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John Ehn's body lies a mold'rin' in the grave
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There's a lumpy, farting, gum-chewing thing in the art world called outsider art. Outsider art can be many things - art by the disabled or merely unschooled, art in the eye of the beholder, or just art out of fashion. Here in ultra-sophisticated, un-bumpkinish Los Angeles, it seems that outsider art might be something of an endangered species. Thankfully, that just ain't so.
You see, once upon a time there was a man named John Ehn who owned a motel in Sun Valley which he named The Old Trapper's Lodge. Mr. Ehn littered the property with a slew of sculptures of his own making, eventually creating a landscape for which David Milch would give his eye-teeth. Time passed, Ehn died, the place was declared a landmark but was still razed. You know, typical LA story.
But the Old Trapper had some fans, apparently, and these fans (we prefer to think of them as a group rather than one lone character, for some reason) arranged for the transport of many of the statues (no! they had not been destroyed!) to a particularly rural corner of the old seat of agricultural learning in San Fernando Valley, Pierce College. And there they sit, to this day. There's some sort of children's day camp that goes on in the summer at the park where the statues are situated, which we find highly inappropriate but just as highlarious. And these aforementioned fans? To this day, they maintain the paint jobs on the statues and Boot Hill gravestones, and we're still unable to discern just who these mysterious fans are.
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