Written By Ted Kane, Long Beach Underground

What do you get when you take a well-adjusted young woman who grew up admiring and emulating the art of the classic Walt Disney cartoons and put her under the influence of the notorious Long Beach based artist/Lord of Lowbrow, the Pizz?

Welcome to the world of artist Meghan McMahon, a.k.a Candy, where pretty flowers smoke cigarettes and blood-sucking insects swoon lovingly in vivid Technicolor-like acrylics. Buxom women do abound in Candy's iconography and there is a clear influence from artists like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Robert Williams and the aforementioned Pizz in her draftsmanship, but where those artists seem to delight in shocking their audience with violent imagery, Candy's work seems largely absent such angst; even her pirates, monsters, and most brazen strumpets are rendered with a sense of playfulness rather than paranoia: the re-animated corpse of a voluptuous woman holds a tattered teddy bear; a seeming dominatrix turns the tables by offering to by the viewer a drink.

For her part, in talking with Candy about her work, she describes it as being more of an "Offshoot" of Lowbrow than a pure example of it. Her art features some of the same archetypes found in the genre--skulls, Tiki men, femmes fatale--but the aesthetic appears distinctly feminine in comparison with the testosterone-fueled visions that laid an important part of its foundation. Her other major influence is the art of Disney, and it could be said that her paintings and drawings split the difference between the underground and that most mainstream and all-pervasive of American cultural producers.

This dichotomy may be most clearly summed by her signature creation, the Monster Flower. Her obsession with flowers stems in part from the "Golden afternoon" scene in Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" and partly from her being, in her words, "Such a hippie girl" and liking the actual plants. She also takes some inspiration from a story from Walt Disney's life that she could relate to. As a student, Disney was kicked out of class for drawing faces on flowers when he was supposed to be doing a still-life. An art-school dropout, Candy identified with the impulse to go against the grain. Her subversive side is not neglected, however; in addition to its man-eating tendencies, the Monster Flower sports glazed eyes, a somewhat obscenely long tongue, and is in the habit of smoking cigarettes. The flower, she says, is normally a "Token of purity," but her flowers are "Totally raunched out."

The cliché of the tormented artist does not apply to Candy, whose art is meant to be fun. The life-long resident of the Long Beach area describes both her parents as "Wonderful," crediting her father with instilling her with an appreciation for cartoons and showing her how to draw when she was a child--and, more recently, with restoring her vintage Studebaker; she also gives plenty of credit to the Pizz, who offered further mentorship in not only the technique of art, but its business side as well. And she takes pride in being a part of a Long Beach art scene that is full of so many talented, if less than famous, artists.

For her part, Meghan "Candy" McMahon looks to be well on her way toleaving the ranks of the unknown. Not much older than legal drinkingage, Candy has already appeared in an impressive number of shows and iscontinuing to add to that number. Currently, her art appears monthly with the Cannibal Flower/Sour Harvest group shows (www.cannibalflower.com) and at galleries near and far...