Latest Work

Neo Brutalism

Larry Fulton has  a distinguished background in Art Direction and Production Design in  the film Industry working on such films as 'The Doors', Fat Man and  Little Boy" with Paul Newman, Fried Green Tomatoes, The Little Rascals, A  Time to Kill,  and with director M. Night Shyamalan on Signs,  Unbreakable and the 6 Oscar nominated The Sixth Sense.  He  lives in  Palm Springs and works out of his Studio 555 where his makes his Tiles  and Totems and other works of Art. 

TILES AND TOTEMS

THE DISCOVERY OF LANGUAGE FOUND THROUGH THE OBSERVATION OF THINGS DISCARDED AND DISREGARDED.

Artist Statement:

"My  visual journey began in Palm Springs over ten years ago with my  personal belief that the placement of the San Bernardino and the San  Jacinto Mountains at the mouth of the Sonora Desert define a uniquely  spiritual space.

In seeking my own path to making art that  symbolized and defined this belief, I began to recognize a particular  kind of beauty and meaning in objects that I discovered all over the  desert floor. Objects that had been discarded and disregarded, things  tossed aside, considered without worth and without value.

THE BIRTH OF THE TILES

At  first these were small objects that communicated in themselves a shape  or design that spoke to me of a larger universe. I began by organizing  these objects into groups and by pressing them into clay in order to  reveal their alternative negative and positive shapes. In doing so I  also began to discover that by linking these clay tiles together a  mysterious language and sense of meaning emerged. I felt that I was  discovering a language that was possibly forgotten or perhaps never  previously revealed. For me it was the language that represents the  “spirit of place”.

I worked for two years unearthing this  language piece by piece, every new found object, bottle cap or gear  adding to the special lexicon and alphabet. I felt that I was not only  discovering a group of signs and symbols, but that by putting them  together into a tapestry or bas relief, a particular message was  beginning to emerge.

One day my work stopped. I sat in the  studio surrounded by walls of text, knowing that there was something  being said, but unable to decipher the code. I came and went daily,  unable to understand but knowing that I had to learn to read and to  listen more closely.

THE BIRTH OF THE TOTEMS

After six months of listening to the surfaces of the tiles I began to hear their story.

The  next step in revealing the” spirit of place” was to move on from  exposing a two dimensional language to excavating a world that arose  from the ground and stood up in a three dimensional space.

And  so I suddenly turned to larger found objects that lived in the same  universe of the discarded. I began to notice the forms and shapes  rendered within packing materials, cardboard and styrofoam that had been  created to protect and to contain other things that were specifically  considered the things of “true” value. In studying these forms and  shapes and by casting them in plaster and concrete,

I revealed a series of what I call totems or guardian spirits.

These  totems represent the three dimensional symbolic sources of energy, both  masculine and feminine, positive and negative, (TOTEMS) that together  with their two dimensional relatives (TILES) speak of the power that  exists within the spirit of the mountains and the desert that surround  us.

They are both ancient and modern, refined and brutal,  crude and elegant. Together they represent a world of spirit that is all  around us."