Byline: Tulsa Kinney

Los Angeles painter James Hayward taught a USC graduate seminar in 1987. That was my introduction to him. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he sure was a talker. He sat in a chair front and center in the classroom with his legs stretched wide open. When he would get excited by his own tall tales (which was most of the time), his long skinny legs would begin to flap back and forth wildly in rhythm to his lilting voice which got faster, louder and higher when reaching the climax of the story. He told stories about Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Brice Marden and Max’s Kansas City. With his good looks and charm, he could brighten up any dull opening. He’s an unassuming cowboy with the manners of a true gentleman, but he can also tell a vulgar joke with the verve of a drunken sailor.

These memories of the now-veteran abstract painter are running through my mind as I’m driving to Moorpark where Hayward lives—we’re going to discuss painting. I find myself giggling down the Simi Valley freeway, oblivious to the stunning desert view, recalling a distasteful joke that Hayward recently told at a Hammer opening—where everyone was getting hammered.

I pull off the county road onto a graveled entrance with a locked gate. I forewarn Hayward with a call, but receive no answer. Out of nowhere he appears with two shaggy barking dogs, looking like a craggy Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat, with a stogie dangling between his fingers—although this stogie contained reefer (a minor detail). He apologizes for not having left the gate open and tells me that he couldn’t find his phone. Once he unlocks the gate I enter a wide, open green field and follow a cactus-lined path leading to his living compound: a studio, various other small buildings and a trailer in which he dwells. It is a clear day, and 50 miles out of LA you can feel a noticeable improvement in air quality. Everything is green and perky with the recent rare California rains, and the crisp December air makes for a wonderful mid-morning bucolic landscape.

I’ve always admired Hayward’s paintings; full disclosure, I own a small black one. A painter once myself, I respond to color and surface, and Hayward’s paintings fully satisfy both counts. His paint application and saturated colors are hypnotic and intense. So to talk only about paint (I realized I had my work cut out for me with his tendency to digress) is exciting, as his paintings have always exuded a raw passion through their luxuriant seductive surfaces.

James Hayward, Abstract #219, 2014, 40×37 inches

When referring to them though, I am cautious to avoid the “F-word.” And by that I mean “frosting.” Hayward’s paintings have been referred to as the frosting paintings—and for obvious reasons, owing to his thick heavy brushstrokes—but Hayward calls them “monochrome abstraction.” He further explains, “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.” Hayward laughs at his own joke, but he’s serious too.

Hayward, 71, has always been a nonrepresentational painter, right from the beginning at San Diego State. He won many prizes for his Hard Edge paintings. “I wasn’t good at drawing people. I was glad to discover at college that you didn’t have to draw people to be an artist,” he says laughing—although he confesses that he won a Smokey the Bear poster contest when he was 7.

But it was in the figurative paintings of Titian that Hayward discovered painting was about markings. “When I first saw late Titians in Rome, I was amazed how beautiful they were and how about marks they were.”

I ask if painting is a physical thing for him—I have this vision of him in his studio vigorously slathering globs of thick crimson onto a canvas with a paintbrush in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other. In my mind he’s wearing only his cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and a pair of red boxer shorts—the same color as the painting he’s working on—and Hank Williams is blaring in the background. He answers, “The physicality is part of it, but the heart and soul of it is the marking. In my monochromes I try to avoid there ever being a special place. There’s no chosen place. It’s totally proletariat, the marking. I want the corners to be as important as the center and I want every mark to be equal in terms of importance. Ideally, the last marks just kind of blend into the earlier marks and disappear.”

James Hayward, Abstract #85, 2004, 27×22 inches

Hayward pauses and takes another drag off the joint he’s had going throughout the conversation. He continues, “[Dave] Hickey talks about how he loves looking at my work because his eyes surf across the surface of the painting and you never get stuck. You just keep weaving through it and finding a new way to drop through.” I was aware that art critic Dave Hickey is an admirer of Hayward’s as he’s curated him in many shows. I ask Hayward if Hickey ever bought one of his paintings. “Oh, I was such a whore,” Hayward belts out excitedly as he exhales a puff. Then he tells the story about how Hickey called him up and asked if he would do a painting for him to hang above the couch for an Italian Vogue photo shoot. All his life he has avoided doing a horizontal rectangle. And for good reason, Hayward explains, ”I’ve always looked at the horizontal rectangle painting as a couch painting.” Not only did Hayward tell Hickey he had never done a horizontal rectangular painting, but he never has done paintings in increments of feet—“they’re simple-minded and kind of vulgar,” Hayward sniffs. “So I got back and asked would 33 x 77 inches (both numbers that I’ve used throughout my life) be okay? He says, that would be fine. ‘Blue?’ He makes sure to ask. I answer blue. And I made it, delivered it and we hung it…ahem…over the sofa,” Hayward laughs.

