![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There is a famous picture of Von Dutch in his heyday, with a spiked crew cut and glaring eyes, looking like a tougher, even paranoid, version of heartthrob Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys (the band whose songs glorified, in addition to surfing, the California car culture). He is credited with first painting vivid red and yellow flames on the nose of customized hot rods. The final products were often featured in car magazines, and many of his innovations became almost commonplace. He painstakingly applied intricate pin-stripe designs and wildly colorful graphics to expensive custom cars, working largely alone in his garage. While Roth became the idol of most every kid who built plastic model cars in the 1950s and '60s - his designs were widely marketed by Revell - Von Dutch did individual work for well-heeled customers. Von Dutch, whose real name was Kenneth Robert Howard and who died in obscurity in 1992 of liver disease, at age 63, is less well-known than Roth because he shunned publicity and refused to have his designs commercialized. While Roth, now 62 and retired, is the most famous of the genre, the late Von Dutch is the grand master of the form, the one Roth and the rest were inspired by from the early 1950s to the present. The show includes about 200 artworks by 43 artists and customizers. The exhibit features not only their enduring creations - Von Dutch's most famous image is the flying eyeball - but also works of their artistic progeny, including Robert Williams, best known for his rabidly sexual Coochy Cooty character in Zap Comix, as well as the controversial post-rape scene on the cover of the first Guns N' Roses album, later withdrawn by the band's record company. Now Roth and his fellow hot-rod master artist and customizer Von Dutch are the subject of a major art exhibit called "Kustom Kulture," opening tonight and continuing through June 4 at the Center on Contemporary Art (COCA), 1309 First Ave. Roth was legitimized outside the grease-monkey world when he became the central character in Tom Wolfe's landmark 1965 work of gonzo journalism, "The Kandy Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby." Rat Fink, as every male baby-boomer must know, was the signature character of the legendary Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, the brilliant illustrator and car customizer whose radical, outrageous Rat Fink designs were featured in ads for decals, T-shirts and other auto-related ephemera in the back pages of Hot Rodder, Rod and Custom, Car Craft and other hot-rod magazines. AROUND OUR WEST SEATTLE neighborhood in the 1950s that was the ultimate hip put-down, an acknowledgement among those of us still too young to drive that we were aware of the hot-rod culture of the older guys we idolized. ![]()
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