Art Frontier or Wasteland? : Cheaper Rents, Less Pressure and Relative Isolation Draw Artists to Area

Jeffrey Vallance’s latest work features primitive drawings of turtles and squids set against symbols of modern life: the 7-Eleven logo, a Visa card, Billy Idol.

Vallance suspects this may be an artistic reaction to the environment he grew up in, a land of shopping malls, movie theater complexes and fast food restaurants--the San Fernando Valley.

“The Valley does not recognize anything artistic. It is acultural,” said Vallance, a native of Canoga Park and one of Los Angeles’ most popular young artists. “It’s just a rental house, it’s not really connected to the rest of society.”

Van Nuys has never been mistaken for an art mecca. There are no revered contemporary museums in Reseda or Sylmar. Although some 1.3 million people live on this side of the hill, the area supports only one well-known gallery. Perhaps its most famous landmark is the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

Attracted by Cheaper Rents

Yet, a number of locally and nationally recognized artists live and work in the Valley. Many, like Vallance, have moved to its quiet, suburban neighborhoods in search of cheaper rents than can be found in the downtown and Venice art communities. Others were born in the Valley or remained after studying at California State University, Northridge or California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Some have come over the hill by choice. They say they relish the relative isolation of working away from galleries, critics and the influence of other artists.

“There is a feeling of freedom here,” said painter Lynn Coleman, who moved to Woodland Hills with her husband, artist Craig Stecyk, five years ago. “It’s not as pretentious, you don’t have the snobbery you have on the Westside.”

Explained Louise Lewis, director of the CSUN art gallery: “We can avoid the sense of an aesthetic being forced upon us. We can walk down the street with stockbrokers. We are more mixed in with the people than the artistic community downtown.

“I like the contact with a lot of non-art people,” she said. “It gives you perspective.”

Blend Into Neighborhoods

There is no true artistic community in the Valley and likely never will be, artists say. Neighborhoods are too numerous and spread out, and there is no gallery or popular cafe to draw artists together. They reside anonymously among clusters of homes or businesses.

Vallance, whose work is shown regularly in downtown galleries and who has had shows internationally as well, rents the same small, plain house he lived in as a boy. He earns enough from selling pieces to be a full-time artist, working out of a cluttered garage behind his home.

Candice Ocampo leases a storefront building next door to a shabby-looking church in North Hollywood. Her neighborhood is made up of auto-parts stores and junkyards. The area is zoned strictly for businesses, so she lives there illegally.

Living the Loft Life

The 40-year-old Ocampo sleeps in the back room, in a wooden loft built over a refrigerator, a hot plate and a small desk. The front room has been converted into a workshop that is cluttered with her art: brightly colored paintings and writhing monsters built of torn heater ducts, wires and tubes and shattered car windshields.

“It seems that the art out here is a little different,” she said. “It feels open to me. You can do anything.”

Deviation from the norm of Los Angeles art is common among Valley artists, Lewis said. Some examples:

Steve Moore, a 28-year-old Northridge native, takes standard bowling trophies and adds extra figures, lights and esoteric titles such as “Art Transcending Religion and Science” and “Mercury: Plebian God of Commerce.”

Craig Stecyk’s installation at the USC Atelier in Santa Monica features several walls covered with automobile hubcaps he scavenged from highways and junkyards, hood ornaments from 1950s automobiles and tail fins from Buicks, Cadillacs and Sunbeams that Stecyk sawed off by hand. For his next project, he hopes to saw the tail off a Boeing 747.

Sheila Elias, an internationally known Tarzana artist who has been invited to exhibit a work in the Louvre, painted 750 brown shopping bags with black Xs and distributed them among the destitute street people of downtown Los Angeles.

Not Concerned With Trends

“Valley artists are individualistic,” said Robert Gino, co-owner of the Orlando Gallery in Sherman Oaks. “One thing about downtown is that there is an overlapping of styles. In the Valley, artists have the freedom not to be concerned with what is the popular trend of the day.”