James Hayward, Chromachord #23, 1998, 14×10.5 inches

I ask him why his paintings aren’t referred to as AbEx? “Because the marks have no meaning. Each mark is (pause) they’re pretty much all the same. In a way it’s more like music than Abstract Expressionism. It’s like free-form jazz or something. It’s just marks piled up and piled up.”

AbEx or abstract minimalism or chromachords or, dare I say it?—frosting paintings. No matter how you slice it, it’s painting on a most pure level. Color fuels these gorgeous works, and the markings of a skilled painter yield a masterful work of art; the man behind it provides the soul.

“I’m a hypocrite,” Linda Vallejo says, referring to her latest series “Make ’Em All Mexican.” “I grew up on Fred Flintstone and Frank Sinatra. I’m all American.” She adds, “I think we are all hypocrites in one way or another. We all have our prejudices and judge each other needlessly based on color, class, education, et cetera. If we pretend that we don’t have these thoughts and feelings we’re lying to ourselves.”

I was hoping for this kind of frank conversation when we met for our interview at the Bergamot Station arts district in Santa Monica. We arrived at the same time and I spotted her walking toward the café wearing a floral dress, dangling beaded earrings and sunglasses—which I will come to find out she never removes (although they were transparent enough to see her piercing dark eyes). I commented upon how nice she looked. “I dressed up for you,” she replied.

We sat down to a light lunch and iced tea. Well into our conversation about skin pigment, I thrust my forearm toward hers, to compare our skin colors. I noted she’s not even particularly dark. She obliged with a laugh and acknowledged the Caucasian tradition of comparing tans. She expressed surprise that anybody would consider it a goal to get as dark as possible.

Vallejo grew up not knowing she was “different,” as she spent a good portion of her childhood in Germany. She did think that maybe she wasn’t very pretty, because she felt ignored in social situations. It was only when her family relocated to Montgomery, Georgia, during the mid-’60s—the height of our country’s Civil Rights movement—that she began to realize she was judged by the color of her skin. She was a young adolescent and had to deal with the conundrum of which water fountain to drink from or which bathroom to enter. “If I went to the ‘colored’ water fountain, would I get beat up, or the ‘white’ bathroom, the same situation?” Vallejo was right in the middle of it. She recollected that era with a heavy sigh and a swift hand swipe across her neck. Those were tough times for her.

Now her new body of work, “Make ’Em All Mexican,” addresses that period of her life in a roundabout way. “I think overall this [new series] is actually the culmination of 30 years of involvement in the Chicano indígena community of the United States, especially California, and after being involved in such a long period of cultural awareness, community awareness, aesthetic awareness.” Traditionally, Vallejo tells me, the Chicano-Mexicano artistic genre consists of painting and murals. She wanted to explore other genres and try other methods of art-making. She was teaching all over the U.S. at the time, which allowed her to visit numerous major museums across the country, where she saw a lot of repurposed work: taking an object that is already produced, then making art out of it, i.e., found art objects, readymades.

Vallejo asked herself, “What would happen if I made repurposed art from my cultural point of view?” She mused aloud, “I saw the work and asked myself, how come I’m not making work like that?” She was also able to do a lot of international travel. She visited the Pantheon, which gave her fresh inspiration. She started taking photos and manipulating them, adding newspaper clippings and other images, and called the series (which has never yet been shown) “Censored.”

Vallejo went to a lot of secondhand stores looking for photographs for “Censored.” One day she saw the Dick and Jane primer (the book most American baby boomers grew up with as a reading tool). That’s when she had an epiphany: “I could paint them brown and make them Mexican.” She bought it on the spot and took it to her studio and “put gouache to it.” She didn’t stop there, collecting as many (kitschy or not) iconic images as possible. That would be the first piece in her series, all of the images—either photos or reproductions—being 2D. During one of her hunting and gathering excursions, a pair of salt and pepper shakers caught her attention. They were little pilgrims. “I said to myself, that’s fucked-up,” Vallejo recalls. After that it was no holds barred. Every object, trinket, figurine—they all entered her studio white, but left brown.

