Llyn Foulkes, art world iconoclast, has died, aged 91

"The iconoclastic Los Angeles artist Llyn Foulkes died on 21 November at age 91. A Renaissance man who resisted the rote taxonomy of genre, Foulkes was a painter, jazz musician, filmic muse and art world troublemaker, bucking the commercial commodification of his practice throughout his long career. His varied, anarchic practice, which he termed "consistently inconsistent", did not always endear him to the art establishment, but his trailblazing legacy sets him apart as a paragon of originality."

"Foulkes was born in 1934 in Yakima, Washington. He studied art and music at the Central Washington College of Education in Ellensburg until he was drafted into the US Army in 1954. After serving two years in Germany, he relocated to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, an art school best known for its long-standing relationship with Walt and Roy Disney and considered an incubator of animators."

Llyn Foulkes, born 1934, was an iconoclastic Los Angeles artist and musician whose consistently inconsistent, genre-defying practice resisted commercial commodification. He studied art and music in Washington before military service in Germany and moved to Los Angeles in 1957 to attend Chouinard Art Institute. Early work engaged Pop Art–adjacent imagery—postcards, vintage landscape photography and Route 66 signage—to critique Hollywood’s failed promises. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired his work in the 1960s, and he received a career retrospective in the 1970s. Foulkes also pursued music, drumming with City Lights and founding the Rubber Band.

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