• U.S.

Art: It’s Tremendous

2 minute read
TIME

The sign on the bathroom door was underlined in uncompromising red: “Please keep door shut. Keep out of this room—and I mean it. KEEP OUT—H.L.” The initials stood for Harold Lloyd, filmdom’s famed funnyman, but this time Funnyman Lloyd was not joking—at least not out loud. At 58, he has turned serious part-time artist, and he was about to hold his first one-man show. No one could blame him for being protective about the 40-odd paintings cached away in one of the bathrooms of his 22-room Beverly Hills mansion.

Painter Lloyd concentrates on color. “We live in a world of color,” he says. “It’s a tremendous study.” Lloyd has gone at color like a salmon after a fly; he has spent months interviewing experts, thumbed all the books he can find on color theory, collected and catalogued samples of every hue of paint manufactured in the U.S. and abroad. He began by working out color harmonies of his own on swatches of canvas, finally switched to painting.

The results are as bright as rainbows, and just as vague. “I don’t give a damn about drawing,” says Lloyd. He smears, brushes, or just ladles paint on canvas with a pancake flipper.

Lloyd never consciously draws a figure or a scene, but objects occasionally turn up in his work. Sometimes the image is a dragon’s head; other times the effect is of a vine-covered jungle, a gloomy peat bog, or a procession of dancing elves. “I start painting 90% of the time without any idea.” says Lloyd. “Eventually it suggests something.” He avoids titles: “If I call it a ‘Burning Tower,’ right away I’m keeping people from using their own imagination. If you like the color forms, that’s what pleases me. Then it’s a success.”

Nervously waiting for the show’s opening this week. Artist Lloyd had no idea what kind of artist he should call himself —expressionist? abstractionist? or what? Frank Perls, owner of the Beverly Hills gallery where Lloyd’s work will be shown, has it all figured out. “Just as Rousseau was a primitive impressionist.” he announced, “Lloyd is a primitive abstractionist, completely natural and undisturbed by the art of the past.”

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