Shagadelic, baby!

My high school friend Angela, with whom I reconnected in 2006 at our something-th reunion, lives with her husband Michael and their preschool-age daughter Jessica in Redding, California, up at the northern edge of the great Central Valley on I-5.

They have many interests, but one of the more festive ones is that they (especially Michael) are big fans of the revival of tiki culture, a passion that can’t be easy to satisfy where they live.

Earlier this month, Angela emailed us to let us know that the retro-fabulous artist Shag was going to be in our own Seattle on December 14th and 15th for a gallery opening and nightclub party, and hinted that they would be forever grateful if we would attend one of those events and possibly pick up a little something for them.

Shag, if you’re not familiar with him, is the art moniker of Josh Agle, whose art was instrumental in the revival of tiki culture a few years back (although he doesn’t identify himself as primarily a “tiki artist”). I first became aware of his art from a line of greeting cards he designed. His subjects are ‘60s-chic men and women in sophisticated settings; his style is cartoonlike, with large areas of flat, bright color and simplified shapes. It’s immensely accessible, appealing, and hip.

Well, we were so grateful to Michael and Angela for inviting us to stay at their home in Redding the night we drove away from our beloved North Beach apartment in our moving truck, that we were happy to be the deputy ambassadors of the Tiki Appreciation Society of Redding (disclosure: this is my own made-up name).

By the time we got to the Roc LaRue Gallery in Belltown last Friday, they had run out of cocktails and were serving only beer, but the live band was just getting started. We snapped up the last copy of Bottomless Cocktail (a book of Shag’s art), schmoozed, posed for a few photos with the prints and paintings, and eventually got our picture taken with the man himself, who was very approachable and laid-back, I’m glad to say. He signed the book for Michael and Angela, and with that, our mission for the evening was complete. We stole stylishly out into the night and headed home, not on a vintage Vespa, alas, but in a cab, feeling way groovy, baby, all the way home.

Here I am with the painting "The Lost Book," which I chose because of its Paris background, the black cats, and the fact that the book the cats are looking at is Baudelaire's classic book of poems, "Fleurs du Mal."



Here's David with a print that portrays some of Shag's characteristic themes — the suave fellow with a cocktail, the dark-haired '60s fashionista, the swinging pad. Note the tiki mask on the back wall and the minotaur in the picture-within-a-picture. (Tikis and minotaurs are also recurring Shag images.)


Here we are with Shag, a.k.a. Josh Agle. The book under my arm is Bottomless Cocktail, the book we had Shag sign for Michael and Angela.