“But do you really want everyone to be Mexican?” I ask Vallejo. I mean, you could go to Mexico and see all the iconic imagery and it would be brown. But Vallejo doesn’t want to go to Mexico, she loves living in Los Angeles. She explains, “When you live in a culture where nothing looks like you, where nothing is [validating] your beauty, your intelligence, your potential, your contribution, what do you do with that? How do you function within that?” Vallejo adds, “It’s like being in corporate America, being surrounded by a bunch of guys. And you’re the only girl in the room. It’s lonely. You can never go into the men’s room. It’s exclusionary. It doesn’t feel right.”

When Vallejo added the part about exclusion for my benefit, making the comparison for a woman, I felt that it was a display of empathy. Vallejo’s “Make ’Em All Mexican” produced a knee-jerk reaction in me when I first saw the work at Avenue 50 Studio gallery in LA’s Highland Park. As a white person, I felt offended. The work seemed facile, even shallow. I also didn’t think painting Marilyn Monroe brown made any sort of point. I am a huge James Brown fan, but I wouldn’t want him white just because I’m white. But I realize I speak from a more privileged perspective and that perhaps it was me that didn’t have empathy.

I was prepared to simply write it off as the work of an angry Chicana who wanted to erase the white world, and, well, make ’em all Mexican. I tell Vallejo this, and she is open to my interpretation and not offended at all. She listens to me, but she wants to correct me when I ask if this series is a deep exploration of race. “I don’t want to focus specifically on the word race. The word race makes me a little nervous because I think it puts too fine a point on it,” she explains. “If I said this work is all about race, I think that would be oversimplifying it. It’s about relationships, it’s about the politics of color, the politics of class. I think it’s about inclusion and exclusion. It’s about self-image and self-worth, compassion and empathy, and it’s about what we share in cultures.”

But the work comes off as polemical, and perhaps a lot of people think like me. Vallejo responds, “It’s a strange double-edged sword. The work is interesting to the high-level artistic intelligentsia, but the market is afraid of it.” An ironic twist to her exhibiting this work is that institutions are eager to show the series, but galleries seem to steer clear, (she is affiliated with George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco and Bert Green Fine Art in Chicago). Her close colleagues tell her she shouldn’t do political art. Vallejo is fearless though, and is determined to continue her exploration with this body of work.

A lot of friends and family were able to attend her solo exhibition at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California, on opening night. A poignant moment for her came when her brother was looking at Super Hombre (2014), a Superman bust painted a milk-chocolate brown. Her brother seemed to be in a trance as she approached him. He was almost teary-eyed, she recalls. She asked her brother to articulate what he was feeling. After a long silence, he uttered, “I finally belong.” That was an important moment for Vallejo, as she felt her art transcended what she had been hoping for with this series.

“I can be brown and be powerful. I can be brown and manly. I can be brown and be strong,” Vallejo says of her brother’s feelings. “So when he saw Superman brown, he thought, ‘Me too. I can save lives. People look up to me and I’m brave and I’m beautiful.’” She says this very passionately, then pauses adding with a chuckle, “Brown is beautiful. Brown is the new black.”

Vallejo has produced 200 pieces in three years. Is that enough, I ask her, what’s next? “Now it’s morphing. It’s morphing into paintings. It’s morphing into photography, possibly video. It’s based on the same topic, based on some of the same aesthetic issues. It’s becoming more personal in some cases.”

She’s eager to move in new directions. She’s started a new painting and is sticking with the color brown. “Let’s see what happens when I paint brown. Use paint. Enjoy brown.”
I realize now Vallejo doesn’t really want to make ’em all Mexican. What started as a joke actually produced a real dialogue. She works from the heart, as a real artist should. And she wants to explore issues that are important to her, like artists should do as well. She summed it up honestly and nicely, “I don’t have all the answers. I’m growing with this work.” This doesn’t sound hypocritical to me.

The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and for some reason I was thinking the area would be trashier, near a remote woodsy area. I guess I was already typecasting Smith in my mind, imagining splattered ketchup and a wooden outhouse in the front.

Smith greeted me as I peeped my head through the open door, calling out his name. He’s a tall, substantial bespectacled fellow, in his latter 60s, with white hair and a trimmed white beard. He plays steel guitar, and looks like he plays a steel guitar. He’s immediately gracious, offering me a cup of coffee, retracting his offer of milk, realizing there really wasn’t any milk (and perhaps never has been). He pours me a big cup of joe from the coffee maker, then we head through sliding glass doors that lead to the barnlike garage that is his machine shop. On our way I spy a forklift under a plastic cover on which leaves have gathered. He affirms that it still works and frequently is in use.

