Josh Agle is no starving artist. Agle,better known as Shag,has built a business empire around his signature paintings of cocktail drinking swingers from the 1950s and ’60s.
His work is found in chic galleries and on T-shirts, skateboards, lighters, checks,even at the Venetian hotel and casino in Las Vegas.
Hipsters covet clothes, stickers and other items bearing Agle’s work. Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Stiller and other fans pay up to $6,000 apiece for his original paintings.
The 15 works in Agle’s current show,Night of the Tiki at Culver City’s Copro/Nason Fine Art gallery,sold out at the opening. Now he’s readying for a couple of November shows in Japan.
In all, Shag products generate more than $1 million a year in revenue, Agle estimates. Like any good artist, though, he’s quick to add he sees only a percentage of that.
Still, “it’s one of those dream jobs,” Agle said. “Anybody who wants to be an artist dreams of being able to make a good living at it. I feel really lucky.”
Like the trendy surfwear, apparel and rock bands that come from here, Agle is among Orange County’s cool set. He’s part of a thriving local design economy that’s helping to dispel OC’s old stereotypes.
“Most of the galleries that represent me are in bigger cities,” said Agle, who lives in Orange a few blocks from the circle. “If they know where Orange County is, they’re always surprised to hear that’s where I live.”
Agle’s modern, cartoon-like paintings are all about retro chic: they’re full of swinging bachelors, mod women, tiki motifs, swimming pools and bars serving colorful drinks. Others feature beatniks, jazz types and ghouls that look like they’re from “The Addams Family.”
All of Agle’s paintings are signed “Shag,” a nickname derived from the last two letters of his first name and the first two of his family name.
Old, But New
Agle’s work is “fresh and new” even if it is “derivative of ’40s, ’50s and ’60s culture,” said Dianna Rivera-Miller, director of the city-run Brea Galley, which is hosting a Shag retrospective a year from now.
“I think that’s why it speaks to me so much,” Rivera-Miller said. “I grew up listening to the Rat Pack because of my parents, and all the ’60s stuff growing up.”
The Brea show,Sophisticated Misfits: The Art of Shag,is set to mark the first in OC dedicated to Agle’s work. Rivera-Miller said she first saw Agle’s paintings in Los Angeles and set out to put together an exhibit at her gallery.
“Then I came to find out he lives in Orange and went to Cal State Long Beach, where I went,” she said.
While the paintings set for the Brea show won’t be for sale, proceeds from other gallery shows make up half of Agle’s business, he said. Products bearing Shag images make up the rest,and they’re growing, he said.
Agle’s done T-shirts, handbags, bar stools, wallets and other items for Newport Beach-based Paul Frank Industries Inc. There are lighters from Bradford, Pa.-based Zippo Manufacturing Co. He’s also done skateboards for San Diego-based Foundation Skateboard Co. and cocktail sugar tins for Los Angeles-based Planet Sugar.
“Every year, it seems like I license my artwork to more products, and it becomes a bigger percentage of my income,” Agle said. “Some artists think that’s sort of crass. But I never thought I would be showing my paintings in galleries and be considered a fine artist.”
The limited items Agle did for Paul Frank now are collector’s items, according to Ryan Heuser, the apparel company’s president.
“The Shag and Paul Frank collaborated efforts have sold through to the piece,” Heuser said. “The items are so sought after they can be found in limited numbers on eBay, going for hundreds of dollars.”
Agle also designs tiki mugs for San Clemente-based Tiki Farm Inc., a maker of Polynesian-style statues, masks and other items. The affiliation has been a boon for the year-old company, according to founder and owner Holden Westland.
“It launched us,” Westland said. “People who were familiar with Shag learned about us as a result of the mugs.”
Agle’s work can be found in other places, too. He did the cover for “Tiki Drinks,” a handbook for umbrella drinks that came out last year.
A recent edition of Los Angeles-based Barracuda Magazine bears a Shag cover and a piece penned by Agle that’s titled “Shag: A Man and the Vehicle That He Loves.”
His passion: a 1964 Ford Thunderbird. Agle also did T-shirts for the magazine.
In Las Vegas, Agle has designed menu layouts, cocktail napkins, matchbooks, casino chips and a mural for a new lounge opening in the Venetian.
Called Venus, the lounge has an “early ’60s, Las Vegas vibe,” according to Agle, who received a flat fee for his work with the prospect of licensing revenue from T-shirts.
