The Art of Angst in a Comic World

The telephone rings continually at Robert Williams’ house. These days, everyone wants the artist to explain himself.

A woman calls from Hollywood, a man from New York and another from London. Williams spends 15 or 20 minutes on the line each time, defending his art.

“I’m pontificating,” he says between calls. “I hate that.”

For 20 years, Williams has preferred to work quietly, getting up at 4:45 each morning and painting until after dark. He paints comic-book scenes gone mad with violence, blood and “neked” women.

“Art that exceeds acceptable social parameters,” he calls it. Or, “fine oil paintings depicting colloquial visions of an imagination self-indulged.”

Most people never paid attention to Williams or his particular vision of the world. But that changed last year when the heavy-metal band Guns N’ Roses put one of his works, “Appetite for Destruction,” on the cover of their album of the same title. The painting depicts a woman lying on the street with her shirt torn to reveal a bare breast, her dress split open and her panties pulled down below her knees. An orange, mechanical beast hovers menacingly above.

Feminist groups protested the album cover, and some record stores refused to put it on their shelves. Geffen Records decided to issue two different covers--one featuring Williams’ painting and another with toned-down artwork.

But the uproar continues. Williams says he receives a constant flow of hate mail and death threats. Newspapers and magazines call for interviews. Last month, he appeared on MTV to state his case.

“I’m not the good person you tell your children to be like, and I can’t do paintings that are interior decorating,” he said. “I have a lot of sex and violence in my paintings because I do art work that deals with anxieties.

“I like to antagonize society. There’s no question about that.”

Such angst and unrest emanates from a North Hollywood neighborhood next to the 170 Freeway. Robert and Suzanne Williams have lived in the same brown house for 18 years. She is an artist too, and their paintings crowd the walls of this small place.

Collections fill the rest of the space. Stone Tiki gods from Easter Island, salt and pepper shakers and Edison phonograph cylinders. Replicas of caveman skulls are lined up on the floor. Imperial German spiked helmets from the 1800s take up half the back room.

The dining room is Williams’ workplace. His paintings are stacked on racks against the wall. There is “Siege of the Maskers,” a nightmare medieval battlefield of scattered corpses, fire and murder. There is a photograph of “Enchiladas de Amora,” a piece he recently sold in New York. It portrays a naked woman reclining across a giant plate of beef enchiladas. Behind her lies a deserted roadside eatery with a junked car, rusting out front.

Such work hasn’t been welcomed by the art world.

“He does get reviewed in Art Forum once in a while,” said Robert Lopez, the curator of La Luz de Jesus, a Melrose Avenue folk art gallery. “But he’s not accepted.”

However, while most fringe artists struggle to get by, Williams has been supported by a following that buys virtually everything he paints. Last month, he sold 15 paintings for $2,800 each during an exhibit at the Psychedelic Solution gallery n New York City. In April, he’ll show at La Luz de Jesus, where his books, posters and paintings are among the gallery’s best-selling pieces.

“The guy is not scared to portray life as he sees it,” said Jacaeber Kastor, owner of Psychedelic Solution. “I think people can relate to his pictures, as opposed to a painting of three shades of gray with a red circle in the middle and some intellectual saying, ‘It symbolizes the elemental mode of blah, blah, blah.’ ”

Now that Guns N’ Roses has presented Williams to the rest of the world, with mixed reactions, the artist finds himself a bit uneasy. He was nervous about inviting a member of the press into his home, unsure of why anyone would be interested in him.

“Aren’t you going to use a tape recorder?” he asked. Then, he peered out the window. “Do you have anyone else out in the car?”

Finally, he settled into an antique barber’s chair by the fireplace and began to talk. The words came out in spurts, like an angry sermon, punctuated by pauses as he formulated the next thought. Williams is a thin man with gray hair combed straight back. His speech is marked by a slight Western accent of Albuquerque, his hometown.

Save for a brief stint in military school, his formative years were spent roaming the streets, fighting. When Williams was old enough, he bought a hot rod. For 6 months in 1959, he worked the midway in a carnival.

“When I was young, I thought I was Napoleon.”

Williams also thought of himself as an artist. That tendency landed him, for a short time, at the Chouinard Art Institute (which later became CalArts) and, for two years after that, at Los Angeles City College. The other students disdained his comic-book style and referred to him snidely as “the illustrator.”

But such art came into vogue with the ‘60s culture, and Williams found himself in the right place at the right time. He worked for hot-rod artist Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, then joined seven other cartoonists to create Zap comic books in 1968. In the following years, Zap gave the world Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat and Williams’ Coochy Cooty.

“There were no stops in those comics. Sex, violence, sedition. If you could think it up, you could put it in a comic book,” Williams said. “The reason I’m telling you this is for you to know the festered mood I came out of. To do something like the Guns N’ Roses cover is normal for me.”

Williams left Zap after the end of the Vietnam War and transferred his efforts to the painter’s canvas. His work continued a tradition of violence.

“I don’t care what you say, everybody likes violence in some way. That’s part and parcel of our animal nature.”

And his paintings featured nudity.

“There’s a place for that. If a man wants to look at a woman’s neked body, that’s just as goddamn sacred as any church.”

Years passed in increments of hundreds of canvases. Changes came with the age of punk--Williams catered to a public thirst for brighter colors and more graphic violence. He built a cadre of loyal supporters.

Now, his work is growing more technically complex, marked by greater spatial depth and elaborate backgrounds. Williams works relentlessly at age 45, turning out paintings in batches of 40 or 60 at a time.

“It’s a horrible obsession. It’s worse than drugs. It’s worse than sex or masturbation.”

Suzanne gets a kick out of the hubbub over “Appetite for Destruction” and says she wishes people would pay as much attention to her paintings of colorful, intricate designs. Two hot-rods are parked in the garage of the couple’s suburban home.

And there is a newspaper tabloid displayed in the living room. The headline reads: “Hitler Was a Woman.” Of all the items in the house, perhaps this newspaper speaks best to Williams’ premise that “if it commands attention, it’s culture; if it matches the couch, it’s art.”

“A lot of people hate my stuff,” Williams said. “But a lot of people can’t get enough of it. My prices are going up. I’m doing good.”

The Guns N’ Roses controversy hasn’t hurt business, but Williams doubts that all this attention will give him long-lasting fame or acceptance among art critics.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “I’m lucky to have a house and a nice wife and be making a living at painting anything I want.

“That’s being Napoleon, isn’t it?”