1963–
Want to have a little fun with culture? Party hearty with Michael Godard, known far and wide as the “Rock Star of the Art World.” In fact, among his many celebrity collectors are actual rock stars such as Ozzy Osbourne, he happens to be a drummer who’s played many a gig in Las Vegas, his hometown. Godard knows his audience so well that his intensely popular paintings seem like personal letters about the pleasures of life addressed to the fortunate collector who looks at them each day on the wall at home and is reminded of a casual chat and photo op after a VIP auction onboard a cruise ship or a gallery opening. They are postcards from a glamorous life: Vegas, Baby!
Godard rose to fame as the painter of life’s many pleasures. For those who love a generous tipple, and savor not just the buzz and the bouquet but also the visual pleasures of wine or cocktails, Godard is the man. He serves up naughty odes to the martini or luminous images of the zinfandel rising like a water nymph from the glass to confront the spirit of the chardonnay in her cool veils of pale gold. It’s no wonder that among the many places you see these paintings, including hotels and nightspots, they adorn the officers’ lounge at the Pentagon and have been at sea with the Navy.
READ MORE +As with adult beverages, Godard taps into the way music and art have enjoyed a long friendship with benefits. Jazz and rock dominate this duet. He follows in a great tradition. Since the 60s, album covers and posters have play a huge role in the visual response to this music, as the long legacy of Peter Max attests as well as the psychedelic posters of Wes Wilson and Stanley Mouse. Harmonizing perfectly with this chorus, Godard offers charming accompaniments to jazz, especially his Keys of Grey, Key of G and Keys to Wine which, like the music itself takes a good key (G will do, as will red) and harmonizes on it, layering burgundy and cardinal, scarlet and an almost black red, playing the scales on a hue. The closest match to Godard’s own boisterous personality, and life story, is the raucous Party Like a Rock Star, an action painting that blasts the onstage action using the members of a band, the feral drummer (a cross between Peter Criss of Kiss and Animal from the Muppets), the brooding genius of the lead singer on his knees, the too-cool-for-school bass player turning his back, the ambitious guitarist challenging for the spotlight, all with pyrotechnics sprouting from their heads, the blur of the drumsticks resounding through multiple strokes, all the over-the-top histrionics of a stadium rock act are encapsulated in this one canvas. It is no coincidence that until his 30s Godard was a professional drummer for many bands in Vegas, where rock concerts are lavish stage acts.
Born and raised in Pasadena, Godard discovered early that his gifts with doodling could win friends so he enrolled at the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and then studied studio art at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Before he committed to being a full-time painter, he had a few other jobs that have fueled his thinking and techniques, including roles as a mechanical engineer, commercial illustrator and caricaturist. The deft way he paints the rim of a martini glass or a guitar is a credit to this training.
What’s so funny about art? Dominated by tragic biographies (Van Gogh is the most famous), art history leans heavily to the serious side, but there are notable ancestors to Godard’s irreverent paintings. Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, and such classical predecessors as Goya, Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch are all laugh-out-loud hysterical at moments in much the same way that Godard can make a goofy visual pun or slapstick scene.
Every painting might not be for every person, but everyone, I think, loves to have a laugh.
Michael Godard
Laughter is a great equalizer. Like a cold beer or dirty martini, Godard’s paintings offer the pause that refreshes. The spherical little characters, those olives and grapes and strawberries that he drops into so many of these potent visual cocktails, scramble across tabletops, dive into wine goblets and play electric guitars in an antic send-up of the conventional art scene. They are uniquely of course, Godard’s own fertile imagination, his signature personages (legend has it that he did the first of his signature olives when a friend asked for a birthday painting celebrating the dirty martini) but they have their ancestors. Fans of animation will no doubt have their points of comparison for these round little rascals, but their helter-skelter energy also recalls one of the oddball geniuses of the Middle Ages, the diabolically inventive and talented (talk about brush precision) of Bosch. Both Godard and Bosch go all out for the slapstick and it would be a blast to hang the Seven Deadly Sins, one of Bosch’s most bizarre creations with Godard’s tongue-in-cheek Seven Deadly Zins in all their Rat Pack suavity.
Godard doesn’t flinch at making fun of art. It takes chutzpah to be a satirist, and he offers quite a dose of it, taking a run at the biggest stars in the sport. No less than Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, featuring the iconic gap between the outstretched hands of Adam and God, is re-imagined as a fist bump between two dudes built like the linemen for the Vegas Raiders (for whom Godard is the official artist). A parody of Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, one of the most famous interiors in the art history textbooks, comes off like the Star-Spangled Banner on Jimi Hendrix’s white Fender Stratocaster, recognizable and dismantled at the same time.
For all the laughs, there is a serious humanitarian side to Godard’s life and work. His dedication to those who serve the United States in the military is famous not just among vets but those who support them. Since 2006, when he lost his daughter at the age of 16 to brain cancer, he has devoted his time and work to supporting St. Jude’s, Make a Wish, Nevada Cancer Institute and The Sharon Osbourne Colon Cancer Foundation. “The funds I help raise save lives – it’s the most important thing I do. All the money in the world cannot bring her back, but the funds I help raise for a cure will help save another child,” he declares.
Whether wine or music, jokes or parodies, Godard has his finger on the very pulse of pleasure. These paintings offer a welcome reminder that art is a source of sensual delight, a stimulus to set our toes tapping, our heads spinning and a smile spreading across our faces.
“Love Blossoms” (2016)
There is a touch of realism in everything Godard does. He reveals that his silly characters are modeled on friends or art lovers he’s met at auctions and on cruises. If you look closely at the details, you can spot the hidden names, dates, or initials hidden throughout Godard’s work, often in the reflections on a wine glass or dropped into the background.
Vegas is everywhere in these compositions, such as the characters enjoying a beer-soaked round of golf, a nod to Godard’s time out on the local links, or the casino scenes that also invoke his love of math. “I’m fascinated by the statistics and the math behind gambling,” Godard says. “I’m a math geek.” That mathematical passion and his work as an engineer is an interesting background to his paintings, and especially the way he uses color. Godard knows well that the physics of color and sound are directly linked. They rely on vibrations whose wavelengths obey mathematical principles, another of his passions. This is the rational side of the great music-art relationship. The more potent aspect is the straight shot from a musical chord or a bold color to the emotions, because that vibration behind the cause and effect of art or music and our response is psychological. Godard plays the palette like a Gibson, teasing crazy dissonances such as green and red but also building satisfying harmonies of silver, black and white along the keyboard or those luscious reds in all their shades seen in the cocktail series.
“Ride Em Cowboy” (2017)
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