Dennis Larkins
A Startling Art Career
by David Larkins
With such a long and varied career creating the sort of art that reaches out and grabs the viewer, whether it’s on a three-dimensional canvas or towering overhead as part of a monolithic concert set, Dennis Larkins has a knack for making an impression. So much so that over the course of his celebrated career, he’s picked up a wide following among everyone from connoisseurs of the lowbrow to fine art collectors to Deadheads. Admirable as this is, it’s made for a fairly diverse fan base.
Grateful Dead Radio City poster, D. Larkins/P. Barsotti, © D. Larkins/P. Barsotti/ GDP.
That fan base can now at last come together to see gathered in one place the sheer breadth of Larkins’s creative vision with the release of Startling Art: Revealing the Art of Dennis Larkins (Last Gasp/LaLuz de Jesus Press). The cover depicts a ruggedly pulpy archeologist pushing aside a screen of jungle vines to uncover perhaps the most well-known of Larkins’s “rock art” pieces, the infamously collectible Grateful Dead “Radio City Music Hall” poster. The back cover of the book is a whimsically typical slice of Larkins’s skewed worldview, a surrealistic collage playing with the concept of artist as ultimate outsider against a background of those cheesy “You Too Can Be An Artist!” ads that have run in the back of comic books and popular publications since time immemorial.
Between the covers readers will find an art book quite unlike any other they may have encountered before. Not just a catalog of images nestled among self-important essays; Startling Art is a personal history, an artistic biography, of Larkins’s creative growth over four decades as a working artist. From his early experiments in psychedelic landscapes to the beginnings of his use of found imagery to construct pop-surrealist phantasmagorias, the reader is treated to a visual feast on every page. The majority of the book is devoted to Larkins’s current body of work, created over the last decade as he plugged into the underground art scene after a 20-year hiatus to work as a commercial artist.
“Road Trip to the Forbidden Zone”
The term commercial artist sells Larkins short however, for even in that capacity he brought his uniquely profligate vision to a wide variety of entertainment venues. His contributions as a poster artist, already mentioned, are covered, but so too is the central role he played in pioneering a theatrically grandiose vision of the 1970s arena rock scene. Working with legendary musical impresario Bill Graham, Larkins created almost literally from scratch a new approach to concert staging. His larger-than-life stage designs for such immortal acts as Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Journey, and many others are given their due in print for the first time, as the reader is treated to pictures of the sets themselves along with sketches and behind-the-scenes photographs of the sets’ construction.
This is just one example of the unprecedented level of access into an artist’s life and creative journey allowed by Larkins’s new book. In many ways, it was the only format that could even begin to summarize his career, and the best way for old fans to discover new facets of a pioneering artist.
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