Peering Through the ‘Gates of Hell’ : L.A. Artist Chronicles Riotous Urban Landscapes With Historical a Twist

COSTA MESA —  The night the Los Angeles riots erupted, artist Sandow Birk got a call from a collector who sounded stunned.

Actor Nicolas Cage owns a 1991 painting by Birk that depicts a bloody Los Angeles gang killing, the city enshrouded in smoke. He told Birk he kept gazing from the painting to the fires raging below his hillside home, incredulous at how prescient the artist seemed.

Unpretentious and frank, Birk denies he’s clairvoyant. He points out that there were four drive-by shootings near his Hollywood loft this year. Sometimes he has to lie on the floor until the gunfire subsides. Birk says that for about five years now, he’s simply been painting his surroundings, smoke-filled air included.

Using that tactic, Birk began to paint riot-torn Los Angeles, producing works that make up his first institutional solo show, opening Wednesday at the Orange Coast College Art Gallery.

“I had to paint the riots,” he said in a recent interview at the gallery. Essentially, “I was already doing it.”

“The Gates of Hell: L.A. Landscapes of the 90s,” contains 15 paintings that form something of a riot travelogue, taking viewers past graffiti-scared, burned-out mini-malls, bullet-riddled bodies dripping blood, Korean shop owners battling back looters, hyperactive, heavily armed police. Providing a backdrop are Los Angeles’ relentlessly sunny skies, purplish sunsets and palm trees, albeit all three often are obscured by smoke from arson fires.

The show is curated by Irini Vallera Rickerson, OCC’s Art Gallery director. The centerpiece is a 10-foot-tall ceramic “gate” based on Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” with similar figurative vignettes. Ceramic artist Stephen Rivers fashioned much of the piece, which features the Rodney G. King beating and retired Los Angeles Police Department Chief Daryl F. Gates, wherein lies the wordplay in the work’s title.

“Gates sort of created the environment for these paintings to come about,” said Birk, who portrays Gates as a stern cowboy, hands poised at his holsters. “Everybody hated him, and (he) was just stubbornly insisting on staying (in office) longer, like a cowboy, I guess. He just wouldn’t leave town.”

Birk bases all his paintings on historic paintings, most by 18th- and 19th-Century French artists such as Jacques Louis David or Jean Francois Millet, swapping past heroes or common folk for contemporary people and situations.

In “President Bush Visiting the L.A. Riots,” for instance, Bush stands amid the rubble of a burned-out mini-mall, benevolently touching a bandage on the chest of a black man. Other men, slumped on the ground nearby, wear expressions of despair; some blithely tote away stolen TVs.

The painting is based on Antoine-Jean Gros’ “Napoleon Visiting the Pest House at Jaffa” (1804), in which Napoleon visits his sick and dying soldiers at a hospital, touching the plague sores of one awe-struck man who stares as if Napoleon were able to cure him.

An example of “18th-Century propaganda,” Gros’ painting was meant to glorify Napoleon and elevate his status at the end of a failed military campaign in Egypt, Birk said. His painting illustrates his feeling that Bush was likewise angling for some good PR with his visit to Los Angeles during its hour of need.

“It was this big attempt to make him seem like he was concerned and in touch with the people and everything, and it was a big photo (opportunity), he was just using the riots to strengthen his image,” he said.

What fascinates him most about the classics is how those with military or patriotic themes romanticize and mythologize death and violence.

“They’re so dramatic and staged and false, so romanticized, that it’s like a joke; it’s not real. My point of view is the same,” he said.

Birk says that by similarly exaggerating street violence and gang warfare to the point of satire, he strips away any alleged nobility, morality or glamour. He believes his most successful works are those that correlate strongly to the intent and social commentary of those they copy.

Birk first imitated historic paintings for his works about surfing (he’s an avid surfer) as a way to legitimize what some might see as a lightweight subject. He inserted surfboards and perfect waves into his renderings of famous marine scenes.

Raised in Seal Beach, Birk, 29, left for a surfing trip through South America after two years of study at L.A.’s Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design. He subsequently studied 18th- and 19th-Century French painting in Paris and England, where he became familiar with the art he’d later appropriate.

In 1985, he returned to Rio de Janeiro. There, he built surfboards, designed T-shirts and became art director for Surfer magazine’s Brazilian edition. He wanted to paint, however, so after three years he moved to Los Angeles, returning as well to Otis to obtain his degree.

Living initially in South-Central Los Angeles, Birk’s cityscapes became more violent as he settled into the community. He would observe a deputy district attorney friend try a drive-by shooting or other gang-related cases at Compton Courthouse. Sometimes he just hung out.

“There’s the idea that L.A. is the melting-pot city and the city of the future, where everyone is mingling,” Birk said. “But when you live in the city, it’s just a total myth, it’s just not true. (In one) . . . neighborhood, (blacks) are living a mile from a huge Mexican neighborhood, and they never mix with them; they hate them.”

Birk has enlisted graffiti artist Devon Flynn to spray-paint flamboyantly colorful graffiti designs on some works. He also tries to maintain a balance of Asian, Latino and black gangs in his paintings. He has worried, nonetheless, that he might offend some gang members--for depicting their defeat at the hands of rivals, for instance--and wondered if he might, in fact, be in physical danger. But he took some paintings to the Compton courthouse, where gang members saw them.

“These guys would come in, like in handcuffs, and sit underneath them, on the bench, waiting to go to trial, and they were like ‘Oh man, that’s really cool,’ ,” he said. “That was a relief.”

Not everyone reacts so positively. Birk said he’s often asked whether he has the “right,” as “some white guy,” to paint urban realities that primarily involve blacks or other minorities.

“I think that’s a terrible question,” he said. “Here you get all the politicians and all these people trying to promote L.A. as being this big melting pot and (urging people to) live together, but the minute you do anything that’s not your own culture, everyone attacks you. That’s crazy. I paint what I see, and I believe it’s L.A. culture . . . not black culture. I’m from L.A., and if I can’t paint it, who can?”

“The Gates of Hell: L.A. Landscapes of the 90s,” with paintings by Sandow Birk, runs Sept. 9 through Oct. 1 at Orange Coast College Art Gallery, 2701 Fairview Road, Costa Mesa. Hours: Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 2 .m.; first and third Mondays, 7 to 8:30 p.m.; second and fourth Tuesdays, 7 to 8:30 p.m. (714) 432-5039.