Don Fritz makes his paintings and ceramic sculpture look like child’s play
Surfer ceramics, retro printmaking, and colorful paintings filled with wayward boys and girls—all this and more fulfills the restless creativity of Santa Cruz artist Don Fritz. With shows in Japan, South Korea, New York, Seattle and Hollywood under his belt, Fritz has come a long way from his days as a downtown heartbreaker waiting tables at India Joze. “I think of myself as a cultural archaeologist,” says Fritz, a former bohemian surfer and now tenured professor of art and head of ceramics at Santa Clara University.
Surrounded by tall glass cases filled with toys and figurines, Mexican masks and a museum’s worth of Japanese, American, and Mexican candy displays, Fritz shared his latest projects with me, clad—always—in a Hawaiian shirt.
Just back from a printmaking residency in Guadalajara, Fritz was swamped with coursework for the two ceramics classes he’s teaching. “Transformation of common objects,” was the theme he assigned to students, who responded with a sophisticated array of expertly glazed telephones, toasters and books. Their work bore a resemblance to Fritz’s signature body of ceramic work, loaded with bowling pins, flying saucers, teddy bears, birds, dogs, kitchen appliances and, most notably, children from a post-war America that no longer exists.
On the way into his kitchen, where Fritz’s hefty collection of paint-by-numbers artwork hangs over the 1950s Formica dinette set, I admired a wall of vinyl. “My taste is eclectic,” he says. “Hip-hop, rap, latin, rhumba, tango, jazz, lots of circus music, big band, and all the 007 albums.”
In all of his paintings and ceramic sculpture, Fritz returns over and over again to themes of childhood. “I’m interested in toys,” he says with a grin. “Gender-specific toys, and how they influence the roles we play in later life.” His work is currently shown, along with “pop surrealist” artists, at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, where a new show of his work opens on June 5.
Fritz is still amazed at his own durability and success. “The only way I got ahead, ever, was through networking and friends,” he says. As it turns out, the daughter of Eduardo Carrillo—then a professor of art at UCSC—suggested that he apply for the instructor pool in art. “Ed was my fairy godmother,” Fritz recalls with affection. One part-time job led to another, from this school to that, and finally the lecture jobs at Santa Clara became a full-time tenured gig.
“I really love American popular culture,” he says. “The pop narrative is definitely my thing.” The ominous icons that fill his work—children being bad, encroaching airplanes, explosions, mushroom clouds, space ships—“all have an apocalyptic aspect, a hint of paranoia,” he notes.
An aura of retro fills everything Fritz makes and owns, from the Last Supper painted on a slice of redwood tree trunk to the vintage Hawaiian shirts and Howdy Doody puppets. Fritz credits Bay Area legend Nathan Oliviera for giving him some solid advice: to take on these serious topics, topics like the nuclear shadow haunting the baby boom generation—“but in a serious way. So I try to embed some fear and mystery into my toy imagery,” he says. Toys gone sinister.
An Air Force brat, Fritz moved all over until he transformed his low high school GPA into something that would get him into UCSC. To move on to grad school, he created an original suite of toy images embossed into handmade paper. “I call them tablets of American icons that got me into UC Davis,” he says. Fritz’s over-the-top faintly lurid iconography of naughty children, sinister animals, and skies filled with spacecraft and ghosts, has made his huge body of work instantly recognizable. Collected by Japanese museums and Hollywood actors, the work injects a touch of dystopia into a Disneyfied landscape. Don Fritz makes it all look like child’s play.
See the work at donfritz.com. PHOTO: Sculptor and painter Don Fritz gets creative at his home in Felton. CHIP SCHEUER
