
This culminated in a sell-out show of large rock landscape paintings in Paris at the Darthea Speyer Gallery in 1970. There were additional early painting successes with awards and attention at the Paris Biennale (1967) and as the representative of the United States at the Saõ Paulo Biennial curated by Jim Demetrion. Irving Blum brought Warhol to see it twice, which I am sure influenced his cow wallpaper that he showed three years later at the Ferus.
#Llyn foulkes one man band serial#
Then in 1963 came the Rolf Nelson Gallery exhibition with cows and serial imagery of surrounding landscapes. Just like I had an edge: wearing all black, owning a raven and collecting taxidermy animals. I was incorporating everything from collage to dead animals and textures to improve the photographic effect, and the works had a whole dark edge to them, using tar as paint. I had a lot of critical success with my 1960s burned blackboards and chairs, assemblages and combines, and early shows at the Ferus Gallery (nine months before Warhol’s first show there) and at the Pasadena Museum in 1962. A major early influence was de Kooning and a particular painting called Merritt Parkway 1959, which had a big slash of white coming down that looked like a cross, and I realised: ‘Oh my God, that’s like a religious painting.’ Anthropomorphic images became influential to my own work. When I arrived in Los Angeles in 1957, the art scene was extremely small – until the magazine Artforum moved from San Francisco down to L.A., right above the Ferus Gallery, and things really picked up. Then I gave it all up when I was seventeen and discovered art through The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, a book I borrowed from the library. That started me collecting horns and bells and playing music. When I was ten I wanted to be a cartoonist, and at the same time discovered the cartoon music of Spike Jones.

Growing up in Yakima, Washington, I began drawing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck at the age of five.
