Askew aspired to compete in Olympic weight lifting, but had very little money to sustain himself through a long training session. He considered relocating to a place where it was cheaper to live. He figured that Tahiti was a good combination of salubrious climate and affordable living. He planned to move there with a fellow weight lifter Alex Dick, who also happened to be a sign painter.

In a sign painting trade magazine, Askew had seen an article about the velvet painter, Edgar Leeteg. The article showed some of his velvet paintings and said that he lived in Tahiti, so Askew and Dick decided to look up Leeteg once they landed in the islands.

They hit it off with Leeteg, and Leeteg invited the two fellows to live on a piece of land he had on Moorea. Askew and Dick built a hut on the land with a commanding view of Cook’s Bay. They tended a garden for food and learned to cook on hot stones. Between their garden, the coconuts growing nearby and a generally low cost of living, they spent only about $4 a week on food.

They would regularly go to Papeete and visit with Leeteg. Leeteg was usually very secretive about his velvets and would stop painting and cover up his work whenever visitors came by. But as he got to know Askew and Dick better, he became more comfortable, and would work while they watched.

Eric Askew (left) with the famous velvet painter Edgar Leeteg (middle) and Askew’s friend Dick in Tahiti.

Because of the friendship they had developed, Leeteg explained his technique for painting on velvet to Askew, but asked him never to reveal it to anyone.

Askew is now 84 years old, but shows no signs of slowing down. He hasn’t surfed in over 30 years, because he says the surf is too crowded, but he still windsurfs and skis regularly. When ski season comes around, he sounds like a teenage ski bum, paring back his work schedule to allow more time for skiing.

“It always surprises people that this old fart is out there windsurfing or skiing,” says Askew, “People always ask how old I am and then say, ‘I hope I can do that when I’m you’re age.’ I tell them they can if they want to.

“I tell them they can’t eat at McDonalds. You’ve got to eat a whole lot of fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. Eat whole grains. You can’t have a lot of white sugar. You can’t drink. You gotta cut back on the salt. People say, ‘I can’t do that!’ Then you’ll have a lot of pain when you’re older. There’s no trick way, unfortunately.”

The subjects of Askew’s paintings (which are often bucolic Polynesian portraits and maritime scenes) reflect his love of the sea. “What you paint reflects what is in your mind,” says Askew, “[Crude art] doesn’t appeal to me at all. Why? It appeals to the cruder part of my mind. I don’t want to be involved with that. I don’t want to be around crudity. I want to be around the better things in life.

“If I paint a nude, it’s got to be a gracious nude, not something crude. It’s a part of me and I’m not going to do something like that.”

Askew, who is still a prolific artist, has started painting velvets again recently, after not having done one for about 25 years.

To this day, Askew honors his 60 year-old promise to Leeteg and has never disclosed the velvet painting secrets Leeteg showed him. Will he ever pass the velvet painting techniques on to a new generation of artists? “No,” Askew answers firmly and abruptly, “Leeteg’s gone on and that’s the way it is. There are a few little tricks there and I might as well hold onto those.”

Eric Askew’s art is featured at the Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City.

Excerpted from the print edition of Barracuda issue #08.

Palm Springs has received a lot of attention lately for its wealth of modern and post-modern architecture. One architecture firm was largely responsible for a changing the face of Palm Springs from a sleepy desert town into a jet-setting community of the future. The firm was the Alexander Construction Company, founded by Robert Alexander and his father George.

The Alexander Construction Company was quite prolific. Between 1947 and 1957, they built 2,200 modern-style homes around Palm Springs. The company’s homes had such a large influence on the character of Palm Springs during that period that realtors often use the word “Alexander” almost like an adjective when describing a modern-styled building.

Pre-modern architectural design had always been hindered by limitations imposed by building materials and techniques. But modernists had new techniques and materials available to them and could seemingly build anything they dreamed up. Form would no longer so slavishly follow function for them and they set out to break all conventions.

The most obvious manifestations of conventional architecture were the right angle, symmetrical angles and parallel lines. Modernist architects added curves, askew angles and free-standing elements to their designs as a break with restraints of the past and an embrace of the future’s potential.

Located at the end of Ladera Circle in Palm Springs, California, the “Elvis Honeymoon House” is a classic example of modern architecture. The house was designed by Robert Alexander in the early 1960s. Its primary design consists of four circular structures on three different levels. (The circular motif is why the house is sometimes referred to as the “platter house.”) The front entrance of the house has free-standing steps made out of circular stones that casually rise up over a man-made stream and lead to the front door.

