Not So Famous Views of L.A

100NOT SO FAMOUS VIEWS OF L.A. BARBARA THOMASON 1 Editor’s Note The moment I laid eyes on Barbara Thomason’s paintings of Los Angeles, I fell in love. I’m a sixth-generation Southern Californian. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Albert C. Martin, designed many significant L.A. buildings, and the men on my father’s side—great-grandfather Matt Conway, grandfather Charlie Dunn, father Joe Dunn, and uncle Dick Dunn—were commercial real estate brokers who helped shape the city. I was raised in the heart of the city and learned from infancy to love its light, its hills, its concrete, its wildlife, its architecture, its beaches, its history, and its crazy-quilt beauty. Barbara’s sharp eye, skillful hand, creative genius, and admiration for her city combined to result in an extraordinary series of paintings that celebrate “my” Los Angeles—and, no doubt, your Los Angeles, too. It is a great honor to publish this collection of 100 not so famous views of my city, with commentary by the artist. And I am grateful to the great L.A. writer David Ulin for contributing a foreword. He, too, has fallen in love with Barbara’s paintings. This little booklet is but a sample of what’s to come. All of us at Prospect Park Books look forward to releasing the hardcover book in September. And don’t miss the show of all 100 paintings that will be hung in the gallery space at Angel City Brewery in the historic Arranaga building at Traction and Alameda in late September, with a publication party on September 20th from 4 to 6 p.m. We hope to see you there. Colleen Dunn Bates Prospect Park Books 2 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. 3 FOrEwOrd 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. By David L. Ulin I used to keep a list of sacred sites in Los Angeles. By sacred, I don’t mean religious bestow their own sort of specialness, the specialness of the everyday. Thomason or even (necessarily) significant, but rather places, buildings, street corners that paints as a native, capturing Los Angeles at the level of its streets. Here is the L.A. held resonance for me. First was the Western Exterminator Company, with its 1931 we know, the L.A. we navigate, on foot, in cars, by public transportation, a city, as logo of the “little man,” wagging his finger at a rodent as if he were a slimmer Raymond Chandler observed in The Long Goodbye, “no worse than others, a city cousin of Rich Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly. I don’t know why that image so rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” attracted me; I did not then, and do not now, live in Silverlake. But every time I There is no glitz, no glamour, and (more important) no need for it, since the whole drove east on Silverlake Boulevard and passed beneath the Temple Street overpass, point is to peel back those myths and those misunderstandings, to expose what I felt as if I were unwinding L.A.’s history. I was a grudging transplant to California, has been waiting all along. The 110 north at the 105, the Jim Henson Studio on and I felt cut loose from the urban textures of the east. I missed the grit, La Brea (built, in another era, for Charlie Chaplin), the Capitol Records the ordinariness—as a newcomer, what I mostly saw was spectacle. Building from across an empty stretch of the 101, opossum scurrying in How was I to know that Los Angeles was a city just like any other, that it the foreground—this is Los Angeles without its history of forgetting, no was built out of families and neighborhoods? Western Exterminator was longer rootless, placeless, but instead, through Thomason’s transforming my first clue that there was more to the place than its surfaces, that there imagination, the embodiment of place. were layers, nuance, heritage. And yet, there is also an edge, an unexpected tension, for nowhere Western Exterminator, it turns out, is the first of the 100 images in in 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. do we encounter a human being. It’s Barbara Thomason’s 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A., an homage to the not just Western Avenue outside the Wiltern; Thomason gives us the city nineteenth-century Japanese artist Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views deconstructed, depopulated, a shadow of the floating world. It’s a subtle of Edo that becomes a celebration of the most mundane (and, thus, most move, one that sneaks up on us as we move through the series, and it moving) landscapes of Southern California life. D.J. Waldie would have a reinforces the sense we often have in Los Angeles of being alone when field day with these paintings, which capture a set of glimpses in which we are on the street. Even more, it suggests something of Thomason’s Los Angeles is revealed as its essential self. There’s the Yugura Tower in Little intentions, which are to showcase the city on its terms. “The photo archives of Tokyo, seen from across First Street, as if it were a snapshot, or a memory. Or the vernacular Los Angeles are indeed gigantic, running into millions of images,” glorious Eastern Building—I always think of Edmund Wilson when I see it; “the Norman Klein has written. “However, these cannot compete with hundreds of blue Avocado Building,” he sniffed, “bawdy as the peacock’s tail”—rising behind a movie melodramas where downtown is a backdrop.… Indeed, Los Angeles remains parking lot and a clutter of other, more anonymous downtown structures, partially the most photographed and least remembered city in the world, and will most obscured. A dragonfly floats beyond a chain link fence at the Silverlake Reservoir; likely stay that way.” What Klein is suggesting is that we tend to understand, and El Coyote’s neon sign glimmers red beneath the shadow of a misty night. On another move through, L.A. as a background, against which we play out the action of our evening (or, perhaps, the same one), the Wiltern evokes the stillness of Western lives. 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. insists on the opposite: It requires us to Avenue like something out of Edward Hopper, empty in the city’s solitary glow. recognize the city as it is. Through Thomason’s eye, in other words, her assiduous What I love about these paintings is that they are recognizable; I have seen, attention to the here and now, Los Angeles finally plays itself. have walked through, nearly every location they portray. What I love about these DAVID L. ULIN is the author, most recently, of the novella Labyrinth. His other books include The Lost Art of paintings is that they are commonplace; there is nothing special about their scenes, Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary about the vistas they animate. Did I say nothing special? What I mean is: They Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is book critic of the Los Angeles Times. 4 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. 5 4. Felix The Felix the Cat sign has sat atop the Chevrolet car dealership on the northeast corner of Figueroa and Jefferson, next to the University of Southern California, since 1959. Winslow Felix, the dealership’s owner back then, got permission from the creator of Felix the Cat, a popular cartoon character dating back to the silent- movie era, to use him as his mascot. This landmark sign is a marker of Southern California’s car culture and recalls an era when people still had a sense of humor about cityscape. Efforts to make the sign an historic landmark have failed, but Felix is still hanging on—although neon purists were outraged when the current owner replaced the original neon with more economical LED lighting in 2012, citing a monthly bill of $3,000 just to keep neon Felix smiling over Figueroa travelers. 6 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. 7 5. Echo Park Lake Created in the 1860s as a drinking-water reservoir, the lake is next to the Angelus Temple, which was established in the ’20s by charismatic preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. She imported giant lotus plants from China to plant in the lake, and they flourished until succumbing to pollution in 2009. The lotus festival, a celebration of Pacific Rim cultures, lost its namesake for several years, but in 2013 a restoration project was completed, new lotuses arrived, and the paddleboats were back in operation. The lake supports a population of ducks and balloon sellers, who wander around looking like giant colored-egg colonies with legs. The view of downtown L.A. is excellent from the lake; the view in this painting is from the north end of the lake looking south. This is the only painting in the series that includes a person—and only because you can see nothing but his legs. Echo Park Lake is located between Glendale Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue, north of the 101 Freeway. 8 100 Not So Famous Views of L.A. 9 17. 2 Freeway The 2 Freeway, which runs from Echo Park to La Cañada Flintridge, is also officially called the Lanterman Freeway. It was named for former state assemblyman Frank D. Lanterman, who authored the 1971 Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which ended the involuntary commitment of the mentally ill, and the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Act, which expanded protections for the developmentally disabled.

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