I’ve learned a lot about art since I was seventeen. Not who is who, or who knows who, or who is making a scene. I think I’m pretty sure [that] what makes real art comes from deep inside. Not hippity-hop to get to the top or learning to swallow your pride.
Llyn Foulkes, in Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty, Llyn Foulkes One Man Band (Los Angeles: Kino Lorber, 2016), film.
Llyn Foulkes moved to Los Angeles at twenty-three. He enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) but left after two years, feeling like he had learned everything he could from an institution. The pioneering Ferus Gallery, a magnet for rising art stars in Los Angeles in the 1960s, gave him a solo exhibition in 1961, but he was soon dropped from their roster.1 Foulkes didn’t fit easily into the conventions of the art establishment: he was reclusive, he labored over paintings for years, and the style of his work, which changed often, was never in concert with the demands of the market and did not fit within easily definable categories. But what remained stable throughout his career was his outrage over politics, art history, and American popular culture, and his romantic belief that art could change society.2
Llyn Foulkes, oral history interview with Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, recorded June 25, 1997–December 2, 1998, audio transcript, available at aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-llyn-foulkes-12132#transcript. ↩︎
Marilu Knode, “Llyn Foulkes and the American Dream,” Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and Hard Place (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1995), 11. ↩︎
Llyn Foulkes had his own vaudeville band when he was eleven years old. Inspired by Spike Jones, the trumpet-blowing, cowbell-ringing comedic musician and performer, Foulkes built his own musical contraption equipped with horns and bells.1 He studied music in high school, playing drums and the timpani, and began listening to jazz. His musical career developed alongside his painting, drumming in the rock band City Lights from 1965 to 1971 and opening for major rock bands. However, Foulkes disliked the way amplified guitars sounded; looking back to his roots, he built a percussion instrument and formed his own group, the Rubber Band, in 1973 (cartoonist Robert Crumb drew a cover for its record, which was never released).2 The Rubber Band played on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1974 but broke up in 1977. Foulkes, ever the loner, continued work on his instrument. The Machine, as it came to be known, comprised horns, a xylophone, cowbells, a drum set, organ pipes, and an electric bass string strung horizontally at his foot. As writer Jason Weiss described the artist’s one-man band: “When he plays, Llyn Foulkes is every part of the Machine, his body built right into it.”3
Marilu Knode, “Llyn Foulkes and the American Dream”, Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and Hard Place (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1995), 12. ↩︎
Jason Weiss, “Llyn Foulkes: Only Listen”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Ali Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 138. ↩︎
Jason Weiss, “Llyn Foulkes: Only Listen”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Ali Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 140. ↩︎
Llyn Foulkes often paints self-portraits, depicting himself at various stages of life.1 Representations of his childhood are happy ones. He had an early talent for music and drawing—looking to Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse—and by his teenage years he had planned to become a cartoonist. Foulkes was drafted into the US Army and stationed in Germany in 1954–56. Upon his return, he enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) in 1957, producing mostly abstract work. Foulkes turned increasingly to self-portraiture as his painting became a frequent mode of dealing with personal hardship;2 “Music is my joy, painting is my angst,” expressed the artist.3 In contrast to depictions of his boyhood, illustrations of Foulkes the man are marked by grief, as in The Corporate Kiss (2001), where his eyes appear downcast in dismay. Mickey Mouse kisses the artist’s cheek in an act of betrayal—Foulkes was outraged by the insidiousness of Disney’s cartoon, a once-beloved character of his childhood now representing everything wrong with corporate America.4
Jim Lewis, “O Pioneer”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Ali Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 170. ↩︎
Ali Subotnick, “Lone Star”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 98. ↩︎
Llyn Foulkes, in Ali Subotnick, “Lone Star”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 81. ↩︎
Ali Subotnick, Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 15. ↩︎
When Llyn Foulkes left art school, his paintings were raw; thickly built up, they often incorporated tar, burnt newspaper, and wood. Having recently returned from service in the US Army, he allowed death to overshadow his work and destruction to become a part of his practice—he dug and carved into his paintings, cut into them with an electric saw, and took a hammer to their surfaces. He has been known to demolish paintings he is unsatisfied with, even after they have been presented in exhibitions. The Lost Frontier (1997–2005) is a monumental masterpiece that was eight years in the making, but as the artist has said of his work, “nothing’s ever finished,” lamenting that at some point, the museum or gallery just takes it away from him.1 He started The Lost Frontier after his second divorce, when he moved from Topanga Canyon to downtown Los Angeles. It presents a bleak Los Angeles landscape of astonishing dimension and texture created by layers of paint and the addition of found materials. Over its development, Foulkes turned on it with his saw and hammer, removing entire sections of the painting. A formal and psychological challenge, by the time Foulkes completed the work, its scale had greatly expanded but little of the original painting—or its plywood substrate—existed.
Llyn Foulkes, in “Llyn Foulkes One Man Band Documentary with Tamar Halpern,” BYOD, The LipTV, Los Angeles, posted May 14, 2014, video, 50:07 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=eSDYX-33wi8. ↩︎
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