Gary Panter blog

ABEL

In high school, on Spence Street in Sulphur Springs, Texas, I took over the family garage and turned it into a psychedelic dungeon with the help of my friends. The decoration began in Rat Fink days with a big Rat Fink HOT CURL mural on three walls.

I would paint little figures on paper in green and red lines and flash red and green painted glass lenses alternately to animate the figures. We made film loops and stained them with thinned oil paint and enamels and got strobe lights from the Edmund Scientific catalog.

Later in HIPPIE times, we walled off the garage door and built a carpeted stage. I did lots of big paintings and sculptures in there and black light posters of JIMI HENDRIX and AUBREY BEARDSLEY began to cover the hotrod and surfing imagery.

My friends and I made a sculpture that we called ABEL that was an antique trunk, housing colored lights surmounted by a watercooler-sized water bottle with dyed water that was bottom-lit from the housed lights. The thing stood on four chrome exhaust extensions. It was dandy. Nearby was a giant driftwood root we'd dragged home from the local reservoir. I'd carved it into an abstract angelbirdskull and impaled it on an improvised bent rebar stand.

There was a dark blue bass drum that I slowly painted with white enamel paisleys. I badgered my parents into buying me a green multilensed glass light fixture that hung from the ceiling on a chain. I would swing the hanging fixture with great vigor and we would all get dizzy in there.

How did they make those blobby lightshow effects back in the 1960s?

In the sixties various means were used and superimposed to make lightshows.

The earliest effects used hand-painted slides, scratched film and blistering paint effects made by mixing incompatible transparent paints and painting onto bulbs, refraction with crystals, filmloops, etc.

The typical '60s blobby lights were made using overhead projectors like schools use. On the underlit glass area, where the transparency usually goes, is placed a big clear pyrex dish. Into the dish are mixed oils and water colored with various dyes. Onto this mess is lowered some kind of big convex glass lens like might be found on a train light. The lens is used to squash the oil and water creating blobby actions. The dish is operated in sync to the music by the lens holder.

It's very messy and you don't want to get electrocuted playing around with liquids and electricity, so watch out!