The Birds of Heaven 14, Red-Fronted Conure

In the 1960s Robert Lostutter, both a painter and a draftsman, participated in the initial phases of Chicago Imagism. Although each of them had a singular style, the Imagists shared a tendency toward figurative work and a bold palette, and they drew heavily (and often humorously) from popular sources, such as comic books. By the early 1970s, Lostutter turned from oil painting to watercolor as his preferred medium, and also explored the related field of printmaking.

By the mid-1970s Lostutter had developed a highly personalized world of peculiar hybrid male heads, part human and part plant or birdlike. Some of these forms were inspired by the artist’s trips to Mexico and his interest in tropical plants and birds. It is not always possible to tell if the gorgeous flowers, leaves, or feathers are applied ornaments or are the remarkable growth on the figure’s skin. Whether sullen or eerily sinister in their poses, or exhibiting leering eyes and sidelong glances, these exotic beings suggest a magical and private world of sensuous exaltation in physical deformity. Lostutter’s imagery is figurative, displaying meticulous renderings of the human body or head that arise from an internal fantasy of hypnotic clarity—beings captured in eerie transformation. Bodies may be bound, blinded, or truncated, yet what seems grotesque embodies considerable dignity, partly through the intense colors and brilliantly invented details.  

By the end of the 1980s, Robert Lostutter had produced a large number of prints, principally lithographs, which the artist reports he destroyed because they did not represent his artistic attitudes or standards at the time.  As he recalls, “Those who had seen them, however, claim they were of considerable interest and very accomplished in their draftsmanship and invention.”  This multicolored lithograph is thus an historic early work, since it is one of the artist’s first preserved graphic pieces and one of two magnificent color prints created in 1974 at Chicago’s Landfall Press, one of the country’s premiere print studios (now based in Santa Fe, New Mexico). Unlike Lostutter’s later prints (see object 1998.64), which are mostly small in scale (in line with his contemporaneous watercolors), this relatively large example approximates some of the visual presence of his earlier paintings.  In it, Lostutter introduces the central subject of his mature graphic oeuvre—hybrid human heads, sometimes part bird, otherwise displaying exotic floral forms.

Resource: The Chicago Imagist Print: Ten Artists' Works, 1958-1987: A Catalogue Raisonne, Dennis Adrian and Richard Born. Sue Taylor, ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago, David & Alfred Smart Museum, 1987, p.12.