New Romantic Thomas Woodruff fits right in

THOMAS WOODRUFF’S “FREAK PARADE”

If you’re a Southern Californian of a certain age, and you’ve never owned a Taurus, you’ve probably been glared at by Exene Cervenka or shared a beer at least once with John Doe. The LA creative class marinates itself in a whole X ethos: even if you don’t sport a Bettie Page haircut or a single tattoo, you’re friends with all the roller derby girls, and they do. You’ve got an arsenal of tiki mugs and a bright-painted living room instead of your neighbors’ two tones of taupe. And if you’re in the galleries at all, you’re not there for Kinkadian hearthlight, but for the heartwarming glow cast by Goth-creepy consumptive girls and fantasy hearses, painters working from the territory first wept upon by the Keanes’ big-eyed waifs. It’s cheery death, lyrical death, Percy Bysshe Shelley met with Jessica Rabbit in a blender (no, actually in a blender; burlesque and blended-bunny death are still totally all the rage), and it probably once adorned the collection of the legendary Long Gone John. X made punk rock pretty, gave it harmonies even, and the painters took up their brushes and followed along.

But did you know on the East Coast they’ve never even heard “Los Angeles” or “White Girl”?

So how does New York City’s Thomas Woodruff fit in here so well? Shouldn’t his paintings be based instead upon the short-hard-brutish ethos of (Thomas Hobbes via) the Ramones?

I first saw Woodruff’s work more than a decade ago, at the Huntington Beach Art Center, back when the center (under Naida Osline and Tyler Stallings) was getting national recognition for its daring and magnificent shows.

The exhibit, “Nosegays and Knuckle Sandwiches,” its fanatical painterliness and its embrace of feminine beauty were astounding in an age when Cal Arts grads couldn’t paint a hand puppet on a paper bag. The subject matter was a slosh of New Romantic and neo-Victorian, gavotting with the Reaper in the age of AIDS—beautiful damsels, frolicking mice, roses with a touch of rot—and it was as fresh and breezy to me as the effects promised by Massengill. I hadn’t seen Mark Ryden or Camille Rose Garcia doing beautiful death. I hadn’t seen Daniel Duplessis reveling in delicate hummingbirds and gilded morning glories without any apology. All I had done to that point (the mid-’90s) was suffer through manly gray planes of Ab-Ex crap.

Christopher Scoates, the director of Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum, created that show (with his wife at the time, Debra Wilbur), and he’s brought Woodruff to the UAM for more.

“Freak Parade,” the new exhibit, begins where “Nosegays” left off: it keeps the Victorian and the pretty, Bedazzles it with gossamer spider webs encrusted in gems, and then hammers us on the head (or hammers spikes through our noses) with its Jim Rose Circus Sideshow-style freaks. There’s no touch of rot in the roses, no subtle worm-in-one-apple hidden amid dozens of shiny ones. It’s swan-necked bunnies and ventricles for hair and two-headed beasties grafted by Dr. Moreau. It’s a red-maned, mustached merman in a wheelchair (not Bathhouse Bette but Jo Jo Mirando Neptuna), his “tail” pockmarked and pustulent, and neck-ringed monkeys like the women of the Padaung. It’s a man made out of lettuces with flowers for his feet. And it’s gilded and bejeweled and doesn’t swan around the moors mooning after death: it puts on a turban and dolls itself up and snickers in the face of it instead.

THOMAS WOODRUFF’S “FREAK PARADE” CAL STATE LONG BEACH UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM | 1250 BELLFLOWER BLVD | LONG BEACH 90840 | 562.985.5761 | CSULB.EDU/UAM | OPEN TUES-SUN NOON-5PM AND THURS NOON-8PM | OPENS THURS WITH A RECEPTION AND BOOK SIGNING, 6-8PM | THROUGH OCT 14

Tags: cal state long beach, freak parade, thomas woodruff, university art museum