By Norman Hathaway
Essay by Mike Salisbury
(Picturebox; New York)

For decades, airbrush art was the butt of jokes, evoking images of sexed up paintings on the sides of vans or sleek palm trees adorning surfboards and vacation T-shirts, but not anymore. Design historian Norman Hathaway has resurrected the movement and four of its masters, Dave Willardson, Charles E. White III, Peter Palombi, and Peter Lloyd, for a vibrantly illustrated book that reads like a love poem to the halcyon days — and amphetamine-fueled nights — of 1970s Los Angeles, when the airbrush style came to define an era.

The images that populate this coffee-table book — women posing next to bananas, pickles, or hot dogs, or cowboys strumming guitars into the sunset — are not ironic, even though their obvious sexual innuendos and saccharine Americana can make them seem, today, like the pinnacle of hipster cool. These humble West Coast masters of commercial art were able to transform a utilitarian American invention from the late 19th century into a tool of artistic fantasy.

The book begins with a rambling but insightful essay by the visionary art director Mike Salisbury, who during his tenure at some key publications, including the LA Timess West magazine and Rolling Stone, commissioned some of the best images in this book. Salisbury speculates that Los Angeles’s lack of folk history or, as he puts it, its dearth of "handcrafted warmth in our endless miles of anonymous real estate" made it ripe for this new style. Los Angeles was, he explains, "the first American city of the future and the first renderings we received of that city were in airbrush."

Salisbury returns again and again to the distinctions between LA "hippie" and LA "hip," associating the former with Sonny Bono, dangling crystals, and no air-conditioning, while in the latter he finds a kinship with Jim Morrison, salon-prepped long hair, and airbrush art. He uses this binary to explain the airbrush artist’s lexicon, an odd cocktail that includes roller skates, high heels, and chrome finishes.

While each of the four artists brandishes his own take on the medium, they share an affiliation with Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design and a carefree machismo that evokes the boys’ club of the New York School. Willardson is known for his Alberto Vargas-inspired pinup girls and large luxurious shapes; White III is the master of complex compositions that can be hallucinatory in their details and he often demonstrates an affinity for aerial perspective; Palombi is the dark wizard of the pack who relishes the erotic; and Lloyd is the most painterly of the crew, using tight close-ups as a way to reveal interesting details, such as the wood grain of a violin or the texture of a woman’s nipple.

Their work was ubiquitous in 1970s America. Images created by these four artists adorned movie posters (American Graffiti, Star Wars), product advertisements (7-Up, Levi’s, Screaming Yellow Zonkers), and the covers of countless LPs (Chuck Berry, Sammy Davis Jr., Hall & Oates, Kansas, Jefferson Starship, and Rod Stewart). "For ten years, record stores became my galleries, " Dave Willardson says. Though content with their commercial careers, Willardson says they weren’t blind to the artworld. "Sure, we were always influenced by fine art...we saw an exhibit by Edward Kienholz in the ’60s. We went back to the studio and everything we created after that was mannequins and fiberglass," he explains. Palombi is more blunt as to why he chose commercial over fine art: "I wanted to make money...Fine art is fun, but only if you have rich parents."

Today, the airbrush aesthetic mostly lives on in popular design software that makes it all too easy to mask, spray, and correct mistakes. As Hathaway recalls about those pre-Photoshop days, "Being an airbrush artist was a complete bitch. You had to possess a full arsenal of chops that those utilizing other media could afford to fudge or skirt around." These artists, who appear Herculean in their technical finesse compared with the graphic designers of today, worked with no net.

"Overspray: Riding High with the Kings of California Airbrush Art" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' May 2009 Table of Contents.