Many say it’s the clothes that make the man. But for Santa Cruz artist Don Fritz, it’s our childhood toys that shape us.
Fritz’s work, which recently arrived at the Community School of Music and Arts, is a metaphor for growing up surrounded by social cues that teach children how to be masculine or feminine.
Colorful toys and cartoon figures float throughout Fritz’s works in what seems at first like a disorganized hodgepodge. In one painting, “Future,” objects like a frog, a turtle, candy and a rocket surround a young boy. Bold words and phrases like “space cadet,” “satellite in orbit,” and “electric” hang around him on a creamy white background.
The artist grew up with two older sisters in the 1950s, and learned early lessons about gender through reading “Dick and Jane” primers and playing with toys.
“I played with guns and all that. My sisters were really into dolls,” Fritz said. “I remember the first time I played with dolls, my dad told me I shouldn’t do that because that’s what girls did.”
Like other pop artists, Fritz employs familiar “low-brow,” Disney-esque images to make his art accessible to the average viewer.
Each work is like a puzzle, and it is the viewer’s task to figure out why, not where, each piece belongs. Analyzing Fritz’s work is similar to looking back on your own life and piecing together the events and experiences that shaped you.
The complexity in how Fritz represents the formation of identity stems from his own upbringing and his education.
Before gravitating towards art, Fritz studied psychology and sociology in college, which infused his work with ideas about how the individual relates to society. His characters — young, naive cartoons — are the sum of their surroundings. But behind the blatant imagery — the bright colors, simple figures and bubble words — lurk subversive underlying messages and images.
For example, two of Fritz’s large mixed-media paintings hanging side by side in CSMA’s Mohr Gallery portray a typical boy and girl: young and innocent, surrounded by objects that fill their lives. But drawn in layers beneath the main characters of each piece hides the phrase, “Guilty as sin.”
That sinister phrase sparks questions: What are the meanings of all the symbols that surround the children? What have the little boy and girl done wrong?
“As an adult, I’m kind of unraveling the experience I had as a child,” Fritz said.
He spent his early years living in Germany while his father worked on top-secret rockets for the military. Upon moving to the United States, Fritz’s box full of toys disappeared. Only recently did he realize that the loss of his childhood toys influenced the kind of art he creates.
“I was thinking of ‘Citizen Kane’ and Rosebud,” he said. “I thought, ‘Is that why I’m doing this?’ They say we never grow up. It’s just our toys that change.”
Fritz has lived in Santa Cruz since the 1970s and currently teaches art classes at UC Santa Cruz and at Santa Clara University. He has shown his work throughout the country and internationally, particularly in Asia.
Other works in his CSMA exhibit are ceramic sculptures, the most startling of which is an enormous head of Pinocchio, with a hat so pointy it looks like it’s about to pierce the ceiling. In several of his ceramic pieces, Fritz used a technique called Raku firing which renders a dark-metallic, aged look.
But his most thought-provoking pieces are the large, mixed-media paintings with layers upon layers of symbol and meaning. To Fritz, the more time he takes to draw in background figures, erase them and add layers and depth, the more successful the work.
“It’s really important to me that things are erased and painted out,” Fritz said. “It needs to be that way or else it wouldn’t be the experience of what it’s like to be human. I want a psychological experience in the work.”
