The American artist Van Arno Schauer, known to the world as Van Arno, was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he attended a Christian Science school. He was accepted at Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, where he studied under Carol Caroompas and Lita Albquerque, supporting himself working late nights as a bouncer in nightclubs including Club Lingerie and looking after adult video arcades.

As a young illustrator his work appeared on album covers, video game box art, and nightclub posters, and in the late eighties he began producing large ‘cut-out’ paintings blending cartoon imagery with portraits of cultural and historical icons. These early paintings used black lines and luridly cartoon colour to depict characters ranging from John F. Kennedy to Herman Goering to Othello. To celebrate Christmas 1962 his guerrilla installation of a twelve-foot-tall angel hovered over Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Van Arno became fascinated with the calendar of the ancient Maya, and travelled to Yucatan to see the ruins at Chichen Itza, Coba and Tulum. During the early 1970s he began to create heroic figurative works featuring religious and folk heroes from Christian, Mayan and American history.

By the mid-1990s Van Arno’s illustration output included storyboarding for Robotech, deck designs for Powell Peralta, box art for Bandai Games, and he found a niche in the music industry where his work included a regular cartoon, Airhead, for HITS magazine.

Gradually shifting his focus to fine art, he began to create heroic figurative works featuring religious, folk, pop culture, and mythical heroes. His Olive Oyl series, based on cartoon sailor Popeye’s headstrong girlfriend, captured much attention as he documented her imagined life as a waterfront floozy.

Van Arno’s work was shown extensively in Los Angeles, Seattle, Santa Fe, Nashville and New York. He was frequently featured in Juxtapoz magazine, and in the spring of 2000 several of his pieces were included in a national survey of Lowbrow painters at the Hollywood Art and Culture Center in Florida. He regularly spoke about the importance of ‘lowbrow’ painting and its place in art history.