Kenny Scharf smokes home-grown Ingleweed and talks life in the East Village

I thought it was over before it had begun. My brother Finn had made the faux pas of taking photos of Kenny Scharf just as he was in the middle of taking a massive hit of a bong. Scharf looked at us both with disdain: “Guys, guys!” I immediately tried to placate him, “Don’t worry, we won’t use these photos for the magazine.” Kenny paused for a moment, looking us up and down. I was certain he was about to throw us out of his studio. He gave us a Cheshire cat grin: “No, no, if you’re going to get photos of me hitting a bong, you have to get me hitting one I made!” He ran into his office and returned holding a ceramic alien-like creature. He added his weed, lit it, and took an enormous drag from the top of the alien’s head.“Now we can begin.”

Kenny Scharf is a cultural icon. Bridging the gap between fine art and pop culture, he’s made a career out of the surreal, playful and mischievous. A painter, sculptor and graffiti artist, Scharf draws inspiration from cartoons such as The Jetsons and The Flintstones to create his own visual language, characterised by neon alien-like creatures.

He began his career in New York in the early ‘80s, hanging out with his peers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. A major player in the Lower East Side art scene, and part of the street art movement, it was his psychedelic, alien-filled graffiti that first caught the attention of the art world. Later, through his connection to Haring, he began to show his paintings and sculptures with the dealer Tony Shafrazi – to great critical acclaim.

Over the next few years, Scharf continued to produce work, but whilst his contemporaries, Haring and Basquiat, reached extraordinary heights, he left NY pre-internet and drifted out of the spotlight. He had to sell the paintings gifted to him by friends just to survive. Then, in early 2000, he sold an idea for an animated TV show called The Groovenians, based on the characters in his paintings. He halted his studio practice for almost two years to create this show, only for it to be dropped after the first episode aired. The experience left him broke, so he returned full-time to his studio and began to build up his reputation again.

Although underrated compared to many of his contemporaries, Scharf now commands a lot of attention among younger artists and creatives, his trippy pop-art imagery resonating with the Instagram generation to create a cult following. His giant, round cartoon faces, typically rendered in neon pink or green spray paint, feel distinctly modern, reminiscent of today’s emoji culture. He has managed to transform Los Angeles into his own moving museum with an ongoing series called Karbombz, in which he graffitis cars around LA in his signature neon style for free, with the provision they are not sold as works of art.

Today, Scharf is in his studio in Inglewood, California, his very own Bedrock City. A disused department store, it’s a treasure trove of precious memorabilia: a giant Fred Flintstone statue greets you on your way in; customised surfboards hang from the walls; and sculptures from the ‘80s, made from trash found on a beach in Brazil, sit in boxes all around.

Dressed in homemade tracksuit shorts and flip-flops, which he wears with a paint-splattered punk rock T-shirt, he is every inch the laidback Californian, but with a hint of East Coast edge. He is also very welcoming and engaging, showing you everything his studio has to offer and inviting you to be a part of his world. I begin to feel as though I’ve been friends with him for years.

He suggests we watch him work on a painting and allows us to pick the colour. We decide on an acidic orange. He turns on an industrial-size fan to remove the fumes from his spray paint, pops on a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, and gets to work on a pre-hung round blank canvas. He effortlessly glides the spray paint can, hitting every mark he wants – it is a real performance, hypnotic even. Nonchalant but in total control.

The finished product is one of his giant cartoon faces, smiling to reveal razor-sharp teeth, filling you with joy and dread at the same time. After he finishes the painting and has a few more hits of his bong, we finally sit down to talk about his life.  Not before he hands me my very own green alien sculpture to take home.

What was your first introduction to art?

When I was a kid I didn’t have a lot of access to galleries or museums. My parents didn’t take me to places like that. But I used to go to these head shops in southern California, where I grew up, that were popular in the 1960s, and they had all these posters in there. They had your typical psychedelic posters but they also had all these surrealist posters of works by Magritte, Dali and de Chirico, so I got my first taste of art through posters there. Also, a friend of my parents had a book on Dali and that blew me away… I was just like woah! It was overwhelming – like what the hell is this imagery?

