Made in the Dark: Neon Workshop with Lili Lakich

HANDS ON Artist Lili Lakich at work in her L.A. neon studio.

Neon sculpture artist Lili Lakich's downtown studio is a candy land of color and visions. When in workshop season from mid-February to late April, her studio unfolds into a double-faced playing field, where a small group of students gather for lessons on the history and basics of neon, the artistic designing process, picking colors (Lakich's favorite part) and then hands-on assembling sessions. When that's all over, the working tables and drill tools sweep back into their hidden compartments, and her illuminated sculptures return to the forefront, only now being witness to the multiplication of neon art.

Lakich's collection of work spans over four decades and covers a spectrum of themes. She's captured the unique attention of light-frenzied art houses around the world, having solo shows from Paris to Tokyo. Locally, she was the founding director of the Museum of Neon Art in the downtown Arts District. She has also worked on a few, fabulous eye-popping for-public-display pieces. Her studio sanctuary—neighboring a Jonathan Gold hangout, the Wurstkuche; a cool architect school; and a wacky warehouse down the way—is open around the clock and proves how neon is still hip and here to stay. And it all makes Lakich the most exciting teacher anywhere for the course.

Her current Neon Workshop students—including a filmmaker, former art school teacher, and a handful of local sign makers, to name a few—just wrapped up their 8-week session with Lakich. Now they're ready to show off their casino housings and exceptional wiring—a show not to miss for the curious and stalwart art aficionados, and all friends and family of the students. There will be everything from a beginner's whimsy self-portrait, to Lakich's iconic sculptures on display at her Traction Avenue studio.

Neon Workshop Exhibition Saturday, May 1 2 - 5 p.m.

The Studio of Lili Lakich 704 Traction Avenue, L.A. 90013

WORK IN PROGRESS Students in Lakich's studio finishing projects.

A GLIMPSE AT THE NEON-BENDING PROCESS...

As a student of the workshop, I admit that a huge dose of inspiration for this blog came directly from being surrounded by Lili and her colorful, buzzing neon sculptures for several weekends in a row. When I learned that our neon-bending work would be outsourced, I immediately took my glass tubes and design patterns to my father's company, San Pedro Electric Sign Company, a South Bay business known for its exceptional work in custom neon for over 35 years.

DIRECTIONS (top to bottom) My dad, Gus Navarro, the head of SPESCO, gave me the idea to make a sign of my face, so I outlined it and came up with the sign pattern. / Francisco, SPESCO's glassblower/neon-bender handled all my TechnoLux glass. He works in a dark neon shop (it's better to see the light in a dark room) full of glass tubes and fire torches. / My jaw! / Lighting up my pink, velvety lips. / Neon glass is delicate and cools off fast. Neon-bending becomes a process of slow and fast work.

The completed work of my self-portrait will be on display at the Neon Workshop exhibition (details above) with the rest of my classmates who learned the exciting art of NEON.

You Can Bet on It: 'Learning from Las Vegas'

"We shall be analyzing and categorizing the signs of Las Vegas by content and form, by function (night and day) and location as well as by size, color, structure and method of construction, trying to understand what makes the 'Las Vegas style' in signs and what we can learn from them about an impure architecture of form and symbols. A stylistic analysis of Las Vegas signs would trace the influence of the greats (the designers in YESCO) through to the minor architecture of wedding chapels and sauna baths, compare the national and general sign imagery of the gasoline stations with the unique and specific symbolic imagery of the casinos, and follow the influence patterns back and forth between artists and sign makers."
— Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Standard practice dictates that signage on any property is a precise, calculated dividend of total property square footage. City planners in Los Angeles, for example, have stuck to this formula since the young days of artist Ed Ruscha (pronounced “Ru-Shay”), which sparked his series of books (published in the '60s) chronicling the city’s mundane, repetitive architecture—Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Some Los Angeles Apartments. When high-brow architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown got the hint, they set their path to study Las Vegas in a similar fashion.

Their manifesto, as sampled above, suggested they sought great answers to what made Las Vegas rich in image and allure. Most surprisingly, however, they found Las Vegas was doing exactly what Los Angeles had been doing for so long, but to maximum degrees: empowering its car-bound visitors by building space according to car paths. In contrast to Los Angeles, however, Las Vegas' strength resided in the city's uniform effort in building the biggest, most meaningful signs. Cities worldwide—like L.A., New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo—would strive mimicking the Las Vegas way in future years (or present day), which is why this Venturi and Scott Brown exhibition is fascinating. In the show, over 100 photos and a handful of studies reveal "sign scientists" building sign models, the inspiration to some of the boldest colors and designs, charts examining the thorough sign makeup to every hotel landscape, and so much over-the-top glittering goodness more. VIVA LA SIGNS!

VIDEO: "Las Vegas by Car, 1968" [press play below]

LEARNING (top to bottom) Museum-goers enjoying MOCA's "Learning from Las Vegas." / A photo from the exhibition of a quick sign sketch. / Like Ed Ruscha, architects Venturi and Scott Brown snapped shots of car-bound scenic space in Las Vegas. / An interesting photo in the exhibition, of sign models in observation.

Explore Venturi and Scott Brown's Las Vegas in "Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown." Now in exhibition view through June 20 at MOCA Pacific Design Center.

Lighting the Way: Neon

LOCAL LANDMARKS (top to bottom) A view from the US-101, looking onto neon-buzzing Hollywood skyline. / Larry Albright's crackle tube, as found in one of neon artist Lili Lakick's sculptures. / Huge "SPACE" letters from Space 15 Twenty, on North Cahuenga Blvd. / A light-scenic view onto Hollywood's Vine Ave. showing Patron, Hollywood & Vine and the Taft Building, lit in neon. / A TechnoLux sample suitcase, pictured in Lili Lakich's neon studio. / Fluorescent, neon-looking lights fixed in an empty Sunset Blvd. storefront.

Light alone has developed its share of good and bad. It would be a logical assumption to see struggle in associating those sharp, bright neon lights with any exceptional claim to beauty. But the hundred-year-old-plus medium still has its great followers and admirers, like neon artist and historian Don Concannon, who exercised his praise to a group of Southern California sign industry moguls during a California Sign Association meeting last month.

"Their elegant lines in shocking colors... Their garish sense of humor... How the colored lights penetrate the night so perfect... Go neon!" he went on excitedly. Similarly, neon artist Larry Rivers shared his view in the iconic 1979 book, Let There Be Neon. “Neon has gaiety, joy, pageantry. Circus qualities. I like it story-telling, information-giving qualities. The fact that it has to do with the night distinguishes it from all art forms. The canvas is the night.”

To briefly explain, neon is a chemical element extracted straight from the air and used as a gas pumped through glass tubes, producing (in its natural state) the ubiquitous red-orange glow we see everywhere. Tube manufacturers around the world, like EGL, TechnoLux and the now defunct Voltarc, have long produced tubes of varying colors, intensity and diameters by either coating or tinting them with color, or lining the inside with rich phosphorus powders. Another rare gas used just like neon is the wondrous blue argon, known as “The Lazy One” for its heaviness and lower resistance.

Add electricity, and viola. NEON.