Tears of a Sly, Artful Clown

Tears of a Sly, Artful Clown

A Celebration of the Late, Great, Dark Wit of Artist Keith Puccinelli in Bold UC Santa Barbara Exhibition

By Josef Woodard
Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
September 5, 2024

Plunging headlong into the special artistic world of the late, great, and darkly witty artist Keith Puccinelli, UCSB’s Art Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum’s new exhibition, POOCH: The Art Full Life of Keith Julius Puccinelli, feels like an ideal opening salvo of the season, showcasing the prolific artist’s not-always-delicate balance of cartoonish fine art, satirical observations of a fragile world, the life of a clown (often with self-portraiture in clown regalia), and his own impending mortality.

The show is a grandly comical and yet complex pageant and portrait of the artist, who died of cancer in 2017 and left some 600 works to the Museum. Finally, it’s showtime for the “Pooch” (the artist’s nickname) collection.

Fittingly, given Puccinelli’s obsession with clown leitmotifs, for the festive opening on Saturday, September 7, visitors are encouraged to wear polka dots, and clown noses will be distributed, “while supplies last,” says curator Meg Linton.

As Puccinelli told me in an interview in 2011 before a major solo show at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery, some of the darker, edgier pieces he was working on would “balance out some of the pieces that are a little more warm and fuzzy. I have that side to me, too, or maybe more humorous. But, for me, I don’t want to just be a ‘haha funny’ guy. I want to be ‘haha funny,’ but not only ‘haha funny.’ ”

The serio-comic exhibition at UCSB also touches on facets beyond the artist in the spotlight. For one, the show naturally delves into a strong symbiotic relationship with Puccinelli’s wife, Fran Garvin Puccinelli — a folk art collector, scholar, and gallerist — and the couple’s generous support of a community of significant Santa Barbara artists. One gallery is devoted to work by artists from Puccinelli’s vast collection, a rare sampling of art from the 805 on display in this museum’s history.

The museum’s entrance door is flanked by a cleverly stylish exhibition logo by Puccinelli’s close friend and influencer Tom Stanley, and a radically enlarged reproduction of the artist’s originally compact “3 Men with Tongues.”

Art and design were key facets and driving forces in Puccinelli’s life and work, well represented in this show. His Puccinelli Design practice won awards and left his signature visual imprint all around the region to this day. But Puccinelli’s growing urge to pivot from graphic design into fine art led him away from commercial work, a decision that crystallized when he was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. At that point on, for 20 hyper-productive years, Puccinelli built up a huge body of work, shown at the Ben Maltz Gallery at the Otis College of Art and Design in
Los Angeles, various Santa Barbara showings at the Contemporary Arts Forum (now MCASB), the Jane Deering Gallery, the Tug show at the Westmont Museum of Art, a collaboration with friend and artist ally Dane Goodman, and elsewhere.

As fate would have it, Puccinelli’s largest show to date is the posthumous POOCH exhibition at UCSB. The show had been scheduled earlier, but COVID restrictions got in the way until now.

Linton was ideally suited to the task of burrowing into the vast 600-piece collection and creating a cogent narrative of a few more than 200 pieces. The Los Angeles area–based curator was director of the Contemporary Arts Forum from 1999 to 2003 and curated Puccinelli’s Otis show, The Wondercommon. She was also close to the Puccinellis and was with both of them when they died. Linton co-curated the show Puccinality at UCSB’s College of Creative Studies Gallery as a kind of memorial after Fran’s passing in 2016. Keith died just months later.

Creating some semblance of order from the massive blur of the collection without losing a certain mad fervor relevant to Puccinelli’s artistic voice, Linton has organized the show into coherent sections. “I decided that the biggest priority would be to kind of try and create the beginnings of us telling the story of Keith and his different aspects working in a design world and the fine art world, and then trying to show as much of the work in the collection as possible,” said Linton. “I divided the show into different kinds of themes.”

The art ranges from a wealth of sketchbooks from over the years to images of clown-related art, a room showcasing his graphic design work — for the Avocado Festival, Summer Solstice, AIDS Walk, UCSB, SBCC, and elsewhere — alongside funny funk sculptures, art about “The Everyday” and a “final” mortality-based room with one of the most startling pieces in the building, the large multi-paneled image of a deceased clown, titled “Yet Another Dead Motherfucker.”

