Frank Gehry the painter?
Frank Gehry always dreamed of being a painter.
"In the mid-1960s, Gehry played a unique role in the L.A. art scene that centered around the Ferus Gallery and included such artists as Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Moses. While he quickly became one of what the artist Tony Berlant would call “the band of brothers,” Gehry was always a bit different: there was nothing about Gehry that was blasé or cool. He was eager to learn. At the beginning, it was enough to make Bengston, one of the de facto leaders of the group, ask Moses, “Who is this little putz you keep bringing around?” “I said, ‘This is Frank Gehry—he’s a friend of mine, an architect who is very interested in painting,’” Moses said. “It was very unusual for an architect—most of them never got out of their own territory.” “He was like, ‘Gee whiz,’” said Ruscha, who described Gehry as “the least bombastic person I’ve ever known.” To the artists, he seemed to be always around, listening with a careful ear, looking at everything everyone else was doing. “Frank had an insatiable appetite,” Moses said. Gehry was comfortable with the artists in a way that he would never be with most architects. “There was a powerful, powerful energy I was getting from this scene that I wasn’t getting from the architecture world,” Gehry has said. “What attracted me to them is that they worked intuitively. They would do what they wanted and take the consequences”—something that most architects, in Frank’s experience, were less and less willing to do. “Their work was more direct and in such contrast to what I was doing in architecture, which was so rigid,” Gehry said. “You have to deal with safety issues—fireproofing, sprinklers, handrails for stairways, things like that. You go through training that teaches you to do things in a very careful way, following codes and budgets. But those constraints didn’t speak to aesthetics.” Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair (Sept 15, 2015)
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