Synopsis

During the seven years chronicled in the film, artist and musician Llyn Foulkes creates, destroys, and recreates a pair of large-scale, three-dimensional paintings, one that costs him his marriage, while trying to keep afloat in the fickle art market. With interviews from veterans of the 1960s Los Angeles art scene such as Dennis Hopper and George Herms, the film reconstructs Foulkes’s uncompromising, up-and-down career as he was kicked out of the legendary Ferus Gallery and walked away from a successful career as an L.A. pop artist. Structured like one of Foulkes’s constantly reworked paintings, the film tracks his artistic struggles, ending as he is at last rediscovered by the international art world at age 77. With music written and performed by Foulkes on a massive, fanciful, self-invented musical instrument he calls “The Machine,” the film is a portrait of an artist battling his own demons as well as the perceived demons of the art world.

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