Then there is the “smoking section” of pieces based on Puccinelli’s long love of smoking — matchsticks, ashtrays, cigarettes, and “twigarettes” from various media. “Keith made work about smoking from early on, college days and probably even in high school,” says Linton. “I found some notes in his ’81 and ’82 sketchbooks that said, ‘I really need to quit smoking. I’m gonna get cancer.’ He was always worried about getting cancer, and then, of course, in 1997 he got diagnosed with cancer.”

From another corner of the artist’s iconography, he took aim at the sinister nature of guns. “He did a bunch of work on gun violence,” Linton said. “Keith was a pacifist. While his draft number never got called, according to his sister, he had plans to be a conscientious objector or flee. He wasn’t going to serve.”

Museum Director Gabriel Ritter walked me through the show, still in its final stages of installation, and he mentioned that this is a rare and welcome occasion when this museum gives major attention to an artist with a strong Santa Barbara connection — along with the roomful of regional art.

We walk into the entrance and are immediately greeted by a gust of Puccinellian wit, via the artist’s winking, Ed Ruscha–esque piece “Exit Stencilist.” As Linton explained, the piece was strategically placed at the exit of the Otis show, where “you’d be able to see this on your way out of the museum, but also Keith was a great existentialist.”

Various artists left a discernible imprint on Puccinelli’s work, without his work betraying a strong self-identity. Among his primary influences were politically charged satirist Robbie Conal, transcendent “everyday” transformers Claes Oldenburg and Wayne Thiebaud, and Philip Guston, whose bulbous and cartoonish characters wallowing in alienation have a kinship with Puccinelli’s motley cast of subjects.

On one museum wall, a parallel is directly made between the artists with an actual Guston piece and similar Puccinelli pieces. As Ritter notes of the set, “They could not be more at home.”

“Guston was mentioned throughout all of his sketchbooks. I know he saw the big Guston show in San Francisco in the early ’80s because he references it, so I thought it’d be really nice to put him into context of demonstrating how this isn’t just goofy caricature. There’s a tradition of using caricature to really convey complex meaning,” said Linton.

In the context of this show and this artist, the decision to devote an entire gallery to fellow artists couldn’t be more illustrative of the subject and his spirit of generosity and communal engagement.

Linton recalls, “When I did the Otis Wondercommon show in 2008, I overheard Keith talking to a couple students that were giving them a hard time — this was after his lecture after the two specific installations where you went to a property and had the whole experience. And they were saying, ‘That’s pretty exclusive, if you can only do that for 200 people. How do you negotiate that?’

“And Keith just said, ‘How many people have to see your art for it to be art? I make artwork for my friends.’ He made it for himself, as well as in communication with his community. He and Fran collected a lot of Santa Barbara artists.”

Among the artists represented in this art salon are such important figures on the scene as Richard Ross, Jeff Brouws, Bob DeBris, Julia Ford, Penelope Gottlieb, Colin Gray, Patricia Hedrick, Mary Heebner, Barbara Parmet, Virginia McCracken, Harry and Sandra Reese, Tom Stanley, Lily Guild, Ginny Brush, Joan Tanner, and Ann Diener, among others — and a Howard Finster for good folk-art-hero measure.

Given that POOCH accounts for roughly a third of the estate’s gift to the museum, it’s safe to assume there will be sequels to come. The first foray into making the work public succeeds in offering an illuminating overview of a remarkable artist’s oeuvre and unique perspective.

Other curators will necessarily bring their own more objective takes to the task. But for this particularly personal curatorial effort, Linton said, “It’s been really hard. I was cataloging the collection, and I helped both of them pass away. And I was there in the thick of all of this turmoil. So, I’ve gone through the work. Quite a few times, I wondered, ‘When is it too personal? What is going to serve Keith and the collection best?’

“My take is getting the work that hasn’t been shown. There’s still more work to do, but that’ll be for other people. This will hopefully lay a nice foundation for other projects to happen in the future, and for students to do research.”

More broadly, she says, “What I’m hoping will resonate is just kind of how as an artist you have resonance in your community and how you build community and that you can bring a richness in a different perspective and open people’s eyes to other ways of seeing things. And Keith and Fran are one of those couples. They had a huge ripple effect.”

A Few Words from the Man-Clown-Artist Himself

Back in 2011, I visited Puccinelli at his rambling 10-acre home, a dome house on a hill on the rural stretch between Carpinteria and Ojai, complemented by an orchard, outbuildings, and a sculpture studio. The house itself was densely packed with all manner of art, folk and otherwise, befitting their art-drenched self-made lifestyle.

Puccinelli was culling work and concepts for the Goodman-curated exhibition at SBCC’s Atkinson Gallery, sweet cream sour fool.

