ArtSkool #2- Robert Williams- The Lord of Lowbrow

Robert Williams is an American painter, cartoonist and founder of Juxtapoz Magazine. He was born in 1943 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and like most kids of his era started his drawing career with a love of cars and hot-rod culture. In 1965 he worked for Ed "Big Daddy" Roth as a pin-striper making hot-rod art. When Roth closed his studio, Williams hooked up with the Zap Comix crowd which included R. Crumb, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton and many others and drew underground comix. He gradually developed an oil-painting style which he called "Super Cartoon," which merged the labor intensive technique of master craftsmen with underground comix, erotic nudes, hot-rods, American kitsch, and surrealism. His work, for better-or-worse coined the term lowbrow art which inspired the movement known as lowbrow art or pop surrealism. He later distanced himself from the term lowbrow and proclaimed in 2015, "The art movement I go by is Colloquial or Exploratory Realism...Feral Art."