Zombie Mystery Paintings

A collection of 40 paintings by Williams that are morally insolvent and grossly artistic. It covers his "Middle Years" and features the classic Two Bull Dykes Fighting For The Privilege Of Buying A Prostitute A Banana Daquiri. Introduction by Robert Crumb.

This book, the first one featuring the amazing artwork of Robert Williams, has been unavailable for many years. The book contains an overview of Williams's early work until 1979. It features images from t-shirt designs, comics, posters and oil paintings.

A legendary figure of underground comix, Robert Williams (b. 1943) is an important social chronicler of American popular culture. The interviews assembled in Robert Williams: Conversations attest to his rhetorical powers, which match the high level of energy evident in his underground comix and action-filled canvases. The public perception of Williams was largely defined by two events. In 1987, Guns N’ Roses licensed a Williams painting for the cover of their best-selling album Appetite for Destruction. However, Williams’s cover art stirred controversies and was moved to the inside of the album. The second defining event was Williams’s participation in the Helter Skelter exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. Protests ensued when a room was set aside to feature his work. Uncovering long-forgotten and hard-to-find interviews, this collection serves as a social chronicle of counterculture from the 1960s through the early 2000s. One of the founders of the original ZAP Comix collective in the 1960s, Williams drew inspiration from pulp fiction, hot rod culture, pin-up girls, and traditional academic art. He invented the comics character Cootchy Cooty and worked for the studios of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. He rubbed shoulders with outlaw motorcycle gangs and tested the legal limits of what was permissible comic book art during his day. He has often been described as a figure courting scandal and controversy, a reputation he discusses repeatedly in some of the interviews here. Since the 1980s, Williams has emerged as a force in the fine art world, raising interesting questions about how painting and comic art interrelate.

Robert Williams: The Father of Exponential Imagination is a comprehensive career spanning, comprehensive collection of the iconic painter’s fine art, including every one of his remarkable oil paintings along with a presentation of his drawings, sculptures, and works in other media. Simply put, this is the art book of the decade, and the book that Williams has been working toward his entire career. In the late 20th and early 21st century, diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortably into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, hot rod illustration, to mention a few. This alternative art movement found its most apt participant in one of America’s most controversial underground artists, the painter, Robert Williams. It was this artist who brought the term “lowbrow” into the fine arts lexicon, with his groundbreaking 1979 book, The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams. Williams pursued a career as a fine arts painter years before joining the art studio of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mid-1960s. From this position he moved into the rebellious, anti-war circles of early underground comix, as one of the celebrated ZAP cartoonists. Featuring an introductory essay by Coagula Art Journal founder Mat Gleason along with a new art manifesto and foreword by Williams himself, as well as tons of rare photos and ephemera.

This anthology of hot rod writings and excerpts chronicles the joys of hot rodding, the historical circumstances of its creation, and the major events, people, cars, and builders who brought hot rods to the national stage. From popular writers of the era to those covering today’s cutting edge innovators, this collection explores various themes within hot rodding through news articles, essays, fiction, interviews, and more, with more than 60 color and black-and-white illustrations and photographs to illuminate each excerpt and story. Writers include Gray Baskerville, Ed Roth, Wally Parks, Dean Batchelor, Robert E. Petersen, Tom Wolfe, LeRoi "Tex" Smith, and many more.

Conceived as a challenge to long–standing conventional wisdom, Creating the Future is a work of social history/cultural criticism that examines the premise that the progress of art in Los Angeles ceased during the 1970s—after the decline of the Ferus Gallery, the scattering of its stable of artists (Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Ed Rusha and others), and the economic struggles throughout the decade—and didn't resume until sometime around 1984 when Mark Tansey, Alison Saar, Judy Fiskin, Carrie Mae Weems, David Salle, Manuel Ocampo, among others became stars in an exploding art market. However, this is far from the reality of the L.A. art scene in the 1970s. The passing of those fashionable 1960s–era icons, in fact, allowed the development of a chaotic array of outlandish and independent voices, marginalized communities, and energetic, sometimes bizarre visions that thrived during the stagnant 1970s. Fallon's narrative describes and celebrates, through twelve thematically arranged chapters, the wide range of intriguing artists and the world—not just the objects—they created. He reveals the deeper, more culturally dynamic truth about a significant moment in American art history, presenting an alternative story of stubborn creativity in the face of widespread ignorance and misapprehension among the art cognoscenti, who dismissed the 1970s in Los Angeles as a time of dissipation and decline. Coming into being right before their eyes was an ardent local feminist art movement, which had lasting influence on the direction of art across the nation; an emerging Chicano Art movement, spreading Chicano murals across Los Angeles and to other major cities; a new and more modern vision for the role and look of public art; a slow consolidation of local street sensibilities, car fetishism, gang and punk aesthetics into the earliest version of what would later become the "Lowbrow" art movement; the subversive co–opting, in full view of Pop Art, of the values, aesthetics, and imagery of Tinseltown by a number of young and innovative local artists who would go on to greater national renown; and a number of independent voices who, lacking the support structures of an art movement or artist cohort, pursued their brilliant artistic visions in near–isolation. Despite the lack of attention, these artists would later reemerge as visionary signposts to many later trends in art. Their work would prove more interesting, more lastingly influential, and vastly more important than ever imagined or expected by those who saw it or even by those who created it in 1970's Los Angeles. Creating the Future is a visionary work that seeks to recapture this important decade and its influence on today's generation of artists.