his unique contribution
to both art and public discourse. “One of my trepidations
about doing the celebratory portraits is that it’s
such a slam dunk,” Conal says. “I think
about the history of aggrandizing portraiture. It’s
like walking into a candy-coated quagmire.”
Ross is convinced those voices are mainly in her husband’s
head. “All of the subjects he chooses mean something
to him. I have yet to meet anyone from the so-called
left who objects to these pieces,” she adds. “He
brings that gasp to each and every painting he does.”
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TOP CAT: Conal and Smilla.
Courtesy Robbie Conal |
Conal admits he sometimes felt trapped by his signature
style long before 9-11. He remembers the time in 1993
when he walked through an exhibit and saw all of his
work together. “I thought, ‘Jesus, that’s
what I do,’” he said. “Here’s
a guy who spends his whole career painting heads of
people he despises.”
It’s easy to see how art that “aggrandizes”
might run against the grain. Conal is the son of two
fiery union organizers in New York, who sent him to
public museums as if they were day care centers. A latchkey
kid before the term existed, he grew up with the masters,
scrutinizing and memorizing their works and techniques.
A couple of years after graduating from the High School
of Music and Art in Manhattan, he lived as a hippie
in the Haight, then eluded the draft by teaching college
and playing minor league baseball in Canada. Back in
San Francisco and barely making ends meet as a taxi
driver, he went to the Farm for a graduate degree.
Conal says the anger that would later fuel his art
came from his parents’ political activism, the
Vietnam war and the Reagan administration. Stanford
art professors taught him discipline while submitting
his work to constant, brutal criticism. (Sometimes an
assessment could be particularly biting: Conal remembers
the day a classmate drove her car into a tree after
a bruising classroom critique.) But in the end, he says,
“Stanford saved me. [It] really professionalized
me,” he says.
The guerrilla artist is still working on how to fit
celebratory portraiture into his body of work. “I’m
learning that as long as I stick to people I genuinely
admire and revere then I think I feel . . . I don’t
know what the word is . . . legitimate,” Conal
says. “I have to not be afraid to do something
nice and to not be afraid of being successful at that
level. I have a genuine fear of success on a market
level. It comes from being brought up in a socialist
household in the most capitalist capital. I could keep
a psychiatrist busy for a while.”
Conal isn’t about to abandon the form of art
he’s known for. “Right now,” he says,
“I’m working on my nastiest poster of George
Bush to date.” In advance of the Academy Awards
this year, he dashed off a scathing charcoal portrait
of Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association.
But he was quickly back to the Lennon portrait and the
time-consuming medium of oil paint.
“This new work just opens up a second front for
me, one that gives me great pleasure,” Conal says.
“Once you start doing positive stuff, it’s
hard to stop.”
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