Pop … with a twist

The cardboard boxes and metal slabs on display in the current exhibit at the Luckman Gallery at Cal State LA look so real, some visitors will leave there never knowing the truth.

They aren't real. Artist Daniel Douke created them entirely from canvas and paint.

“Daniel Douke: Endless Instant,” the first comprehensive survey of the Pasadena artist's career, presents 40 works that turn reality — not to mention conceptual art — upside down. Along with his cardboard box and steel paintings from the 1980s are his photorealist paintings from the early '70s, cigar box and computer box paintings from the '90s and recent rose and pastry paintings.

With Douke's work, the everyday, practically invisible object becomes the ultimate artistic creation after months of painstaking labor. That makes the exhibit a mind-blowing experience and puts his art in definite contrast with the work of artists like Marcel Duchamp who created “readymades” from found objects like “Bicycle Wheel” (1913), a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool.

“I'm making stuff that looks like the found object, except it's a handmade object. So, I turn Marcel Duchamp inside out, or at least that's what I would like to think,” Douke said from the comfort of a red leather chair in the Castle Green apartment/studio he shares with wife Nadine. On the walls around the sitting room were one of his metal paintings, a luscious chocolate cake painting and a plate by Roy Lichtenstein, the famous Pop artist whose work played a key role in Douke's life.

Douke was raised in Highland Park and spent a lot of time in Pasadena. After a brief stint as a guitarist in a surf band called the Sessions, Douke eventually ended up at Pasadena City College in the mid-'60s. When he visited the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon) and saw works by Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, his course in life was set.

“It was at that instant that I had an epiphany,” Douke said. “It was like there were bolts of electricity arching from the works into my chest. From that instant on, I was a total converted artist, and that's all I wanted to focus on. I still have not lost that to this day — 41 years later or 42; I still have the same charge that I felt at that moment.”

He went on to earn a bachelor's and a master's degree at Cal State LA, and taught there from 1975 to 2002. Between those years, he forged a career out of crafting reality. He humbly says, “I'm just a guy who makes things with his hands.”

But he plays with “the idea of truth and reality, and what you believe to be true based on your own vision … is not necessarily true.” In that respect, “Endless Instant” is perfectly timed to coincide with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's exhibit, “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images,” named after Rene Magritte's famous painting of a pipe that says “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe.). If Douke were Magritte, he might have written “This is not a box” (or a photo or a sheet of metal) on one of his paintings.

Two large photorealist paintings of swimming pools in this exhibit are representative of Douke's first gallery show in New York City in 1975. Their size alone (7 feet by 5 feet) draws you to them, and the more-real-than-real quality of the light's play on the water's gentle ripples absolutely mesmerizes. Douke made about half a dozen of these paintings capturing the suburban California backyard, spending at least three or four months on each one. “Untitled (Erehwon Garden),” featuring a red bridge over a pool, took him a year to complete.

Having said all that he had to say with those paintings, and in order to distance himself from the numerous other photorealist painters at the time, Douke started to look around for other inspiration. He accessed his studio in Long Beach via an alley strewn with cardboard boxes from nearby businesses: a pizza restaurant, women's clothing shop and electronics store. It occurred to him to use that debris as his next subject.

“I thought I should take something that's overlooked, that nobody cares about. I called it an ‘icon of expendability,'” he said.

Douke took his time experimenting, like “Mr. Wizard in his laboratory,” until he discovered exactly how cardboard boxes would work as a subject. “One of my instructors told me once, ‘If it looks like art, you can be sure of one thing: You're not making art.' Because all you're doing is recreating something that you've seen before as art. That always stuck in my head. I couldn't come up with anything original, so I said, ‘Well, I can make something that looks like something else then.' So my paintings looked like they didn't look like art. That was the evolution.”

When his box paintings debuted in a New York gallery in 1979, the illusion worked too well. Someone who thought they were real boxes being passed off as art scrawled the word “shit” on one of them. The show sold out, and Douke repaired the vandalized box for a collector.

