Shannon Cottrell

Kevin Eastman at Meltdown Comics.

Read more in "Kevin Eastman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Co-Creator, Takes Over Meltdown Comics for 35 Days." See more photos in "Kevin Eastman @ Meltdown Comics."

When Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman took over a portion of Meltdown Comics for "Lost Angeles: 35 Days with Kevin Eastman," he brought his studio with him. Now, the contents of his space are up for grabs on eBay. Kevin Eastman's Art Studio Auction opened on December 25. As of December 30, the top bid was over $7,000.

Early in December, I met with Eastman at Meltdown to talk about his work over the years. Last Wednesday, I returned to his gallery/pop-up shop with photographer Shannon Cottrell for the 35th anniversary party for Heavy Metal Magazine, which the artist has owned since the early 1990s. While we were there, we took a peek inside the studio.

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Diana Cheng: Parade

Open studio tours leave you thinking, "Yes, the art is lovely, but what will the inside of this person's bathroom look like?"

While out on an afternoon stroll this past Sunday, Colleen Crosby found herself drawn to the orange paper lantern and colorful, framed stencil-work at the opening of a driveway a few blocks from her home. Entering the front yard of artist Diana Cheng, Crosby discovered a large table covered in vibrant serigraphs and accidentally happened upon stop number six of nine on the Silver Lake Art Collective's 11th annual, self-guided Open Studio Tour, a relaxed and intimate event held this past Saturday and Sunday afternoons at artists' homes across Silver Lake.

Crosby ended up leaving with a few of Cheng's prints and a renewed sense of community spirit. "We will enjoy these for many years. Thank you," she said, leaning down to give the diminutive Cheng a hug. This was the first time the two women had met, though Crosby has lived blocks away for 14 years and Cheng has been in Silver Lake since 1948, when she came to the United States from Beijing. One of Cheng's friends, an older man who lives in Koreatown and sported a purple-striped turtleneck, a windbreaker and tan slip-on shoes, sat in a lawn chair overseeing the good cheer. He told me he'd met Cheng at a dance hall at a senior citizen center, and that he hadn't even known she was an artist until very recently.

Founded in 2001, Silver Lake Arts Collective (SLAC) consists mostly of older artists who show their work at outdoor festivals like Beverly Hills' annual Affaire in the Garden. 84-year old Bea Gold specializes in wood-cuts and commissioned portraits, and recently published an illustrated book of stories about growing up in New York in the 1930s and 40s. Julie Bagish, one of the founders of SLAC, is a lively grandmother with orange and pink hair who creates Japanese tea-ware and pottery as well as larger, maritime-themed works of ceramic collage. Her vivid blue, fish-centric tile-work splashes across her front yard, across the floors and up the stairs of her house, along the countertops and stove of her kitchen and throughout her upstairs bathrooms; those of you who missed this opportunity to gape and envy can find an installation of Bagish's Watts Towers-meets-Finding Nemo collage-work at Cliff's Edge on Sunset Blvd.

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Shannon Cottrell

For more photos check out our slideshow, Sage Vaughn: Studio Tour

Sage Vaughn, one of SoCal's favorite contemporary urban naturalist painters, is tucked inside a quaint and tidy mid century modern one story studio, located right where Pasadena ends. There's a small group of mourning doves that gather daily outside his door waiting for seeds, unnervingly oblivious to the occasional hawk overhead. Prime death watch viewing if he's not busy researching other concepts of animal behavior, whether it's a Wagner opera or in an inherited collection of vintage Hustler magazines.

This particular morning, upon LA Weekly's arrival, we find red velvet cupcakes and a mean cup of joe complete with hand frothed milk waiting for us. Not a typical artist interview welcome, but our man Sage is anything but typical -- evidenced by the ski mask he always wears tucked in his back pocket.

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Bill Lagattuta: The Arrow Project.

The weekend on the L.A. River, in brief: kayaking in the Sepulveda Basin, cigarette breaks and joints on the bike path in Elysian Valley.

At the sixth annual Frogtown Artwalk, held along a dimly stretch of warehouses and mixed-use buildings on Blake Avenue along the river, the waterway's future as a public resource came into focus, both as a haven for environmentalists and fitness freaks and a scenic reprieve for the urban adventurer.

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Courtesy of Alia Penner

Alia Penner, lounging on possibly the most colorful couch in the world.