In a bid to house several Shag products in one place, Agle’s brother, Piet Agle, started Switched On Gallery in Costa Mesa about a year and a half ago. The tiny store,in about 700 square feet of space,does most of its business via the Web, according to Piet Agle.
But now Switched On Gallery is moving to a 1,800-square-foot showroom and warehouse a few blocks away.
“We’re trying to run a business that is getting close to seven figures a year out of 700 square feet,” Piet Agle said.
The most popular Switched On Gallery items are prints of his brother’s paintings, which sell for about $100 apiece, Piet Agle said.
Saying No
New products are in the works. Josh Agle said he’s working on a line of Hawaiian-style print shirts for Costa Mesa-based surfwear maker Toes on the Nose.
But Agle said he is at the point where he has to say no to some proposals. He said he gets a lot of pitches these days, for everything from refrigerator magnets to bobbing head dolls.
Some of the ideas that come his way are “a little too much into the Spencer Gifts category,” he said.
“I used to hate to say no to anything,” Agle said. “Five years ago, I felt if I said no to a job, well next month there might not be a job.”
Agle’s challenge: cashing in on the popularity of his work without over doing it.
“Most of the work I do I try and do in signed, limited editions,” he said. “That means the companies have to make small amounts of the stuff. But it also means it is usually the highest priced stuff in their line.”
Agle’s timing was right. He started doing paintings in the mid-1990s (back then, they sold for a few hundred dollars apiece). Then came a revival of tiki and cocktail culture, fueled in part by things such as the 1996 movie “Swingers.”
The question for Agle is whether nostalgia for bachelor pads and martinis has peaked, and will his work endure after it fades.
“I was thinking it peaked four years ago, but it hasn’t,” Agle said. “Every year it gets bigger. This could be the peak now for all I know. I hope I’m not so identified with that and the artwork will rise above.”
Agle said he’s already moving on. His current show in Culver City is likely to be his last featuring tiki themes, he said.
A native of Sierra Madre, Agle got his start doing commercial illustration, mainly record covers. He’s done covers for The Dickies, the nutty Los Angeles punk band, and a Sex Pistols box set.
Agle, an amateur musician himself who’s played in OC bands the Tiki Tones, Swamp Zombies and the Huntington Cads, first moved to Orange to serve as art director for Dr. Dream Records, an independent punk label based in the city.
Turning a Page
The record cover work helped get him noticed, Agle said. That led to illustration jobs for Time, Entertainment Weekly and other magazines.
Two years ago, Agle did a Forbes illustration that depicted “the world of Paul Allen,” where technologies the Microsoft Corp. co-founder has invested in ruled the living room.
“It turns out the magazine illustration paid a lot better than the record industry,” Agle said.
Agle hasn’t done any magazine work for about a year now. Just as magazines supplanted his record work, paintings and licensed products now are king.
“The time I spent doing magazine illustrations vs. the time I spent creating a T-shirt or something paid off a lot better,” Agle said. “And I’m also the big boss. It’s a lot more gratifying creatively, as well as financially.”
Agle spent time in Hawaii as a child but said he isn’t sure where his love of tiki and cocktail culture comes from. Agle was raised Mormon, but said he isn’t religious today. His parents live in Irvine,his father, Larry Agle, is an accountant and partner in his own Lake Forest practice, DeKarver & Agle.
Compared with the mores of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Agle said his work is “divergent.”
“The only thing I can chalk it up to is the lure of the forbidden,” he said. “Mormons are forbidden from drinking and smoking. Yet in almost all of my paintings, there’s drinking, smoking, going to a bar, or all three.”
Agle lives on a bucolic street in the historic part of Orange. His wife Glen teaches English as a second language in downtown Los Angeles. The two have a 3-year-old daughter, Zoey.
The house is a showcase of Agle’s collections: 1950s furniture trawled from thrift shops, Polynesian statutes and a wall full of vintage tiki mugs.
Agle said he and his wife have looked at bigger houses in the hills above Orange but haven’t found anything to their liking.
“We have such specific tastes,” he said. “We like the 1950s, 1960s aesthetic, and there are a lot of homes up there like that. But you step inside and they’re just horrid,four or five decades of whatever was current at that time. Our dream would be to find an untouched house up there where some 90-year-old couple did it the way they wanted back in 1962 and it stayed like that.” n
