New Art - Conceptual Realism - Robert Williams

Up to now I have hesitated to even attempt to write a hub on my favorite subject; the materialistic love of my life. Art!

Now when I use the term "art" I am speaking, of course, of the visual medium. Not limited to pigment on a flat surface this love includes sculpture, animation, and three dimensional projection. But I limit myself to just a few movements.

They are surrealism (both modern and archetypal), impressionism and abstract.

In the surrealist realm I include the artists Dali, Magritte, and Octovio Ocampo. I consider the movement I'm about to introduce here in that same genre, though today's artists refer to it by many different names.

Thus the apology below.

This is a "new" form of art that has been around for about thirty years. It has been evolving and changing over time, and as with much art, going back to it's roots, advancing, and retuning to it's roots time and time again.

I apologize because this movement has many names. It was originally called "Lowbrow" based solely on the title of a book by its founding artist.

The book, The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams by, of course Robert Williams.

Williams himself coined the title because he considered himself and his art outside the realm of "highbrow" art. However, there was no real animosity in his embracing this title. He is quite happy to be outiside the "mainstream" though today he has created his own mainstream.

Williams himself states that he never intended for a joke, which is what the title of the book actually was, to become the name of a movement. Frankly, he takes his art very seriously and the title was a statement even though it has a frivolous sound.

Other names the movement go by are Lowbrow, Outsider, Pop Surreal, Cartoon Tainted Abstract Surrealism, or as Mr. Williams now calls it Conceptual Realism. It might also be called Street Art.

Art historians also call it by some of its elements including "figurative" and "neo-classical" though the work only has some of these elements in it depending on the artist and what s/he is trying to convey.

Williams was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1943. His parents state that he took an interest in art at a very early age (unknown) drawing in pencil, pen& ink and painting in watercolors.

Another early love for Williams was the car culture. As his father, Robert Wandell Williams, owned a drive in restaurant called the Parkmore. Williams the younger was exposed to the entire culture of drive in eating including car-hops and hot-rods. Both these fixtures can be seen in his works. At twelve Williams acquired a 1934 Ford five window coupe (see photo and cartoon above).

With an unsteady home life (his parents were married and divorced four times), he gravitated toward gangs, delinquency and hot-rods.

He soon realized that a jail sentence was in his immediate future so he moved to Los Angeles; this at twenty years of age. In L.A. he went to Los Angeles City College and later enrolled in the The Chouinard Art Institute. His stay at Chouinard was short, however, as he was branded a cheap illustrator.

Williams left Chouinard branding it Art School Tyranny and found work with Ed "Big Daddy" Roth. When Roth's studio eventually closed down Williams moved on to the Zap Comix Collective working side by side with R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton.

While working for Ed Roth and The Zap Comix Collective Williams was painting in oils in his spare time. These included the paintings "Appetite for Destruction" and "In The Land Of Retinal Delights."

Though these paintings were richly detailed in oil with many layers of varnish, they were time consuming to produce. Many took a year or more to complete. Lending to this lengthy process was the fact that Williams made his own paints and varnish.

These paintings were also roundly criticized by the "highbrow" art community. Eventually prints of these paintings made their way into his first book "The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams." The book is published by the Last Gasp Publishing, the same house that published most, if not all, of the Zap Comix.

"Something dead in the street commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas!"

"My paintings are not designed to entertain you, they are meant to trap you, to hold you before them while you try to rationalize what elements of the picture are making you stand there." - Robert Williams

In 1994 Williams confounded the magazine Juxtapoz along with Fausto Vitello, C.R. Stecyk III and Greg Escalante. The magazine has been instrumental in introducing and firmly cementing the fame of such artists as Mark Ryden and Shepard Fairey.

Juxtapoz has the third largest subscription base of all art magazines. Its mission statement is to "present art that is provocative, technically adept and worthy of exposure."

"There should be no rules in art. Art should be any program and free. So there's no "good and bad" in art. So to sit in judgment over one nincompoop or another...kinda goes against my grain. Even though there's some that I find distasteful, and I'm not sympathetic with it, tt's very wrong to stand in judgment of people and their art." - Robert Williams

Many, though not all, of Williams' works are featured in the videos below.

Fair warning, some of the images presented contain partial nudity. If you are sharing this hub with younger readers be aware of this fact.

I'm covering Williams first because he virtually created the movement. There was another artist named Mati "Abdul" Klarwein, who was just as influential to the movement. I will cover him next. After that the current trove of artists in the movement. Who they are, where they were born, their medium and influences.

Note that though none of these these hubs will contain partial nudity, researching the artist elsewhere could lead to disturbing images. I have excluded such works as images in the hubs themselves, but researching any of the artists mentioned, including Williams himself, might expose the reader (and his or her children) to unexpected images. This warning extends to the videos above.

You've been warned.