This particular episode is unlike any of the previous ones to date as far as I am aware. 

Of course every guest is unique and special but what stands our on this one is the response of the host - me. Lou Beach cracks me up so much and you can certainly hear more laughter coming from me than is usual on this podcast. 

I am talking rolling, falling off a chair laughter. (Which I almost did a couple of times). 

Of course part of this is the good sense of humor and charm of Lou Beach , elements that certainly make their way into his work. I should add that it is very hard to get me to laugh out loud at anything, an admittedly sore spot of my many friends and acquaintances who like to kid around and tell jokes. 

I first became aware of him through record album covers, first the Liquid Love album from Freddie Hubbard and then the great Weather Report album covers (also on Columbia) in the 70s. 

Only later did I realize there was so much more to Lou Beach. 

As I have said before on other occasions and I believe during our conversation on this episode, I don't really believe in or abide by the ordinary boundaries and demarcations of styles of art. For me these physically reproduced popular album covers are as valid and valuable as the un-reproduced fine oil paintings. 

Of course the meaning and intention is very different but the qualities I admire in Lou Beach's work - the radical whimsy, fearlessness, graphic surfeit of color, and the juxtaposition of disparate pop emblems and figures - are qualities that you can only really get with his style and the world of illustration itself. 

Collage too is till very valid; I often have though of the spirit and impulse of collage, though it does date as far back as the Germany of the 1920s, to be always relevant and in its own way most realistic. 

The content and figures in it are ones that are all a part of our daily lives, for better and for worse. Beach's work too, like the politically oriented ones in that Germany of the 20s, has a most serious dimension along side the popular and he is one of those few visual artists whose work refuses to be coy and always to be remembered. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did. 

Links to Lou's Beautiful Works : loubeach.com

Lou Beach's Bio: For the extended version of Lou's Bio, visit our show Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/journeyofanaesthetepodcast

Lou Beach (né Andrzej Jerzy Lubicz-Ledwochowski) was born in Göttingen, Germany in 1947, the son of Polish parents displaced by the Second World War. 

The family emigrated to Rochester, NY in 1951 where Lou attended public schools and junior college. He travelled to California in 1968 where he began his artistic career by making assemblage art and studying the Surrealists, visiting galleries and museums, and creating collages from pictures cut from old Life magazines. He worked during this time in bookstores, as a delivery man, moved furniture, and ran a punch press and forklift. A road trip across country, ostensibly to travel on to Europe from the East Coast, brought him to Boston where he lived from 1972 until 1979, much of the time as the sexton at the famous Arlington St. Church. 

There he created collages in earnest and had his first one man show at the newly established Boston Center For The Arts, as well as being hired for several illustration assignments.