Llyn FoulkesPainting Is My Angst

man being kissed on the left cheek of his face by a shoulder sized mickey mouse character
Llyn Foulkes, The Corporate Kiss, 2001. Oil, acrylic, and mixed media on panel, 31 1/2 x 26 1/4 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Art’s 35th anniversary, 2003.03. Photograph by Douglas Sandberg.

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

  1. Jim Lewis, “O Pioneer”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Ali Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 170. ↩︎

  2. Ali Subotnick, “Lone Star”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 98. ↩︎

  3. Llyn Foulkes, in Ali Subotnick, “Lone Star”, Llyn Foulkes, ed. Subotnick (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2013), 81. ↩︎

  4. Ali Subotnick, Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A. (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2009), 15. ↩︎