That wasn't the only time his trompe l'oeil art upset someone. In the early '80s at the Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech in a show called “Anti-Static,” students were outraged to see cardboard boxes being delivered to the gallery and overnight blocked the entrance to the gallery with boxes they took from campus dumpsters in protest of what they saw as ridiculous conceptual art.

“I felt honored. The truth and reality thing was really working,” Douke recalled.

Once you know that every detail of the boxes — corrugation, labels, UPC codes, tape, dirt, scuff marks — has been meticulously recreated by hand with an artist's tools of acrylic, gesso and canvas, you can't help but be amazed and start scrutinizing them for clues to their fabrication. There aren't many: perhaps a brushstroke of ink that strays outside the lines of a letter. Because the artist has spent an extraordinary amount of time recreating something you ordinarily wouldn't look twice at, something you would cut open for the contents and then dispose of, the exhibit begs you to examine these objects with an enthusiasm you probably don't even spend on paintings hanging on the walls of our finest museums.

“A lot of contemporary art is so off-putting to the general public. They won't even spend a moment with a pile of shredded felt on the floor, or something like that — I won't name names,” Douke explained. “But I was interested in something that was user-friendly and you didn't have to have an MFA or PhD to understand it. And I've always been interested in the viewer going away with a heightened and broadened sense of perception of things that makes you look a little closer, that makes you understand what you're looking at rather than just glossing over.”

Forty-five boxes later, Douke switched to a much heavier subject, metal, inspired by the metal strappings he created for some of the box paintings. He effectively changed his entire technique and created 270 metal paintings. Whereas Richard Serra is known for his monumental metal-slab sculptures, Douke merely imitated reality again by painting metallic color and texture, along with rust, welded seams and graffiti.

Eventually, he turned to other kinds of boxes: cigar boxes in the mid-'90s and computer boxes in the late-'90s. The simple advice from his New York art dealer to “Paint what you love, baby” led to the oversize cigar boxes. Unlike Warhol's soup cans, these boxes are also outside of the advertising realm: Pop with a twist.

Douke's computer, printer and software boxes stemmed from his interest in “Western society's utopian dream of liberation through the computer.” The boxes of iMac, Adobe and other brands again look exactly like the real thing, but Douke adds Japanese anime characters to many of them.

Proving that he is indeed inspired by the world around him, Douke then turned his eye for detail to roses from his wife's garden. At first he protested, “Flowers aren't for me. That's way too wussy.” Then he took the challenge “to make a serious, unsentimental flower painting” without the schmaltz and romanticism he feared the subject lent itself to. Pastries from Viktor Bene's Bakery at the Pasadena Gelson's Market led to his next subject, a close-up, larger than life look at the sugary confections with glistening icing.

Now, he's working on the reproduction of industrial materials, like insulation. But he always returns to boxes. Douke, who completes about 13 paintings a year, obviously has great patience and an admitted dose of OCD.

“I'm obsessive-compulsive about the work and probably almost everything in my life — and that's not a good thing. I tell my other artist friends that we're all obsessive-compulsives. Thank goodness we have this to work on; otherwise we'd be busy picking lint off each other.”

Though it hasn't gotten in the way of his productiveness, he's well aware of the possible external perceptions of his meticulous work.

“I could spend all day painting six words with a stencil and then going back and correcting them. And then in the evening, if we're out to dinner with friends who function in the real world, you know, they say, ‘How did you spend your day today?' and I say, ‘Well, I painted six words.' You know, it sounds so crazy ...

“[But] you know what? Payday is always at the end of the day for me, when I look over my shoulder and say, ‘I did that. I made that today.' It's the daily activity of it all,” he said.

“It takes such focus that it's like doing a Zen chant, finding your mantra and repeating it so that you can focus, and everything else falls away from your consciousness and you're what I call ‘in the zone,' so you're not worried with your worries anymore. It's just, ‘How can I make this painting good?'”