The Painting That Predicted the Future

Artist John Padlo shares the story of “Bad Days”

BY LEX NELSON

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF JOHN PADLO

When oil painter, tinker, and retro toy enthusiast John Padlo was a student at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, he took a class from a famous Olympic fencer-turned-sculptor. Professor Peter Schifrin didn’t play by the usual rulebook. On the day of the first critique of the semester, Schifrin asked his students to bring cameras to class.

“We didn’t really understand why he said to bring a camera,” Padlo remembers, “but once the critique was done he said, ‘Okay, go ahead and destroy [your sculpture]. You have three minutes — or five minutes, or whatever — to photograph your sculpture and then destroy it.”

“My eyes opened up!” Padlo says. He’d expected to take his sculpture homeand show it off, but now he had less than five minutes to demolish six weeks of hard work. When students protested, Shifrin threatened to give them failing grades if they didn’t follow his order.

“[Shifrin said,] ‘Here’s the deal: If you’re going to be a successful artist you need to be willing to let go of everything you create,’” Padlo recalls. “‘We’re not here to hoard paintings and save stuff. It’s not a sentimental situation. We’re here to create stuff and sell art.’”

Padlo broke his sculpture apart. Years later, he told the story of Shifrin’s lesson to explain how he managed to give up the painting “Bad Days”, a startling portrait that hangs on the fireplace of a church-turned-multimillion dollar home in Boise.

Padlo is best known for his nostalgic paintings of robots, vintage toys, candy, and UFOs in bright pop-art colors, but “Bad Days” features a coiffed blonde woman set against a backdrop of blood-red clouds. Black, white, and scarlet tears drip from her eyes like webbed lightning. It’s an ominous image made even more so by its origin story.

The woman was inspired by a life-sized mannequin that sits in Padlo’s creative space alongside his vintage tractors, classic cars, metal fabrication equipment, and toy collection. He painted her on a whim as a way to stretch his creative muscles, adding the sanguine sky to match her lipstick and the tears simply because they fit the “mood”. It was only later that the painting took on the eerie significance.

THIS PAINTING THAT WAS PAINTED WITH NO PLAN, COMPLETELY JUST INTUITIVELY IN A WAY, ALMOST PREDICTED THE FUTURE.

“This painting that was painted with no plan, completely just intuitively in a way, almost predicted the future. The next 10 years of my life,” Padlo says.

Though Padlo was in a sunny frame of mind while painting “Bad Days” in the early 2000s, things quickly fell apart. A divorce, a protracted custody battle, and the financial collapse of the Great Recession sent him into a decade-long depression. He began to see the two largest tears in “Bad Days” as representative of the twin daughters he was fighting for.

Still, he didn’t hesitate to pass the painting on to Cooper Kalisek, a family friend and one of the developers behind the church-turned-house at 1723 West Eastman Street. It hangs there along with seven of Padlo’s other paintings — including robots, toy cars, and a lipstick still life. More than the rest, “Bad Days” rivets Kalisek whenever he walks by.

“It was one of the first paintings I had received from [Padlo] … I kept sitting there and couldn’t stop staring at it,” Kalisek says.

Distilled on canvas, 10 years of hardship can have that effect.

To learn more about John Padlo and his work, visit JohnPadloArt.com.