[music playing] As far as a punk rock band could have a rock star, he was kind of a rock star.

He was a rock star in our city and in our “scene.” As a teenager, I was always interested in music, and then punk rock came along in 1978, and once I started listening to some of the British punk bands, I was an instant convert.

[music playing] Since the 1980s, Lawrence Tarpey has been making provocative music and art, and he leans on some fundamental philosophies that inform both pursuits.

The whole idea of punk rock was DIY, do it yourself.

DIY, do it yourself, came up as an aesthetic, came up as an underpinning, and a sort of credo, and Lawrence's art represents the same punk rock DIY stuff.

[music playing] He has a kind of what I often call an alien vision.

I know the work probably comes a lot out of surrealism.

It probably comes a lot out of counterculture images, and he has, I think, probably the strongest, most unique personal vision that I know of in an artist, and I don't see any direct influences of anybody on his work.

I think he's the true original.

[music playing] I always had a desire to kind of sing in a rock band, you know, and this was an opportunity.

It's like, well, let's see what happens.

I got, you know, got together with a few guys, and we started a band, a band called Active Ingredients, and it was a lot of fun.

Active Ingredients was the band to measure by.

They were always the band that was asked to go up to Newport and open up for other really large punk rock bands.

The Jockey Club in Newport, Kentucky, was one of the premier punk rock venues in the Midwest.

In those days, stapling homemade flyers to telephone poles was how bands advertised their shows, and Lawrence has been creating flyers and album art for more than 40 years.

You could tell an Active Ingredients flyer immediately.

His stuff was hand-drawn.

It was figurative, but he was accentuating it to make it not real and not 100% representative.

Another element that's hard to miss in Lawrence's work is the underlying sense of humor.

The title of the EP was Bringing Down the Big Boys, and so I just thought, well, here's this, you know, character on the cover with the chainsaw, and he's chopping down some giants.

It has a comic sensibility, which isn't just silly, but beneath that, there is a real seriousness about composition and about making things work together and pulling off this little surface that he's controlling.

That's his little world at that time.

I think of his works as needing to be probably a small size.

It's intimate.

It's meant to be looked at by one person at a time.

But the music is a different matter altogether.

After Active Ingredients called it quits, Lawrence got together with a new band, and it wasn't long before they were filling local venues.

His next band, Resurrected Bloated Floaters, really embraced more of a bit of a country punk sing-along.

[music playing] The Floaters brought Lawrence and drummer Brian Polito together for the first time, and they've been collaborating ever since.

They played in notable bands like the Yellow Belts and Rabby Feeber.

And most recently, they resurrected Rabby Feeber into a two-man studio project.

[music playing] He's got a great setup down in his basement.

It's a pro recording studio.

So we just go down there in the lab and just have fun.

[music playing] ♪ I am a lab made man ♪ Lab made ♪ I am a lab made man ♪ Lab made ♪ I don█t have a guilty pleasure ♪ They covered me with plastic treasure The musical projects and album art involve lots of planning, but Lawrence's process for creating his fantastical paintings is completely different.

If I know what the end image is gonna look like, it's not that exciting to me.

So, that's why I like to work spontaneously, and just whatever happens, happens.

He's making all this up as he goes along, and it's a true stream of consciousness.

The materials, I think, speak to him at first of setting up a situation of starting to work and seeing possibilities in it.

So, I just can put paint down on the surface and start manipulating the paint kind of chaotically, and eventually images start to appear.

Using oil and graphite, Lawrence works on hard surfaces like clayboard or gesso on masonite because his process requires durability.

So, I go in with etching tools, and I can get pretty rough with it.

I like to use utility razor blades to pull paint off because I can get really nice, sharp edges.

And I use a lot of sandpaper and steel wool.

When images start revealing themselves to me, it's exciting.

I can say, “Okay, this is a character that's starting to poke its head through the surface.” He sees possibilities for creatures and heads in everything, I think.

You know, he can put a couple of eyes or even one eye on almost anything, and it becomes a living thing or something that has some kind of life to it.

Whether it's one of his paintings or a digital manipulation of an original work, the worlds Lawrence creates and the creatures that inhabit those worlds are what make his art so compelling.

And for Ron, Lawrence's painting, A Much Better View, is a perfect example of the many elements that make a Tarpey a Tarpey.

It has everything in it that I would like to see in a Lawrence Tarpey work.

It has a cast of thousands, and they're all different.

Some are almost totally abstract and cubist.

There seems to be a heart of the action somewhere in the middle toward the bottom, where maybe two tiny guys might be arguing with each other or something, but we don't know.

[music playing] Unraveling the mysteries of Lawrence Tarpey's work is a delight because that journey inevitably turns our attention toward our own perceptions of reality and creativity.

His passion to create truly original work is an inspiration, and his wonderful creatures are a bizarre reminder of what brings us all together.

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