Hey, good looking!
I braved designer scorn to champion the kings of Californian airbrush
Images by Dave Willardson (above: Keith and Mick, Crawdaddy, 1972 ), Peter Lloyd (top: ‘Caddygirl’, Playboy, 1985) and Peter Palombi (below: ‘Nature By The Pack’, Yasei Jidai, 1976).
Airbrush art was a hugely popular and dominant form in its day, and it is worthy of in-depth study. Nobody seems troubled by super-slick photography from the same time period. The work of Helmut Newton, Moshe Brakha and Guy Bourdin are the photographic equivalents of airbrush art: both forms played with sexuality, polished glamour and humour in similar ways, and the photography is enjoying a revival – without the sour faces.
Academics and design journalists tend to focus on overtly intellectual designers, allowing less conservative, more populist work and practitioners to fade into the ether. Searching for famous airbrush dudes online, I was shocked to find barely any. When Dan Nadel (of PictureBox, who commissioned the book) was teaching at Parsons School of Design, he found that illustration students had shown keen interest when he showed them 1970s airbrush books in class. Maybe so much time had passed that many younger artists were unaware of the work altogether, and would be fascinated by the technical skills required to create such work without a computer.
I opted to focus on the airbrush revival of the 1970s, and limit it to as few artists as possible. I’m tired of the buckshot approach taken by Taschen and others, whereby a category is basically scanned and printed without putting the work in context, or providing insights into how and why the work was created.
Though there were other, equally good practitioners, such as Robert Grossman and Doug Johnson plus the Brits Philip Castle and Michael English, I opted to examine just four Californians: Dave Willardson, Charles White III, Peter Lloyd and Peter Palombi. There’s a compelling mix of chrome, palm trees and sunny optimism found only in the west coast artists.
Charles White III (above: ‘Trees and Peas’, 1974), Dave Willardson (below: album cover image for The Section, 1978).
These pictures weren’t beating you over the head with cleverness or conceptualism. Many airbrush illustrations are simply about objects, free of environments or situations included to support a hokey angle or narrative. There’s usually no puzzle solve, or plot to follow: perhaps that’s why many are quick to brand the work as empty or frivolous.
But that view applies incorrect criteria to the work. Instead, think of the pictures as the result of a long, hard gaze. All the artists are world-class ‘lookers’. It is as though the airbrush tool itself forced them to view their subjects with obsessive visual analytics – breaking each picture element down to a cellular level of study and then building it back up again, bit by bit, until it becomes an impenetrable part of a larger image.
Charles White III (above: ‘Businessman’s Lunch’, Yasei Jidai, 1976 and below:
‘Inflation’, magazine cover, 1977).
On the one hand, the work is ultra-tight and seemingly ‘straight’, but it often slyly winks and tugs against the company line. The artists cheerfully created immaculate piss-takes on advertising and illustration vernaculars. And they regularly and blatantly disregarded client briefs, which enabled the work to communicate on two levels at once: they could be obvious fans of Coca-Cola ads, while simultaneously, via a tweak in the image, giving the finger in the anti-establishment manner of the time.
Norman Hathaway’s Overspray: Riding high with the kings of California airbrush art (PictureBox) is out now, and will be reviewed in Eye no. 71 (Spring 09), out in March. Read Norman’s blog, overspraybook.com.
January 13th, 2009 at 7:40 pm | by Amanda Vlahakis
You’ve just reminded me of an airbrush art book that my husband bought me in our early days of courtship about 15 years ago!
Wow, I must dig it out and take some photos pronto. I remember absolutely loving the book, full of wonderful images and way before I even considered becoming a designer - well it’s survived three house moves anyway.
I even think I know where it is despite not looking at it for about five years.
Why the bad rap for airbrush art? I don’t know … like with all things, I’m sure it will have it’s revival one day.
Rushes off to find said book….