The house has large windows, with wide-open, beautiful mountain views. This combines with the “peanut brittle” masonry to keep the house from ever feeling too sterile or far-removed from the nearby natural desert terrain. In true modernist style, the house fits in with the severe climate of the desert, yet it is never subservient to it.

The livingroom has a built-in 64-foot curved sofa that runs along the outer circumference of the room. Through the back of the livingroom is a view of the pool and patio and the nearby mountains. The circular theme continues with the focal point of the livingroom — a round, free-standing gas fireplace with an exhaust shroud that looks like the engine from a Saturn rocket.

In addition to the central air conditioning system, the house also features a centralized vacuuming system, an innovation first used by visionary modernist architect Irving Gill. Each room has a plate mounted on the baseboard, which a vacuuming attachment hooks into. The suction for vacuuming the entire house is provided from a single machine, eliminating the need to drag a portable vacuum cleaner from room to room.

The circular section of the home which is most easily visible from the street contains the master bedroom. The jet-age feeling of the house is most apparent here. The bedroom portion sits atop a stone wall and is flanked by what appears to be two straight supports that meet at a point in the front of the house and point skyward.

The master bathroom contains a shower and a very deep bathtub recessed into the floor and set at an askew angle to the surrounding walls.

In 1962, Look magazine ran and article called “The Way Out Way Of Life.” It featured the Alexanders and their “House Of Tomorrow.” The article included photos of the jet-setting Alexanders lounging on their gigantic sofa. There was also a photo of Mr. Alexander in front of the house, heading to work with briefcase in hand. It shows him cooly hopping into his Jaguar and dressed in desert casual meets modern professional attire. There were also photos of Mrs. Alexander playing socialite, hobnobbing poolside with no less of a celebrity than Mrs. Zeppo Marx.

The Alexanders were much-celebrated in Palm Springs and enjoyed their house as a hub of local social life. Tragically, in 1965, the jet-setting lifestyle took an ugly turn when the Alexanders were killed in a small plane crash.

It is an incredibly interesting house solely on the merits of its modern design and the fact that it was the personal residence of such an influential Palm Springs architect. However, the house had a second chance at fame when it became the residence of Elvis Presley.

In the mid-1960s, Elvis was as much of a movie star as he was a singer. As such, he spent a lot of time in Hollywood shooting films. Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, lived in the same neighborhood as the Alexanders house and thought it would make a good house for Elvis to use as a retreat from the scrutiny of the media in Los Angeles. In 1966, he rented the house for Elvis at the cost of $21,000 a year.

Elvis entertained friends and his fiancee Priscilla at the house. He would often ride into town on his Harley for ice cream or to race go karts. It was in the Palm Springs house that Elvis had one of his most infamous moments — shooting out a TV screen with a pistol.

In 1967, Elvis and Priscilla were to be married by the pool in the backyard of the house. But the arrival of friends and family tipped off then-leading gossip columnist Rona Barrett (who also lived in the neighborhood) that a wedding was imminent. As the media descended upon the house, Elvis and Priscilla changed plans, deciding to get married in Vegas. In the middle of the night, they snuck into an alley behind the house, where a limo took them to Frank Sinatra’s learjet. They were married in the Aladdin Hotel.

The next day they returned to honeymoon in the Palm Springs house, which is how it got its nickname as the “Elvis Honeymoon House.”

The house has been returned to its mid-1960s splendor (minus the shag carpeting) and is adorned with Elvis memorabilia.

See more photos of the house in the print edition of Barracuda #11.

His initial impressions of Tahiti were mixed. The Tahitian government demanded almost half of his pocket money as a “landing tax” on his arrival. In order to sustain himself, Leeteg sold his boots and his camera, getting by on soup and bread.

In a never completed autobiography, he wrote of the jungles of Tahiti, saying that they “exceeded the glowing words of the travel folders.” In the same paragraph, however, he talked about the Tahitian people in not-so-flattering terms. He described lying in the road, doubled over in pain from ptomaine poisoning and being ignored by passersby.

“Tahiti seems to have a dearth of Good Samaritans,” he said. The only souvenir that he made note of was a sexually transmitted disease he picked up the night before he left.

“No, I can’t say that my first acquaintance with Tahiti made me vow to return some day,” he wrote, “Adding up and balancing the pleasure and the pain, I did not then care if I ever saw the place again.”

