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
xfires 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 ft. wide,
ten 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.