NEAL VON FLUE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A PART OF THE EL SEGUNDO ART WALK. NOW HE’S HELPING SHAPE IT
Words By
MARK McDERMOTT
There is a guy in El Segundo who builds motorcycles in his warehouse lair in Smoky Hollow, reinventing Harleys and other vintage bikes. He’s a fourth-generation local and looks like it.
There is also a guy in El Segundo who is a fine arts painter and sculptor, an artist who has been the subject of academic papers and for a long time served as the influential chair of the city’s Arts and Culture commission. For someone possessing the painstaking manual skills of a Renaissance artist, this guy also has a twist – he was playing with machine learning as part of his art years before AI was on the general populace’s radar.
Then there is this guy who plays banjo and sings, and with his buddy Tony can be found at many of the cooler events in El Segundo performing old and new songs and generally rousing out whatever sleepiness was left in the room.
Then there also is this guy who writes scholarly calls to creative action – perhaps most famously The Dog Leg Manifesto – and has published a sprawlingly beautiful book of art and provocation.
Finally, there is this guy who is the kind of teacher a lot of kids thought only existed in movies until they stepped into his classroom, where many of those kids arrived only because they were required to and left, often reluctantly, nine months later with a profound gift they carry into the rest of their lives – the notion that yes, of course they are creators.
But here’s the thing. All these guys are one guy, Neal Von Flue. His friend and collaborator John McCullough calls the slightly disconcerting phenomenon of Von Flue “the layers of Neal.” He first came to better know Neal as a commissioner, then as a painter, then as a banjo player, then at some point realized an old mural done a quarter century ago – Neal, unheralded, his fingerprints all over town.
“I walk into his motorcycle garage, and we go upstairs, and he’s got everything displayed – but everything’s always in progress,” McCullough said. “His motorcycles are fantastic, epic pieces of 1960s, 1970s Harleys, but they’re always being worked on. And it’s the same thing with the art. You see these amazing pieces and it’s, ‘Oh, I’m still kind of working on that one. I’m still putting the finishing touches on that one.’ You would never know it. He’d never brag about it or talk about it. You just walk in there and you find these layers of Neal, these artistic layers of Neal.”
Von Flue does not dispute the diagnosis.
“I’m an onion,” he said. “Just like Shrek. That’s probably the most accurate thing I’ve ever heard.”
And so, yes, of course: McCullough, the event producer of the El Segundo Art Walk, last year formally brought Von Flue aboard the merry pirate ship that is ESAW as its creative director. It was a match that seemed somehow destined. Yet another layer of Neal.
Von Flue’s studio is in a two-story warehouse on Arena Street in Smoky Hollow, a building that has been in his family, as Universal Engravers, for decades. The sign is still hanging over the shop floor, among the gas station discs and Harley placards, beneath a full military parachute billowing across the ceiling like artistic weather. An El Segundo city flag and an American flag hang high on the back wall.
Neal is a fourth-generation El Segundoan. The engraving shop was his father’s. David Von Flue taught his son to draw, to ride, and to build a motorcycle out of parts, and the two of them eventually built one together. “We’d go on rides together,” Von Flue said in 2021, the year after his father died. “It became a meditation.”
This year’s Art Walk is Saturday, Aug. 22, from 3 to 9 p.m. Businesses across downtown and Smoky Hollow open their doors and avail their walls to artists from across Los Angeles. There is also live music, food trucks, and demonstrations by Standard Ceramics. The architecture of ESAW is like this – a live pottery show here, a glass blower there, and art absolutely everywhere.
Like ESAW itself, an ongoing sense of discovery fires Von Flue’s involvement. “The artists that I have found or noticed or seen that I had no idea were in the area,” Von Flue said. “That this person’s just down the street is mind-blowing to me.”