January 14th, 2009 at 3:30 am | by Dan Nadel
I think the bad rap has been the flip side of an otherwise good “correction” of illustration history — towards the conceptual work of Steinberg and Push Pin, but away from the more “literal” work of Rockwell, Peak, Wyeth, etc. But it’s sort of over-corrected at this point, and has left out the idea of simple image making, without a clever punchline built in. Design history tends to want to make itself look smart, rather than, well, popular, which I think accounts for the large gaps left by the absence of the Overspray artists (many of whom understood text/image/composition in a precise, nuanced way) as well as people like the aforementioned Barney Bubbles, as well as Hipgnosis and others, such as Peter Max. This is the stuff that is meant to be in the dustbin, but deserves rediscovery by people unburdened by the normative design narrative prejudices. I think Overspray (here comes a shameless shill) does a good job of positioning the work in both visual culture at large and design/illustration history in particular. There remains huge swathes of work left out of the narratives. Luckily that seems to be changing. But I’d love to hear from people who (a) don’t like the work and (b) have a perspective on why/how it’s been left out. A healthy argument would be fascinating.
January 14th, 2009 at 11:19 pm | by Liz Farrelly
It’s interesting to hear an author explain his approach to the subject he’s written about….in relation to how it’s previously been portrayed in Design History, and with regard to the economics of publishing, e.g., rejecingt the “scatter-gun” approach loved by some visual publishers.
Obviously, the review in the next issue of Eye will delve deeper, but an author’s preview like this can circumvent some of the more banal arguments that appear in reviews (those that go along the lines of, “I’d have done it this way”…..).
It’s not often that authors are given the opportunity to explain their approach in the media (thank you Eye Blog); of course they often do explain it in the book, but so many reviewers choose to ignore that….
January 21st, 2009 at 4:18 pm | by sc
Because a lot of the airbrush work is music related the snobbery against it reflects the ‘if it existed before the Ramones/Sex Pistols it was shit’ school of criticism that has prevailed in music for much of the past 30 years. Things, happily, are changing though. Books about Barney Bubbles and Hypnosis are out and bands like MGMT can easily be described as slightly ‘prog’. Turner prize entrants are re-creating Asimov-like sci-fi covers and a lot of the work for Ministry of Sounds Saturday Sessions looks a bit, well, 1970’s. I think people are board with the lazy modernism of the ‘8pt top left Univers in cool grey 8’ school and are beginning to look at other influences, which can’t be a bad thing.
February 3rd, 2009 at 9:45 pm | by bob schenker
Critics of this period of commercial art should know what was involved in this type of work. Remember, this is commercial. The planning, conception, craftsmanship and skill it took to produce these images is awesome-all on short notice. There was not time to sit and mull the brief over-there were usually 4 or 5 other projects on the same tight deadline right behind you.
The confidence you needed to pull the trigger (literally) to perfection the whole way through the project and produce a flawless image is amazing. No Command Z if you made a mistake, no restart the computer to clear Photoshop out. Airbrushes went wrong at the worst times-usually 3 in the morning and you needed to be a mechanic as well as artist to stay on top of your game. Not only that, packing the illustration for air freight was an art in itself. No FTP’s back then. Airbrush is a most unforgiving medium and the 4 profiled transcended roadbocks and the medium itself to produce gorgeous sensual images that still are as fresh as they were 30 years ago.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:42 am | by rommel perez
Designers today are becoming dreadfully and ignorantly lazy by the day because today,one click of a mouse or a quick slide of a digitizing pen can automatically produce ‘art’ or ‘design’ faster than you can say “CRAFT”!
The airbrushes’ output, is neither rasters nor vectors, but smoothly-placed fine grain of colors on top of each other and you really must have the skill and talent, mind you, to render on a properly prepared board with layers of maskings- its almost like painting! Its a tool non-pareil.
I hope there will come a time artworks done in airbrush will hang someday shoulder to shoulder with some avante-garde paintings or interactive expressionisms in a hotshot gallery or museum and find its way as an artform. That will be the day.