NEON PARK L.A. Magazine September 1980

From "Los Angeles Magazine" (September 1980) article by Susan Squire called "Why Did the Palette Cross the Road?":

THE PSYCHOPOPPER

Neon (ne Martin) Park lives in a small house at "the end of the world" in Tujunga with a couple of cats and an experimental feminist filmmaker, Chick Strand. Here, in his attic studio, he is madly trying to finish a year's worth of magazine covers for a Japanese media magazine that's a cross between *Rolling Stone* and *TV Guide*"; the animation for an Edison solar power commercial and a wonderfully witty but demanding collection of 12 paintings of erotic ducks, each pose borrowed from a cache of '40s calendar-girl pinups he came upon by chance.

In between these major projects are paintings for album covers, commercial-packaging ventures, posters and mail-order jobs for various clients. He modestly labels his style "psychopop."

"Basically," he says, "I'm a designer who works on different projects. If I had my druthers, I'd just paint, but money in the mailbox is the best thing in the whole world."

He grew up in Berkeley, where he was "too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie", even though he read *On The Road* 13 times; eventually he found himself dead-ended in Mendocino, where he supported himself with "obscure jobs" and drew and painted on the side.

He landed a job doing dance posters for the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco in the late '60s, earning the name Neon because of his penchant for electric colors. Eventually he did the same in L.A. at the beginning of the 70's for the Pinnacle, a production company formed by "a bunch of surfer entrepreneurs" who put on dances and light shows, which led to commercial graphic-design projects for ad agencies and finally to a series of posters for Genesis Films.

[Cosmos Topper Note: Pinnacle started its concerts at the Shrine Auditorium in L.A. in November 1967. Neon Park did a poster for them for The Paul Butterfield Blues Band concert of July 1968, so the 70s Pinnacle reference is an error, as they went bankrupt by end of the 60's.]

One of Park's San Francisco projects caught the attention of Frank Zappa, and his album cover for Zappa's Mothers of Invention's *Weasels Ripped My Flesh* in 1970, now a classic, was highly controversial at the time. "The printer said it was the most degenerate thing he'd ever seen, but now no one would even notice," Neon says.

The late composer-guitarist Lowell George, then working for Zappa and later to produce Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and the Grateful Dead, enlisted Neon to do a series of album covers for the group Little Feat, of which George was the driving force.

Park's feel for cartoon humor, for preposterously vivid colors, for bizarre combinations of elements that, in a kind of alchemy, come to interact in a powerful but slightly silly way, and for the follies and fantasies of Hollywood (a series of "Hollywood ducks," from Bogart to Monroe to Jayne Mansfield, presage the current "pinups") has caused at least one art critic to call him "one of the more inspiring graphic artists in America."

Who else would come up with a painting that had George Washington and Marilyn Monroe huddled together like sweethearts on the front seat of a car on a narrow mountain road during a lightning storm, and somehow make it seem that they belonged together? "It's, uh, very *picante* - as opposed to piquant - and, I suppose, a bit silly," Park twinkles.

HotLink: Ted Alvy COSMOS TOPPER Home Page