Here is my chance to talk about my favorite artist of all time, Robert Williams. I was first exposed to his work back in art school, when I managed to get my hands on the infamous Zap Comics! I was knocked out when I first saw the erotic comic stuff of Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, and of course, Robert himself.
In the mid 1980’s I was again to be stunned when I saw his paintings at the Zero One Gallery in Los Angeles. He would have to be one of my major influences, so how lucky was I to have to have such a famous artist write the foreword to my art book The Red Box.
Mr. Williams has a long history of involvement in the American hot rod culture, and he was involved early on with Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, and Ratfink.
He started Juxtapoz Magazine in 1994, and is credited with starting the lowbrow art movement… a movement that began with hotrod art and “kustom kulture”, but has grown to include so much more.
To say that Williams’ art is pin up art is only part of the equation… it is cinematic, film noir, and heroic on the scale of 19th French salon painting. Here is a lowbrow artist with a great fine art pedigree. His work is included in many high profile art collections, and there is a waiting list to collect any of his pieces!
His psychedelic art includes devil girls, supervixens, femme fatales, punk rock girls, and everything phantasmagoric. Then he throws in the hot rod art, and it’s quite a grand scale surrealist painting!
His most famous art work is probably his 1990’s Appetite for Destruction album cover for the band Guns and Roses.
