text by Steffie Nelson

When the British-born artist Nick Taggart came to Los Angeles in 1977, he planned to stay for three months. Four-plus decades later, he is still here, living on the same Glassell Park street he was told about at a Stranglers show in London. Then twenty-five, Taggart, who studied illustration at Cambridge University, found LA’s legendary light, eclectic architecture, and frontier landscape irresistible—and the antithesis of gray, recession-bound London. He quickly connected with the vibrant underground art and music scenes centered in downtown LA and Hollywood, at clubs like Al’s Bar and the Masque, which gave rise to iconic punk and new wave bands like X, The Go-Go’s, Devo, and Missing Persons, as well as lesser-known groups like Party Boys and Fender Buddies, who became his friends. 

All the while, Taggart sketched his new city in his notebook, depicting the color-soaked mystique of the Santa Monica Pier, Hollywood’s Stardust Motel, Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock, and the dynamic characters in his social and creative orbit. But it wasn’t until he switched from colored pencils to acrylic paints that Taggart finally found a way to capture the city’s light. “Once I started using acrylics I felt like I could get that intensity within the shadows,'' Taggart says today. “Even in the shadows there’s like a blue glow; even the dark has light.” 

In 1980, Taggart painted a series of portraits of friends in their native environments. They included the stylist and musician Gillian McLeod, pictured in her Spring Street loft with her lavender Gibson guitar; the photographer Jules Bates, who is shown leaning against his restored Nash Metropolitan, defiantly holding up his left hand to reveal two missing fingertips he’d lost in an explosion; and punk fans Sandy and Rochelle, whose gumball-palette fashions coordinate with the graffiti’d wall of a venue in Little Tokyo. 

In another painting, the purple pointy shoes on a pair of legs standing over a topless blonde woman, who is lying poolside in a clear plastic raincoat, belong to the fashion designer Gregory Poe, the older brother of gallerist Jeff, of Blum & Poe, and designer of said raincoat. That work caught the eye of Jann Wenner, who tried to commission something similar for Rolling Stone, but Taggart was traveling, and already on to the next thing—which at the time included book and record covers and T-shirt and poster designs for the pop culture emporium Heaven, a counterpart to Fiorucci. The paintings went into flat files, where they remained, unseen for 40 years, until Taggart started sharing some of his archives on Instagram during the pandemic. 

Dani and Yvonne Bas Tull, who run the gallery ODD ARK • LA and are fellow Northeast LA artists, began to take notice of Taggart’s Instagram posts—the work from the 1980s, in particular. “It got to a point where it was kind of exciting to see what he would post next,” recalls Dani Tull, a born-and-bred Angeleno whose mother had an art studio on Skid Row during that same time. Recognizing a little-known slice of LA art history and a vital link between the renegade spirit of the underground and the global art market of today, they approached Taggart—now an art professor whose work skews toward meticulous organic abstractions—about a show. 

LA Stories: Paintings and Drawings from 1980, featuring six paintings and nine oil pastel portraits of models and cultural figures like Brooke Shields and Grace Jones (available as limited-edition prints, along with a limited-edition t-shirt featuring a Heaven design), is a technicolor time capsule. The high-gloss surfaces and saturated hues, angular compositions and cuts of clothing, sculpted coifs and bold slashes of blush and lipstick, all point to the digital age on the horizon, yet are masterfully rendered, in fact, by hand. Seen up close, minute details are revealed within the brushstrokes. For Taggart, who framed the paintings for the exhibition, seeing them in a new context after forty years has been revelatory. “It's sort of more interesting to see them now,” he notes, adding that perhaps he was simply “waiting for the right moment” to show them.  

In Tull’s opinion, the screen-friendly nature of the work makes it that much more rewarding to see it in a brick-and-mortar space. He views presenting the paintings IRL, as it were, as an opportunity “for people to ponder the history of the LA art community. And in that pondering we have an opportunity to think about where we’re at, and where we’re going...Aside from that, the paintings are really fucking cool.”

LA Stories: Paintings and Drawings from 1980 is on view for the first time by appointment only through August 1 @ ODD ARK • LA. text by Steffie Nelson