The machine shop is what anyone might imagine a machine shop looks like. There is a mill, a lathe, big hulking steel tables with saws and other sharp objects, with welders in the corner. There doesn’t appear to be any work in progress, but there isn’t any dust on the machinery either. Smith tells me how one of his lathes is so old that if anything breaks down, he would be “shit out of luck.” But can’t he just make the part, on the machine that he needs the part for, I naively ask?

Smith has spent many years in that shop working on other artists’ work. He was instrumental to many of the artworks in the now legendary 1992 MOCA LA “Helter Skelter” exhibit, working on Chris Burden’s massive Medusa’s Head, Nancy Rubin’s colossal sculpture of trailers and hot-water heaters, and McCarthy’s notorious installation, “The Garden.” That shop has seen some of the most famous contemporary sculptures in existence today.

Standing in the dark, fluorescent-lit room surrounded by the cold steel machines, with the aroma of grease and metal shavings in the air, I pictured Smith toiling away for hours, alone, making complex armatures for the complex artists. In fact, it’s rather ironic that Smith is the one acting most like the archetypal artist, working in solitude in the studio. The role reversal struck me.

After the tour of the machine shop we walk through the backyard where cacti and machine parts line a pathway leading to Smith’s music studio. One cactus has grown out of control, but stops exactly at the doorway. I ask Smith how he does that. He replies that he talks to it, and threatens it at the same time. That seems to work.

Smith is excited to show me his studio, where an array of musical instruments, or sound sculptures as they are sometimes referred to, are on display—all built from scratch by Smith. His policy is to make instruments only out of recycled material. One particular piece demonstrates this proviso quite nicely. It comprises eight saw blades aligned vertically, but cockeyed. He taps the blades and plays a little ditty. Then he goes to another instrument with steel tubes dangling like chimes and gently bangs out a horror flick soundtrack; I listen for a hair-raising scream in the background. The instruments are crammed in a tiny room, making it seem more of a showroom than a place to practice. There is a sound-recording studio in the next room; most of the equipment appears outdated. I would imagine any sound studio would be digital-only in this day and age. I don’t rub it in, but he did show me some digital recording equipment, just to let me know he doesn’t live entirely in the dark ages.

After seeing Smith’s two studios—reflecting the two sides of Smith (one: musician/composer, the other: welder/builder), we settle into the main house, where the living room has been converted into an office, the bedroom another studio, the kitchen serving more as place to keep cold beers and the bathroom functional, but not “female-proofed”—although he assures me there is toilet paper.

Smith grew up in New England in the ’60s. He tuned in and dropped outta Ithica College (actually he was expelled), “majoring in recreational pharmacology—a little too much LSD,” he unabashedly admits. His high school record was no different. He finally found his calling at his father’s much-too-early funeral. Smith recalls how the invited organist brought on a swelling of sorrow where “it became this collective experience of emotion, and everyone was crying. Then the organist brought us all back.” That’s when he realized that music would become his life.

Smith quickly got himself enrolled in Berklee College of Music in Boston—where he faked his way to an entry audition to play piano (he had three weeks to learn piano)—he was stopped midway in his performance by an irate faculty audience, yelling how dare he waste their time. Somehow he convinced them to let him play guitar instead. His scheme worked, but he dropped out after six months. As Smith recalls, he “just didn’t dig jazz music. That’s all.”

Smith then takes me on a journey of how he ended up at CalArts—a story worthy of a Hunter S. Thompson journal entry. His use of profanity is so seamless that I would never have guessed that he uses the F-word practically every other sentence. We find ourselves discussing Windowpane acid versus Purple Haze. Smith rhapsodizes, “The parties were off the scale, everything you heard was true.” He received his MFA from CalArts in Music Composition in 1975.

While all the partying was going on, that last year of school Smith was engaged in some extra-curricular activity. By night he attended the College of the Canyons to get his LA City certification for structural steel. Music is everything to Smith, but welding comes close. He lights up when he talks about it: “I love welding,” he pauses, then leans in, tapping his forehead, “In the little window in my hood—my welding hood—I’ve been looking at that pinpoint of white light for 40 years, and I’ve never gotten tired of looking at it. In that white light, magic happens.”

Smith realized he had to make money in order to support his exotic taste for creating unique instruments and experimental music. He found a place in the film industry composing and performing film scores, such as American Beauty and The Shawshank Redemption. He’s owned a record label and made numerous recordings and CDs. He’s been a member of many bands and enjoys a musical solo career as well. He also welds and builds things, so he was employable in the film industry in that capacity (working in special effects) and found himself building things for artists as well.

