Cal Schenkel
| Cal Schenkel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Calvin Schenkel 27 January 1947 Willow Grove, Pennsylvania |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Graphic designer, illustrator, album cover designer, comics artist, animator for Frank Zappa. |
Calvin "Cal" Schenkel (born January 27, 1947, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania) is an American illustrator, graphic designer, animator and comics artist, specializing in album cover design. He was the main visual collaborator for rock composer Frank Zappa and was responsible for the graphic design of many Zappa album covers. Schenkel's work is iconic and distinctive in style, a forerunner of punk art and the new wave era.
Schenkel grew up in Oreland, Pennsylvania. He attended the Philadelphia College of Art but left after one semester and set out to build a career in the world of art. As an unemployed artist he was introduced to Zappa in 1967 by singer Sandy Hurvitz (later known as Essra Mohawk).
Schenkel's artwork, influenced at first by the comic strip Krazy Cat and by Mad magazine, had by 1967 developed its own "primitive" "ragged" surrealist style. In 1976, together with Don Van Vliet (better known as Captain Beefheart), Schenkel held an exhibition of his artwork in Greenfields Gallery, at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. The young Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, was an Evergreen student at the time.
Schenkel first statrted working for Frank Zappa in 1967. He was introduced to the musician by Cal's girlfriend Sandy Hurvitz. Schenkel recalled: :"When I first met him [Zappa] in New York, the art studio was in his apartment — but that was only for a brief period. I didn't actually live there [as widely reported], but I would commute to work at his place. When we moved to LA . . . he had rented the log cabin, I had a wing of it. It was my living quarters and art studio, which I rented separately from them." For over a decade, Schenkel, working in either an annex of the Zappa household or in his own studio, attempted to give visual form to Zappa's music while developing his own, distinctive style. Schenkel:"I love naïve and folk art, art that has an unfinished look. I don’t like the polished for the most part. Now what that means or where it comes from I'm not sure. But I was probably influenced graphically by artists I saw in school. And of course there's the comic book look — like Krazy Kat. A part of it was just lack of skill, trying to take advantage of my own naivety. I'd really only had a semester of art school, so I hadn't evolved my style when I was doing all of this. It just comes natural, too."
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