Some Valley artists agreed that they aren’t as influenced by the styles of others as would be the case if they lived downtown.

“It’s almost peer pressure. A lot of the time you can be easily persuaded to do art that isn’t intrinsically what you want,” said Hal Honigsberg, a Sepulveda artist whose work has shown to favorable reviews at Eilat Gordin Gallery in West Hollywood. “I like being a little separated from the artists in L.A.”

Others suggested that off-beat artists end up in the Valley because they are not as financially successful as those who make and sell more conventional art to a largely conventional public. Most of those interviewed have day jobs or double as commercial artists.

“I think most artists live out here because of economic reasons,” said Ocampo, who survives by working for a caterer. “Most of us are poor.”

Victim of Gentrification

Stecyk used to rent a space downtown, at a time when rents were cheap and many artists were moving there. Because of the influx of artists, the area soon earned a fashionable reputation. More and more non-art people moved in and the rents went up. He says it is the same old story.

“Being an artist is a shuck deal. You move into someone’s place and fix it up and get all your artist friends to move there,” he said. “Then all the secondary people come along and all of a sudden you have bistros and galleries. The rent goes up and you move on again.”

Ocampo laughs at the recurring phenomenon.

“We’re interesting,” she said. “People like to be around us.”

While many artists were forced out of downtown by rising rents, others have actively shied away from the established art community. Honigsberg thinks it may be a sign of the times.

“I don’t think there’s a Cafe Voltaire attitude anymore,” he said. “The Dadaists don’t have to get together and rap.”

Shared Housing

For the last four years, Honigsberg and his wife, Etsuko, have shared a three-bedroom Sepulveda house with Moore and another man, a documentary film maker. Their home is filled with art. Paintings, posters and mixed-media tableaux adorn the walls; tables are covered with colored paper and pencils and other materials. The mantle over the fireplace in the living room displays Moore’s trophy art side-by-side with Honigsberg’s “trap” art--elaborate wood and nail trap-like constructions painted in somber greens and reds.

“We’re not out of the mainstream. We’re not in Idaho,” Honigsberg said. “We’re 20 minutes from downtown. And galleries certainly don’t turn you down because you’re from Sepulveda.”

Many of those who have left downtown said they grew tired of the art scene.

“Downtown is supposedly what’s happening and we lived there for so many years,” Stecyk said. “It seemed like it would be worth moving to suburbia for a change. The first night we were here we saw Steve and Cyndy Garvey shopping at Ralphs. It was great.”

The only time Valley artists get together is at openings in downtown or Westside galleries. Stecyk said it is a routine that goes beyond love for art or friendship. Artists need to be seen at openings, to make contacts, in order to get shows of their own.

A contingent of Valley artists attended Stecyk’s opening in Santa Monica last week. They walked individually through the show, then gathered in clusters in the lobby, sipping fruit juice from plastic cups.

The USC Atelier is located on the third floor of the Santa Monica Place shopping mall. The artists watched curiously as shoppers rushed in and out of stores adjacent to the gallery. Some of the shoppers stared back.

“I think we’re scaring them,” said Dave Lynch, a Chatsworth artist.

Talk soon turned to the Valley.

“When I was growing up, the big thing was getting out of the Valley,” Moore said. “In its own way it has a small-town culture. It’s just easy to live there.”

Then Moore and Chatsworth artist Ken Jones debated the finer points of society in the Valley, finally concluding that Van Nuys was the cultural center of the Valley, Chatsworth the artistic hub.

Mused Stecyk, “There are a lot of people who from time to time have rolled through the Valley . . . old cowboys and artists.”

Works Out of Home

Lynne Westmore moved to the Valley 20 years ago because that was where she and her husband wanted to raise their two sons, one of whom has grown up to be an artist. She works in her Northridge home, where she creates collages using tissue, magazine cut-outs, handmade paper, paint and whatever else she can get her hands on.

Sheila Elias also sought a calmer environment. The painter, who works both in her Tarzana home and at a studio she rents downtown, said she needs to escape the crime, trash and traffic.

