Regis Ginn

Post Warhol Ciccione Triptych

Undated

Oil on canvas, mounted on cardboard

14 x 18 inches

Provenance: Raymond Pettibon; private collection, Los Angeles

Domestic shipping $35

Regis Ginn (1923-2005) was an english teacher from Southern California who published two pulp fiction spy novels and produced a number of small scale paintings that were never shown during his life. These were described by the New York Times after his death as "eerie, thrift-store Francis Picabia-style portraits and pinups" that bear a curious resemblance to the work of his son, Raymond Pettibon.

A navigator with the Army airforce in World War Two, Ginn described himself on the inside cover of his 1968 cold war spy novel Tyyger Tyger as a "Patriarch, erotica archivist and sly frottage enthusiast, end product of seven American colleges and distinguished graduate of the U.S. Air Force Weight and Balance School the arriviste posed bashful behind the postiche basher is a nonpracticing Freeman of the City of Cambridge who summered and falled in Britain (1944) and now lives in the extreme northeast section of Hermosa Beach, 90254."

Pettibon remembers his father less fancifully as having designed a rabbit warren for the family in Hermosa beach and filling it with "thousands upon thousands of dog-eared paperbacks, back issues of Show and Detective Story Monthly, old Playboy magazines, picture frames, dusty garbage bags containing who knows what, boxes of moldering sporting goods, and paintings of pinups." He described his father as someone who "used to drive 20 miles out of his way to find a gas station charging 25 cents, as opposed to 27 cents a gallon," and that he "built additions to the old family house with cheap, termite-ridden wood that leaked so badly that as a boy Pettibon slept under plastic tarpaulins heaving with rainwater."

Ginn, whose other son Greg Ginn founded the legendary punk band Black Flag, was a Republican,"but he wasn't uptight, " said Pettibon. "His politics weren't hippie, but his lifestyle sort of was." Pettibon, acknowledged that his own art "often speaks in his father's voice -- flippant, knowing, a bit rough. The voice, it so happens, of the sort of backslapping, tipsy bully who calls people by ridiculous nicknames."