That’s where Paul McCarthy comes in. The two go way back in many capacities: work, art, performance, music and play. Smith has known McCarthy since the ’70s and, oddly enough, they worked together on the first Star Trek movie, doing their manly things such as welding and building. Many sculptors work in construction for their day jobs, and that’s precisely what McCarthy and Smith did. Their paths also crossed as they were with a group of musicians that played at art openings. McCarthy as been his “primary employer for the last decade,” Smith says. And how does that make you feel, I ask like a therapist. Smith really doesn’t think much of the role he might play being an assistant to many art stars. He considers it a job, and the good part is he gets paid for working in an environment that he loves.

Smith says McCarthy’s status in the art world makes many assistants necessary: “To play on that level, you have to have a crew.” By way of example, he cites McCarthy’s exhibition in Germany several years back: “It was fuckin’ huge!” he exclaims. “The thing I built was the size of a 2-story house—and everything moved. One man cannot fill that building.” Smith is referring to McCarthy and collaborator son Damon’s Haus der Kunst exhibition, “Pirates Caribbean,” in Munich in 2005.

Smith darts to his computer to show me Underwater World, one of four installations from the Munich show. He brings up a video of the kinetic sculpture, which resembles a moving ship, mainly to illustrate the scale of it. Smith built the entire sculpture, piece by piece, in his machine shop. It’s unbelievable when you realize the gigantic size of the piece. They assembled it at McCarthy’s studio in Baldwin Park and it ended up being 21,000 pounds of steel. He also built the mechanics of the ship-like sculpture, to make it rock as if at sea—all this from a foam core model consisting of a few basic shapes.

That machine shop is also Smith’s studio for his own work, where he built and designed a three-neck steel guitar he calls lovingly “Guitarzilla.” How might artists feel when spending time on another’s work, knowing what could be accomplished if they were spending that much time on their own art?

Smith acknowledges and doesn’t deny that he does develop a personal connection with the work, especially when it’s like Underwater World, where he constructs every inch, from start to finish. But it’s still not like creating his own work, he maintains. “Left to my own devices, I would never build that. I would build a guitar. It would have chrome, pin-striping, it’s going to have anodizing.” He has absolutely no problem with recognizing the authorship of the artwork, no matter who does the manufacturing.

To further explain the position of artists’ assistants, he makes the comparison to a studio musician being hired to play a part in a song. “So I show up and play a solo—not my song, your song. My solo, your song. What you do is you appropriate my art for your art. You appropriate my skills for your art, and I’m okay with that.”

We drift into conversation about a few other artists he’s worked with, like the late Mike Kelley. He worked on one of Kelley’s last installations, a piece from the “Kandor” series. Smith pauses, then wistfully says, “He got on the bus. You get on that bus, you don’t get off.” At that point, Kelley was on top. But that meant huge commissions, huge commitments, huge pressure. Smith saw it all up close. “He had 45 minutes, that month, to talk about a $300,000 sculpture. About what he wanted me to do, how he wanted me to do it. Afterwards I’m talking to Paul [McCarthy] and telling him about Kelley. I said, ‘He doesn’t own his life.’ McCarthy goes, ‘Oh yeah. We sold it. We sold our lives. I’m hanging on a rope outside of an airplane. I look to see what the pilot is doing—there is no pilot.’” Smith pauses again, then repeats, “Yeah, you get on that bus, you don’t get off. Do I want to get on that bus? No, I like where I am.”

Smith told this story with an air of sadness and caution. At that point, aren’t you just working for the man? Is that what most art stars are doing today? Churning out a product in order to fulfill the supply and demand at the dealer’s? Or their collectors (so they can turn around and flip it)? Isn’t it like any other job now? Sure, maybe McCarthy is the director, the man at the helm, but is it worth it?

“If [McCarthy] sells a fifth of what he makes, I would be surprised. It’s about selling the piece, it’s about putting on the show.” Smith adds that if the artist doesn’t sell the piece, the artist doesn’t get to make another. “What it looks like to me, and I don’t want to piss off anyone, but it looks like to me, you have the big pieces, and the little pieces pay for the big pieces. You can’t do the big pieces if you don’t sell the little pieces.”

Some artists can’t handle it. They lose control, and then they might wonder where is that spark, that drive, that magic—the magic that Smith was talking about—that white spot when he’s welding. Smith said he never tires of it, for over 40 years now. I wonder how many successful artists today can say that.