Los Angeles River Series #16 (2019)

View in Store

Fine art museums around the world contain treasures informing the history and development of humankind, creations that never cease to provide inspiration and awe. This is equally true for painters and other artists whose careers are often subtly and sometimes strongly influenced by seeing the works of others. While identifying the specifics of such influence and shifts may be best left to art historians, it is possible to compare similarities and differences in an artist’s work to that of influential predecessors.

In this 16th painting of the Los Angeles River Series, Imagine, two very different works of art from the past seem to have been merged into one: The partial face of a character appears in the lower left corner is perhaps inspired by the World War II graffiti meme ‘Kilroy”, whose comical head and nose is shown peering over a wall usually along with the narrative ‘Kilroy was here’. Its origins are uncertain, but the Kilroy image was ubiquitous during the 1930’s and 1940’s.  During the Second World War the meme was frequently found scrawled as graffiti perhaps by US marines and it was even rumored to have been found at the Kremlin on a VIP bathroom stall whereupon Stalin asked an advisor “Who is this Kilroy and what is his purpose for being here?”

‘The Fighting Temeraire’ is the second inspiration in Imagine. At the time it was painted in 1839 by the English artist William Turner, long before the Impressionist movement, it was groundbreaking and the source of much controversy and scorn. When paintings were expected to conform to traditional realistic compositions of idealized scenes, and critics at the British Royal Academy could make or break an artist’s career, Turner’s ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ with its abstract shapes of vivid colors, atmospheric hazy dreamlike effects and its relative lack of detail, turned the art world on its head. English art critics were actively debating the meaning of art: What was art if it does not accurately depict reality?

In the Los Angeles River painting ‘Imagine’, both a Kilroy stand-in and the vivid colors and abstract shapes of an atmospheric sky in ‘The Fighting Temeraire’ seem to be combined into a single painting along with electrical lines, bridges, roads, riverbanks, warehouses, and cloud formations. Everything explodes forth from a peculiar character’s head as do the end of the Fourth Street Bridge and the vanishing point of a channelized Los Angeles River void of vegetation and life. The painting’s elements seem to shout “Look at us...we are one. Imagine with me. Together let us build a new future.”

If you are interested in this painting, you can view more details in the Store. If you would like to learn more about the City of Los Angeles' River Project, explore the links below.

More on the Los Angeles Revitalization Project

City of Los Angeles River Revitalization Project