Will The Real Gary Baseman Please Stand Up?

His are the quiet drawings of saturated mascots a shade too perverse to be found in a children's book. You've probably seen his wide-eyed faces (bears, bats, and the rare bear-bat) stamped and bound in hardcover in Meltdown Comics in Hollywood or molded into designer toys at the Giant Robot in Silver Lake. You might have seen his signature, sometimes broken up into syllables in the lower-right corner: BASE-MAN.

What you likely haven’t seen is a photo of the artist himself. Like so many other modern day pop artists, he lets his work do most of the work.

That’s why getting to see Baseman at his new gallery showing at the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City last Saturday was so exciting. And I wasn't alone. Between the gallery and the Carnival-esque party that filled the cleared out parking lot next door, I must have overheard a dozen guesses: Was he the man in the oversized Dunce hat? Surely nobody else would wear such a thing in public. Was he the colorful man with the scarf? The fashionable man with the upturned collar? The sculptor in the back of the party? He could have been any of them.

But when Baseman was finally introduced in front of the carnival games inspired by his art, near the fire pit burning scraps of paper on which attendees had written their anxieties, and clad in the brown robes of a monk, it was clear and without question that there stood Gary Baseman.

The aforementioned robes bore one of Baseman's sketches like a family crest and he was joined on stage by a live mascot of one of his figures, as if he had kidnapped and corrupted a character from Disneyland. Elsewhere in the party, models with rubber cartoons covering their breasts filtered through the crowd. The Culver City audience stared for a few nervous seconds before taking out their cameras to capture the spectacle, the face behind all those faces.

Originally in Los Angeles Magazine at: http://lamag.com/do/blog.aspx?dt=05/07/2009