When he got back to his job, America was being strangled by the depression. There was very little work to go around, and the jobs that were available were being milked to provide employment for as many people as possible.

Leeteg caught grief from his fellow workers simply because he returned from vacation. They felt his return was essentially taking work away from them. They also resented him because he was unmarried and therefore didn’t need the work as much as a married man did. He was even put on trial by his union for working overtime to finish a job in a remote location, rather than returning the next day to complete it.

He had no interest in dragging his feet to stretch out work, and seeing his co-workers squabbling over work was beginning to make him bitter.

Then, a letter arrived from a friend he had made while in Tahiti. The letter said that a theater was going to be built in Tahiti and they wanted to hire him to paint the signs for the lobby.

Faced with continuing to struggle amongst featherbedders and a paltry paycheck in the U.S., Leeteg discussed his options with his mother, Bertha. Late in 1932, he stole some brushes from work and filled several empty mayonnaise jars with paint. With only his aged mother, a portable record player and his pilfered art supplies, he tossed his job to the wolves and left the U.S., bound for Tahiti, “where all the happy failures go.”

Leeteg had found a niche for himself by revitalizing and revolutionizing velvet painting, but there was still no market for his work, and certainly no critical acceptance of the medium. He occasionally sold a few paintings, but it was mainly to sailors for a few dollars. He would oftentimes trade a painting to a bartender for a bottle of whiskey.

A turning point in Leeteg’s career came when a jeweler named Wayne Decker visited Tahiti on a vacation cruise. He happened upon several of Leeteg’s velvets in a shop full of junk. He decided that he must have one of these paintings, but when he excitedly returned to the shop with his wife, all of the paintings were gone.

The shop owner didn’t know where Leeteg lived. So, Decker spent the rest of the day searching every bar in Tahiti, looking for Leeteg and leaving word that he wanted to buy some of his paintings.

Just two hours before Decker’s ship was to set sail, he saw a man fitting Leeteg’s description (a rotund, staggering American) approaching the ship.

Leeteg stepped up to Decker and said with a grin, “You must be Mr. Decker. Crawford told me when I found the loudest Hawaiian shirt I’d ever seen, it’d be you.”

Decker invited Leeteg down to his cabin. He stayed for a few hours and went on to tell Decker of his flight from the States and describing the method he had developed for painting on black velvet. Decker finally asked how much it would cost for Leeteg to reproduce some of the paintings he had seen in the junk shop.

“If you will give me that fancy Hawaiian shirt I will make one for you,” replied Leeteg. Decker took the shirt off his back and gave it to Leeteg, along with four more of his loudest aloha shirts and $200.

Tears welled up in Leeteg’s eyes. He said he was so moved because Decker was the first person who had trusted him since he arrived in the islands.

Touched by Leeteg’s generosity and thrilled with the quality of the paintings, Decker wrote to Leeteg, ordering at least ten paintings a year for an indefinite amount of time–for any price within reason. This standing order would stay in place for the rest of Leeteg’s life. Decker would eventually own over 200 Leeteg velvet paintings.

Decker was Leeteg’s first patron, and their arrangement allowed Leeteg to finally end his flirtations with abject poverty. Although this financial stability was beneficial to Leeteg for obvious reasons, it was equally important because it shored up his confidence. He was finally given an outside reassurance that he was on the right track.

“Nuts to art. Genius is just the compelling desire to excel, to express one’s self, to give enjoyment to others, this plus nature’s gift of a super-abundance of energy over and above the requirements for daily living. A surplus of exuberance to share among those around us.

“…The so-called fine arts have been on the skids since the turn of the century, when impressionism was aborted into the birth of all “isms” of abstract painting. Art is, always has been and, if it is to survive, always must be emotional. To make it coldly intellectual by abstractionism and impressionism is to destroy it or mold it into a monstrosity that is better kept locked up in musty museums. I frankly would rather prefer to have my paintings displayed in a gin-mill rather than buried in a repository together with the rest of the dead art, which is where this modern crap will end up.

“I refuse to be converted. The other day one of these ‘artsy artists’ from the Metropolitan in New York was sitting right on this lanai and he did some sketching of this bay. He showed me his finished canvas. I wanted to vomit when he showed me what a sacrilegious abortion he painted of my beautiful Paradise. I was quite frank with him. I told him I had seen better similar art on a stableboy’s shovel!”

– a letter from Leeteg to Aloha Barney

Excerpted from Barracuda issue #06.