For Laguna Beach artist Cliff Wassmann, science fiction never gets old, but it’s taken him several years for it to pay off.
The local painter and photographer admitted he was struggling both creatively and financially with his work. He made do in his small Ocean Avenue gallery, exhibiting in both the Festival of Arts and the Sawdust.
But something was off.
“Around 2015, I just hit a wall with my landscape paintings,” he said. “They weren’t selling very well, and I just couldn’t make it happen. I tried different things. I was painting waves, I was painting Southwestern stuff, and nothing was really clicking with the public.”
He thought about his real passions and decided to do something different, combining new and old.
“I started out as sci-fi fantasy painter, and I always wanted to go back into that because I never really felt like I finished off with it. It didn’t sell back in the ‘80s,” he said. “Instead of starting from scratch, I grabbed some old landscape paintings that hadn’t sold, and I just put some dinosaurs in them.”
Out-of-place dinosaurs in otherwise realistic landscape paintings – ironic juxtapositions that were risky.
“But people really loved them. And then I decided to add some Star Wars characters into some local beaches, like as parody art. And they liked that too.”
It wasn’t an easy transition for Wassmann. He was using paintings that he thought stood on their own.
“It was actually stressful at first because these paintings that I reworked were actually really good paintings. And I kind of felt like I was ruining them by doing this. So the first ones took me a long time even though it was a fairly simple change. I struggled with them and stared at them for months before I ended up going for it.”
And then he held his breath at the festivals.
“The reaction from the public told me I was on the right path. People kept telling me they hadn’t seen anything like it before. They are very realistic landscape paintings just with things in them that you don’t expect.”
The things people do to survive, to reinvent, to take risks.
Thankfully, it’s working out for Wassmann. This is the way.