“This is peaceful and beautiful and a getaway kind of place,” she said.

However, Elias wishes there were more artists’ hangouts like Al’s Bar and Gorky’s near her home.

“This morning I went to the Good Earth in Encino,” she said. “I don’t think you’d call that a hangout. There’s really nothing out here.”

‘Should Be Doing Art’

Westmore countered: “I have spent a lot of time at Al’s Bar and I’m not missing out on anything now. It’s not good to sit and talk about art over two or three martinis when you really should be doing art. You’re spending all your time not creating.”

Long before downtown became a trendy art community, Robert Gino and Philip Orlando opened the Valley’s first contemporary gallery. That was in 1956. The two had been professional dancers and would have preferred to open a dance studio, but they figured a gallery would be better business.

At one point during the 1960s, they said, there were five or six noted galleries along Ventura Boulevard. Orlando said there were not enough collectors in the Valley to support the galleries at that time. Today, the Orlando Gallery is the only one left.

“Some of the best artists on the scene are coming from the Valley. It’s not a wasteland like they think it is,” said Gino, who claims that the Orlando is the oldest contemporary gallery in California. “There’s the snobbish attitude that the Valley is not hip. That’s bull.”

Two Main Galleries

In discussions with Valley artists and officials at CSUN and Cal Arts, the Orlando is invariably mentioned. CSUN also shows local artists regularly. Just about every artist who comes from or studies in the Valley passes through one or both of those galleries.

“The Orlando has had, at least, the good sense to produce some good shows. It has the best reputation for making an effort,” said Douglas Huebler, head of the art program at Cal Arts for the last ten years. “But frankly, it doesn’t carry the weight that some of the other galleries do.”

Meaning, of course, galleries on the other side of the hill.

Gino and Orlando argue that art is becoming of larger concern in the Valley. They said there are more collectors than ever before. Elias said she believes more collectors will attract more artists.

Cal Arts Is Big Draw

The Valley has always attracted art students. Cal Arts has established itself as one of the country’s leading multi-arts training institutes. Alumni of the starkly modern-looking school, originally funded in 1966 by an $11-million grant from Walt Disney, have earned international recognition in the post-modern movement, music, writing and even cinematic special effects.

Cal State Northridge offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art, with specialized study in everything from painting and sculpture to jewelry and three-dimensional design. Its gallery contains a permanent collection of Hans Burkhardt and other contemporary artists.

Proposed art centers in Warner Center and the Sepulveda Basin may further improve the cultural climate. Lewis, of CSUN, hopes there is a budding Venice in the Valley.

Different Outlooks

“We’re an art frontier. We are on the cutting edge,” she said. “We are going to develop into a strong art community.”

Huebler disagreed. And Cal Arts would not likely take part in such an emergence, he said.

“We’re in kind of an ivory tower here,” he said. “All of our students have their eyeballs set on making it in New York or downtown L.A. The Valley is virtually a waste space.”

The artists themselves, while not as damning as Huebler, similarly doubt that the Valley will become a bona fide art community. Many complain that supplies are not always available. Ocampo must drive to downtown stores for high-quality pigment. Honigsberg, too, makes regular trips for materials.

“You have to admit, there are more people who shop out here than make art,” Dave Lynch said.

Much Creativity

But, several artists contended, the Valley suffers an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to art. Moore insisted that the Valley abounds with creative expression. You just have to know where to look for it.

He described a van that is often parked outside Biff’s coffee shop, at Balboa and Devonshire boulevards. It is covered with hood ornaments, trophies and other metallic memorabilia. And there is a metal-tubing dinosaur that adorns the front lawn of a Van Nuys home.

“Amid the Gemcos and Hughes Markets, you have guys out there doing this stuff,” Moore said. “They don’t care about art. They do it because it’s cool.”

As Ken Jones sees it, art knows no boundaries.

“It doesn’t have to be an organized sort of thing,” Jones said. “People who are artists do it anywhere.”