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Clip & save art notes. ABOUT THE ARTIST As a little boy growing up in California's San FernandoValley San Fernando ValleyValley, southern California, U.S. Northwest of central Los Angeles, the valley is bounded by the San Gabriel, Santa Susana, and Santa Monica mountains and the Simi Hills. , Kenny Scharf was fascinated by television. The purchase of thefamily's first color set was instrumental in forming Scharf'sartistic sensibilities. "I like bright colors, the brighter thebetter. When I was 7, I think, we got our first color television set,and I used to sit real close, and I would see these intense colors, likedots. That's what kind of color I like." Born in 1958, Scharf exhibited talent for drawing at an early ageand attended art classes on Saturday morning at a local shop. In hismid-teens, the family relocated to Beverly Hills, and Scharf enrolled inBeverly Hills High School Beverly Hills High School (usually abbreviated as "Beverly" or as "BHHS") is the only major public high school in Beverly Hills, California. (The other public high school in Beverly Hills, Moreno High School, is a small alternative school located on Beverly's campus. . Scharf found his niche in the art department,where he had access to limitless art supplies. After high school, he completed two years at the University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara HistoryThe predecessor to UCSB, Santa Barbara State College, focused on teacher training, industrial arts, home economics, and foreign languages. Intense lobbying by an interest group in the City of Santa Barbara led by Thomas Storke and Pearl Chase persuaded the State , before following his instincts and moving toNew York City New York City:see New York, city. New York CityCity (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. . In 1978, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts The School of Visual Arts (SVA), is an art school in the New York City borough of Manhattan, and is one of the nation's leading independent colleges of art and design. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. , wherehe met fellow student, Keith Hating, who became one of his closestfriends. In a 1985 interview with Haring, Scharf recalled, "Iremember learning about Andy Warhol and that whole scene. And I said,like, wow ... and knew I wanted to go there." It didn't take long before Scharf was establishing himself asan artist to be noticed. His early work from this period incorporatesappropriated images from 1960s television cartoons, such as The Jetsonsand The Flintstones, set in space-aged, fantastical settings. An articlefrom the 2005 issue of Interview magazine described Scharf's earlypaintings that "depict an all-American cast of cartoon characters... launched into futuristic, unstable galaxies to consider theunderlying chaotic nature of our own society." He had his first New York show in 1979 at Fiorucci, a popularclothing store that catered to the punk/New Wave crowd. While Haring wasbecoming notorious as a graffiti artist, Scharf began creating his nowfamous "closets," environments painted in day-glo colors,decorated with cast-off objects, and bathed in black light. Scharf also focused much of his energies on performance art andalso on "customizing," turning factory-produced objects intoone-of-a-kind works of art. "I've always been into customizing... when I started customizing in the late '70s, I was like,'I'm not into the beige, olive-green world,' and Istarted customizing my radio, phone and blender. Why do we have to takewhat we're given?" (Whitewall White´wall`n. 1. (Zool.) The spotted flycatcher; - so called from the white color of the under parts. Magazine, Winter 2009.) From the cartoon images, Scharf's style changed into what heis most known for: smiling, biomorphic creatures in bizarre worlds ofsaturated color. "Scharf starts to evolve away from Hanna Barberaimagery toward his own biomorphic cartoon hybrids. Scharf's imageryarises from incredible occurrence of when The Flintstones representingthe past and The Jetsons representing the future collide in an imaginary'time-splat' resulting in infinite mutations." (Source:Artnet.com.) In December 1984, this month's Clip & Save Art Print, Dawnin Paradise (as well as a customized 1961 Cadillac called Suprema UltimaDeluxa), was exhibited at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. Withthe critical success of the Shafrazi exhibit, Kenny Scharf became anovernight "art star." In a New York Times article from thesame year, Scharf was referred to as a "Hieronymous Bosch of ourKool-Aid, sci-fi, space-age kulture," although he chose to describehimself as a "pop-surrealist." The following year, Scharf's painting, When Worlds Collide(1984), was chosen to be part of the Whitney Biennial, which furtherelevated his notoriety. This painting, "like all Scharf'spaintings, owes something to Surrealism. The dreamscape dream��scape?n.A dreamlike scene or picture having surreal qualities.[dream + (land)scape.] composition, thepictorial conundrums ... the biomorphism Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century.The term was first used in 1936, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Biomorphist art focuses on the power of natural life and uses organic shapes, with shapeless and vaguely spherical hints of the forms of biology. and hyperreal Hyperreal may refer to: Hyperreality, a term used in semiotics and postmodern philosophy Hyperrealism, a school of painting Hyperreal numbers, an extension of the real numbers in mathematics that are used in non-standard analysis rendering bringto mind Miro (in particular his paintings of the late '30s) andespecially Yves Tanguy. "But Scharf's paintings, for all their oneiricstrangeness, don't work on you the way Surrealist paintings do.There is none of the spooky dread. There is no sex or sexual terror.There is no suffering, no anxiety of any kind. Scharf's are not thedreams you wake sweating from or brood about. It is Surrealism withoutthe dark edge of night, Surrealism for the fun of it." (Artnews,September, 1985.) "Fun" is the word most used to describe Scharf'scartoon-inspired paintings, a word that the artist takes quiteseriously. "when people hear the word fun ... they think of'superficial' or 'frivolous.' But to me it'sour life force. It's about celebrating what we are here for, thegood things. That doesn't mean I don't think about the badthings. And there's a lot more to the work when you want to lookdeeper." (Loft, December, 2004.) The late 1980s and early '90s were sad times for the artist,seeing many of his friends, including Haring, die of AIDS. In 1992,Scharf moved his wife and two young daughters to Miami. In 2003, theScharf family moved to Los Angeles, where the artist set to work on anoriginal animated series for the Cartoon Network. He continues to liveand work in Southern California. ABOUT THE PAINTING This month's Clip & Save Art Print, Dawn in Paradise, is agreat example of the iconography of the pop-surrealist, Kenny Scharf.This super-saturated landscape of purple, yellow, pink, red and green,and others like it, made Scharf an overnight sensation in the New Yorkart world of the 1980s. The sun's rays rise above Smurf-shaped clouds; clouds thatcontain the signature Scharf smiling face. "I remember walkingaround and looking at things. I would make everything into a face. Likecar grills, they're all faces to me. A building with two windowsand a door. I still see faces everywhere I go." (Flashart, 1985.) In this dreamscape, the cloud face seems quite pleased with thescene below: a psychedelic Eden in which each element within it writhesand grows in harmony. It is a place "filled with spectacle andwhimsy whim��syalso whim��sey ?n. pl. whim��sies also whim��seys1. An odd or fanciful idea; a whim.2. A quaint or fanciful quality: stories full of whimsy. . A cosmic universe that draws from both our subconscious and frommass media--a place in which we can all relate." (ContentsMagazine, January, 2003.) To learn more about artist Kenny Scharf and to see more examples ofhis work, visit the following Web sites: * www.kennyscharf.com * www.paulkasmingallery.com/artists/kenny-scharf/ * To see a photograph of the artist at work:http://il.exhibit-e.com/paulkasmin/c3a66755.pdf.