Alia Penner is an artist with unquestionable style. Her work is scattered all around L.A., from her loopy '70s-inspired Cinefamily posters to her work designing t-shirt prints for Shepard Fairey's company, Obey. But she's also become an online style darling for her hippie aesthetics and kooky collection of vintage dresses. This isn't surprising, given that Penner comes from the bohemian enclave of Topanga Canyon, and spent her childhood dreaming about bright, psychedelic color.
After a T magazine profile on her brief foray into dress-making, she's been flooded with requests for lookbooks and portfolios.

Recently, the laid-back Penner's stylish, retro illustrations have taken her into the epicenter of the very un-laid-back world of fashion. She's been set designing and photographing for cult indie fashion magazine Lula, worked with model Erin Wasson and Missoni among others, and just came back from a trip to Paris, where she did a collaboration with Colette, the Parisian dictator of cool.

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Shannon Cottrell

Check Archaia's L.A. office in Shannon Cottrell's slideshow, "Archaia Studio Tour."

Archaia has something big in store for this fall. On November 16, one week before Thanksgiving and the release of The Muppets, the Los Angeles-based comic book company will unleash A Tale of Sand, a new graphic novel based on a "lost" screenplay written by Jim Henson and writing partner Jerry Juhl.

"It's the last and only screenplay that Henson never got to produce in his lifetime," says Archaia Editor-in-Chief, Stephen Christy, "so we're bringing it to life as a graphic novel."

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Shannon Cottrell

See more of Shannon Cottrell's photos in "Inside COOP's Studio: Huge Paintings, Pinball Machines, Toy Collections and Cute Dogs."

L.A.-based artist COOP, famous for his references to cars, comics, devils and hot girls, once built a Model A Sedan.

"Obviously, I had as much help on it as I could," he told us when we visited his downtown Los Angeles studio.

"It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, but when you drive a car where every nut and bolt of it you've held in your hands, it's just a totally different thing," he says. "It's kind of a hunk of junk, but the car has a soul to it and it's kind of difficult to express. It's like a painting to me that I can drive around in and it has a lot of meaning to me to have that car."

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Carol Cheh

E. Kim Bolanowski shows off her brand new glass-blowing furnace and oven, built by her husband

Just as Topanga Canyon lies on the outskirts of Los Angeles, the art that is shown there tends to exist outside of the dominant art dialogue that takes place in the city's museums, art spaces and galleries. This leads many in "the LA Art World" to dismiss the annual Topanga Canyon Gallery Artists Studio Tour, which took place this past weekend, as an outpost for "bad" art. And indeed, there was some typical "bad" art on display there -- tepid landscapes and still lifes, sloppy abstract painting, clumsy/gaudy collages, juvenile narratives of one sort or another.

But there were also some cool finds that perhaps spoke to the region's storied history as an enclave for outsiders and dropouts of every stripe. People hang out there because they need to be away from it all, for one reason or another; and the art they produce, as well as the lives they lead there, provide some interesting windows into another art world.

In the most remote southern corner of the studio tour route, high atop a hill overlooking the Santa Monica Mountains, was a stunning house that was designed and built by fused glass artist E. Kim Bolanowski and her husband Ron, two over-achievers if I've ever met any. Although both have full-time careers in The Industry -- Kim in props for television, her husband in special effects for movies -- Ron, an engineer, somehow found time to build a complete set of glass-blowing machinery (including a furnace, oven, "glory hole" and kiln) from scratch, and Kim, a self-taught artist, somehow finds the time to have a thriving home practice. It boggles the mind.

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Shannon Cottrell

Vanessa Prager

See more photos in Shannon Cottrell's slideshow, "Vanessa Prager: Studio Tour."

When 26-year-old painter Vanessa Prager was just 19, she decided that she wanted to paint.

"I started drawing when I was a teenager," said Prager when we met at her Silver Lake studio. "I wanted to get bigger and more colorful than pencil would allow and then painting came up out of that."

She went to some thrift stores, picked up how-to books and taught herself.

"That was how I learned to paint," she said. "And trial and error. A lot of error."

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Photos by Gendy Alimurung

Painter Audrey Kawasaki works in a cozy two-story Los Angeles apartment that also serves as her home. The place is filled with light, books, art, and a cornucopia of creepy, cute collectibles.

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