SoCal artist has turned the feel of the ’50s into an industry
By SAM MITTELSTEADT
Get Out
The subjects in Shag paintings exist in a world filled with midcentury design — and a dash of mystery.
The women sport big sunglasses and beehives; the men wear skinny ties and, occasionally, fez hats. They toss back martinis and tiki drinks, sit just so on swank furniture, and engage in vices like cigarettes and . . . murder? (There seem to be a lot of widows skulking about, dressed in black but not necessarily mourning.)
‘‘Why do people like Shag? The work is great — it's perfectly done,’’ says Amy Young, who opened Perihelion Arts gallery in downtown Phoenix with partner Douglas Grant in October 2002. ‘‘The style is appealing to many people — he's highlighting the lounge-y, cocktail sort of mysterious culture, and no one else does it like Shag.
‘‘It's a slice of retro. Every picture is a story. And it's one of those scenarios that makes people wish they were in it. I'd like to be sitting here with my cat, who has a cocktail, and my partner, who has a cocktail, and there's maybe a mysterious stranger in the room. It's alluring and inviting.’’
The way the artist blends style, intrigue and humor enchanted MGM Pictures executives, who asked Shag to update the Pink Panther cartoon character for this year's 40th anniversary of the films.
“At first, they said, ‘We're releasing all the “Pink Panthers” on DVD around the entire world and we want you to illustrate the box set for it,’ ” Shag says. “Then MGM merchandising and promotions said, ‘Hey, we could base an entire campaign around these illustrations you're doing.’”
The new Pink Panther is more feline, less human, and “a little more adult,” he says. “They even said, ‘You can make him smoke if you want to.’ ”
Taking on such an iconic character wasn't too daunting, he says. “Especially in the early ‘Pink Panthers,’ the settings and music and clothing are really related to the stuff I paint.”
An artist by any name
After giving up the “slave labor” of commercial art in the late 1990s, Josh Agle — take the last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last — has become a pop culture phenomenon. His dozens of paintings and thousands of limited-edition serigraphs are snapped up quickly and turn into collectors items.
The works that comprise the “Infernal Intentions: Rare Prints & Objects” show, which opens Friday at Perihelion Arts, are small-scale test runs called artist proofs, which he uses to test colors for the limited-edition lithograph printings.
“When I started doing the Shag stuff, I consciously painted what I wanted to see,” he said. “The very first paintings I did, I thought, ‘If I had the ultimate painting on my wall, what would it be?’ ” It was a tiki bar scene at Trader Vic's, in fact, but “I wanted there to be something more than a cool-looking painting, so I try to put a little narrative in there — a little story. Not everyone cares about ’50s and ’60s design and furniture or whatever. But I wanted something that grabbed them.”
That something is sometimes a little bit of unease: In “Palm Springs After Dark,” four lovely lasses cavort in a Futurama-style home with what appear to be living ventriloquist dummies. In “The Golf Widow,” a comely woman and a tattooed thug enjoy a drink on the patio, while her husband lies splayed out on the green below, his golf ball forever to remain 2 feet away from the pin.
“There are almost cultural clichés that I touch on,” Shag says, “but that otherworldliness, for lack of a better word, lets people know these weren't painted in 1958.”
Exceeding expectations
Shag's star began to rise with the interest in midcentury design and cocktail and lounge culture, which plumbed the same era his paintings specialized in.
“Movies like ‘Swingers’ came out, and cocktails were back in pop culture, and what I was doing kind of fit into that,” he says. “But I didn't want my career as an artist to rise and fall according to the whims of the time. I remember a guy asking me in 1998, ‘You're popular now, with the rise of the cocktail explosion, but what are you going to do when that dies down?’
“I've always made an attempt to not be above that, but to be separate from that,” he says. “The ‘Swingers’ stuff has disappeared, but the paintings continue to sell.”
It's not just paintings that sell now:
• He's licensed works for Christmas cards, cocktail napkins, and a “little series” of five books — three cocktail recipe books, one zodiac book and one about love.
• The play “Shag With a Twist,” billed as a two-hour stage mystery “that brings to life the illustrations of Shag through an evocative cocktail of art, music and dance,” opens March 18 in Los Angeles.
• He's even the subject of a coffee table book due in September from Chronicle Books. “One of my gallery owners said he was going to a publishing show and he thought a book would be a good idea,” Shag says. “He came back with three or four offers,” which astounded the artist.
“Everything about my career is surprising to me,” he says. “Maybe I have low expectations. When I did the first five or six paintings I ever did, I thought there'd maybe be about 10 people on Earth who'd like them and buy them.”
‘Infernal Intentions: Rare Prints & Objects’
What: Exhibit opening and artist reception for Shag
When: 6:30 p.m. to midnight Friday. Show continues through March 31.
Where: Perihelion Arts gallery and bookstore, 1500 N.W. Grand Ave., Phoenix
How much: Free
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