A seemingly elegant door to his studio in the house, fastidiously made from matchsticks (part of the UCSB show) was, he explained, “patterned after a folk-art Americana tradition. They called it ‘prisoner art.’ Prisoners would use wooden matches, back in the days when they could get wooden matches, and they would craft little boxes and frames, and give them to their wives or girlfriends. [Fran and I would] come across these at flea markets, and we’d buy them. It was a genre that we knew about.”

Asked where did clowns enter his life and art, he answered, “Pretty arbitrarily, I think. I like, sometimes, that your first reaction might be, ‘Oh, a clown, funny, haha.’ But your secondary reaction might be that it’s not such a great position. A cigar blew up in his face. It’s not so great after all,” said Puccinelli. “I kind of use it as a tool to bring out my darker side, my more pessimistic side. In some ways, I’m really pessimistic and disappointed with the state of the world and whatnot. On the other hand, I’m really optimistic. I don’t know what that is, but I have both in me.

“I started doing [clowns] around ’99.” [Points to an early drawing of a clown in a boat.] “My name is Puccinelli, like Punchinello, a figure and puppet from the commedia dell’arte, which became Punch, as in Punch and Judy. This figure has been around a lot in various cultures. I decided I would just sort of act upon my name.”

And act he did, creating a vast body of clown-themed art, often with himself as model. At that juncture, he was heading down another clown-y rabbit hole of research. “Sometimes I look for images for reference that I might use in my drawings,” he said. “I’m doing this Pulcinella guy. Philip Kaufman loaned me this book on Tiepolo’s Pulcinella. I’m working on a self-portrait, a tall piece like this.” [Shows me a small model of the ultimate work.]

“A lot of people know of my drawings, and they think of me in that context. But other people know me for installations or mixed media. I always drew stuff when I was a kid. Maybe not very well, but like any kids, it was the hot rods and airplanes and whatever. I decided to teach myself to draw like this. It is very labor-intensive. I kind of wanted it to be hard and laborious, and not easy.

“I’m lazy. I’d rather do something easy. But I think I need to work harder sometimes. So, to do this more intensive type of work is a good challenge for me.”

He started his own business by default. Puccinelli studied sculpture at San Jose State University before heading to Santa Barbara and working, in non-art fashion, for the Enterprise Fish Company. Later, that restaurant became one of many clients for Puccinelli Design, opened in 1983. “I met Fran, and we got married in ’84. I built my business, and it became very successful, in design, illustration, advertising, copywriting. It was kind of a one-stop shop. In ’95, I said, ‘You know, everything is good, but I wonder if there’s something next. What’s next?’ I thought I would rumble around with that in my mind for about a year and figure out what’s next.

“Well, within six months, I had closed up my business, got rid of my employees, and became a part-time business at home, like the way I started it. And I started doing more of my fine art — well, it’s not fine, but I call it fine. That sort of evolved into no design and all fine art. I just decided to see what else life was about, as I became a little bit older. I thought, ‘This is great, but maybe I want to do things differently. Maybe I want to make it bigger, or maybe I don’t want to do it anymore.’ ”

Fran clarified, “Then, after you got sick, when you got the cancer, then it was like, ‘Okay, the time is now.’ ”

Creating his own distinctive voice and artistic bearing began early in his “second career,” although he could be self-effacing about who he was as an artist. “So many diverse artists have influenced me,” he said. “I’m probably not playing the game right, because I need to be more pegged in, and I’m not that pegged in.”

“You’re playing the game, babe. Don’t worry. You play your own game. I say you’ve got the Puccinelli style,” said Fran. “It’s hard to explain it, and he’s all over the place. One week, he’s doing something, and the next week, it’s something else.”

Overlooking the view of wildlife on his property and other rustic pleasures, Puccinelli philosophized about the fragility and sacredness of life — which, in his case, would end six years later. 

“These are our golden years,” he said. “We’re trying to have fun while we’re on the right side of the grass. Seems kind of decadent, contrary to the way I was raised, but oh well. It’s just giving yourself permission to enjoy things.”

That spirit and “Puccinelli style” is amply present in the AD&A Museum at the moment.

The opening reception for POOCH: The Art Full Life of Keith Julius Puccinelli is Saturday, September 7, 4-6 p.m. at the UCSB’s Art Design & Architecture Museum. The exhibition will remain on view through December 15. The museum is free to the public; gallery hours are Wednesday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m. See museum.ucsb.edu.