On the easel in his studio is a large painting of the Plunge, formally the Urho Saari Swim Stadium, the WPA-era building the city recently refurbished. Von Flue points to that refurbishment, along with the Art Walk itself and the library’s enrichment programs, as what the city’s Cultural Development Fund has made possible, a percent-for-arts program paid into by developers.
“They should be thanked, and they should be celebrated,” he said. “It’s one of those examples where I think that art and business, for lack of a better term, can really go the same direction. They’re not at odds, always.”
Around 2017, before most people had heard the phrase, Von Flue began working with a generative adversarial network, making images with it, curating them, then painting them by hand in oil. The Brill Family Foundation in Santa Barbara showed the paintings late last year in an exhibition on AI and human creativity, then gave him a grant to join a working group of artists thinking the problem through.
What he came away with was that AI can do all of it except process. And human beings are exquisitely gifted at artistic process.
“AI is bad for artists, is what everybody says, and I think that’s true,” he said. “But the steam drill was bad for John Henry. And who do we talk about now? We talk about John Henry. We don’t talk about the steam drill anymore. But who do we want to be?”
He is John Henry, and boy does he know how to swing that hammer. He spent this summer painting plein air at South Coast Botanic Garden. He also finished the work for the foundation, where the group’s shared theme turned out to be data: how it is gathered, and what it costs. Here the story folds back on itself. Smoky Hollow is now full of tech companies, and tech companies need data centers. El Segundo has several. One more was proposed recently and withdrawn after enough residents turned up at the planning commission to object.
“It was oil before, and now data centers are a very interesting focal point—their consumption, and the way they’re scrutinized in a way that I don’t think Standard Oil was ever scrutinized when it showed up here 100 years ago,” he said.
Von Flue this fall begins his tenth year teaching art at Vistamar, a small private school in El Segundo. His teaching philosophy rests on a counterintuitive notion: there is no such thing as talent. At least not in the way we usually think of talent. It is once again about process: about the fruits of doing the work itself.
He offers himself as Exhibit A. On paper, he says, he is a high school graduate. He went to El Camino College and took art classes, eight years of them, with nobody telling him to go back and finish a math requirement. He did not graduate. “I gestated,” Von Flue said. He made work, a prodigious amount of it.
He and his former partner, Dawn, went into business as Von Flue Studios, an El Segundo shop that would take on more or less anything, from web pages to massive murals. In 2004, they did a project that scattered 20 painted surfboards around Hermosa Beach for the summer. They later did a 40-foot-wide, 10-panel mural for Hermosa’s centennial. “I think the public reacts to art,” Von Flue told the Times. “This shows you that art can be anywhere and for anybody.”
Eventually he realized he was not especially happy as a working artist but loved teaching. At Vistamar, he found a school that cared less about his degrees than about whether he could do the job.
The students who occupy him are not the ones who arrive already good.
“If I’ve got two kids coming into the room, and one has been told they’re a great artist their whole life, and this is their identity, and they sit next to a kid that doesn’t want to draw and has been told they’re not talented, how do I get that second student to try?” he said. “They’re already coming in two down.”
The confident ones, he says, will go live artistic lives no matter what. It is the other kids who keep him up at night. If a student left his room having concluded that art was for other people, he said, “I would feel two inches tall.”
Which is essentially the Art Walk’s argument. Most people, Von Flue said, meet art through museums and institutions. The Art Walk puts it “down into areas where we spend all our time,” at your favorite restaurant, down the street from where you live.
On Aug. 22 the roll-up door on Arena Street will be open to the sidewalk, and anybody walking past can see straight in: the bikes, the parachute, the stairs going up to the room with the paintings. Three other El Segundo artists will be showing their art there. And whatever is on the easel that day will be up there too, perhaps unfinished, the way things tend to be. In process.
Another layer of Neal.
The El Segundo Art Walk was Saturday, Aug. 22, from 3 to 9 p.m. Free and self-guided. Maps at participating businesses and at elsegundoartwalk.com. Von Flue Studio is at 138 Arena St., Unit C.