Were they the type of things you’d hang in your room?

I didn’t really hang posters until I was a little older, like the dorm room kinda thing. I might have hung up something that came in an album. I would get Beatles and Stones records, then when a little bit older, I got into Bowie and T. Rex. When I moved to New York, I started getting into punk rock.

Why did you decide to move to New York?

To become a famous artist [laughs]! I didn’t know about being a famous artist, I just knew it looked so much more exciting than what was going on in U.C. Santa Barbara and thought I wanted to be there.

And when did you meet Keith Haring?

I met Keith at SVU in my first week at school, in 1979. He was painting in an empty room and I heard some Devo – I followed the music and saw him in a white room making these black marks to the beat of the music, all alone. He had painted the whole room and he was in the corner and I was standing there watching him for a while. We started talking and became friends instantly.

How did the friendship affect your career?

I didn’t know anything about the right place to go and I used to rely a lot on Keith, because he was not only very talented and driven and smart, but he helped me manoeuvre through the art world in the early days, because I really didn’t have a clue. So I felt comfortable being in Tony’s [Shafrazi] gallery because Keith was showing there.

Do you remember when Tony first saw your work?

I had been showing for a while in the East Village, venues like the Fun Gallery, Club 57 and Fiorruci, but they were just one-night shows. I was showing but nothing broke through into a gallery, something more serious. Keith was working at Tony’s openings cleaning bottles and stuff like that, so we used to go along, as there were free drinks and whatnot. I didn’t really meet Tony then, but a little bit later. There was a show at PS1 called ‘New York/New Wave’ and I had some work in there, and it was at about this time Tony was getting interested in Keith’s work. Keith showed Tony my work at that show, so that’d be the first time he saw it. And then, at one point, he brought someone to my apartment, because I didn’t have a studio, and sold a painting. That was the first real sale I had.

Who else were you hanging out with?

I had a whole group of young kids – of course Keith was one of them, Basquait, John Sex, a whole group. We all moved to New York basically for the same reason and at the same time. We were all living in the East Village because the rent was cheap, and it was a great community; you’d walk outside and just find someone to hang with.

Not like today, then?

It’s funny today – everyone’s on Instagram and whatnot. There is this whole connection because of the internet but at the same time it doesn’t compare to the real connection you’d have back then. You couldn’t get anything from your phone or MTV or anything like that; you had to seek it out in person. There were a lot of people doing the same thing and everyone was together, so it really was a community.

Do you miss that sense of community now you’re based in LA?

I have artists who are really good friends that I am close to but most of them don’t really live in LA. Even if they do, I don’t see them – it’s just the nature of the city and how busy I am. You don’t exactly run into people in the street, because you’re in a car. Ed Ruscha actually has a studio underneath my house, so you’d think I’d see him all the time – and I’d love to – and I see him more often than most because he is literally underneath me, but I don’t even see him. Everybody is just busy.

Do you know when you’ve made a great painting?

I get involved in everything I do, but once in a while you do something and you go, OK, I know this one is going to cause ripples or this one’s major and it’s gonna knock ‘em down. I’ll do a whole show and no-one really gets it, and then ten years later, I’ll bring it out and people will think it’s the greatest. Sometimes artists are before their time… Often!

Would you consider yourself obsessive?

Oh yes, completely. I don’t think you can be successful in art if you’re not. You have to be. Look what you’re against. It’s not an easy thing to do, so you have to a kind of intensity.

You are still having fun while painting, though?

Of course. In fact, I have to say, it just gets better the more I do it, and I’ve been doing it professionally for 40 years. It just gets better; it gets more exciting. I get better and I get more rewards from having the confidence

What does the future hold for you?

Newer. Bigger. Better.