At the age of 78, Foulkes is having his second big moment. The L.A. artist and musician showed with Ferus Gallery in the 1960s and enjoyed early recognition for quirky, detailed oil paintings — an enormous cow, or rocks that sort of looked like people. He later moved on to more complicated mixed-media works, creating intricate scenes that brought together cartoon culture and self-portraiture as well as an ongoing series of grotesque bloody heads. When Scott Indrisek spoke with him, Foulkes had had a few recent pieces in last year’s Documenta (13) exhibition, where he also sang and performed with his complicated, self-made musical instrument, dubbed the Machine. Next month a retrospective of more than five decades of his work comes to the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles; it will travel to the New Museum, in New York, in June.

Scott Indrisek: Was it a daunting task, looking over this much of your work?

Llyn Foulkes: Oh, terrible — like intensive therapy without a therapist. I had to go all the way back to my childhood. You start thinking about the bad things you’ve done and what an idiot you were then. It’s my life, you know. And good or bad, you take it the way it is. Early on in the ’60s I was pretty well known, and then I gave up what I was doing and tried to go back to what I was doing before. Art changed, Minimalism and installation art and all that stuff came in, and there wasn’t that much in the art magazines about me in the ’80s. I’ve had problems from the stock market of art — let’s put it that way. I’ve always been out of the mainstream because I always talk against what’s going on in art.

SI: Did you have a peer group of artists on the West Coast?

LF: I’ve always been pretty much a loner, in the sense that I didn’t really associate with that many other artists. That didn’t help me either. In ’67, when I won the Paris Biennale, I started to feel like I was losing my soul because I would go in the studio and the magic was gone. You just start copying yourself. And then I turned around and started going back into dimension in my paintings, because my paintings had been all flat during the ’60s, except for the very early stuff, which was pretty raw. I put everything from dead possums in them to big black crosses painted with tar. But I didn’t start getting into the art magazines until I started to paint flat.

SI: Have you always supported yourself with just your work, or also doing other things?

LF: In the early ’60s I was driving a taxi and working in a hand-painted picture factory to make money. Hack paintings, they used to call them. You did what you did to survive. And then UCLA asked me to teach in ’65. I was a really good teacher. But that drained me in my art, because I was giving it all out to the students.

SI: And all this time you’ve also been playing music. Is that a distinct endeavor from your visual art?

LF: I’ve always played music, as long as I’ve been an artist. When I’m doing music I don’t think about the painting, even though some of the subject matter is the same. If I have songs about Disney, Mickey Mouse, or the Lone Ranger, any of that stuff — it’s in my paintings and my music both. But I’m also really into jazz and a lot of improvisation. See, when I was 10 or 11, I wanted to be a cartoonist. And then I heard Spike Jones. He had a novelty band; they made music that was kind of like cartoon music. So I identified with that, and I started imitating his records. And my mother would take me around up in Yakima, Washington, to the Moose Lodges or the Masonic Temples, and I’d do my little performance. She would’ve been like a stage mother if I’d been in Hollywood. I grew up in a family that was mostly women, because my father left when I was like a year old. The family never hugged or kissed or anything like that, but when I per-formed they would just go gaga over me and compare me to movie stars. So I started thinking the only way to be loved was to be famous. And when I was 17 or 18, I discovered Salvador Dalí, and then everything changed. I started to paint. My first painting looked a lot like Dalí; it’ll be in the show.

SI: Why does Mickey Mouse appear so often in your work?

LF: My former father-in-law, Ward Kimball, was one of the “nine old men” at Disney Studios. He gave me a Mickey Mouse Club pamphlet from 1934; the first page talks about how they implant things in children’s minds, almost unconsciously. This is the beginning of marketing. They go all the way down to little babies. People would rather go to Disney World than any of the other great scenic places in America. In Los Angeles, half the artists have worked for Disney. Not that they wanted to.

SI: When was the last time you went to Disneyland?

LF: Oh, I haven’t been for years. The first time I went was ’60 or ’61. I had a beard then, and I looked like a beatnik. I was with my wife and child, and they wouldn’t let me in. They had these big Aryan guys with blond hair and blue eyes, and one of them said to me, “If my kid looked like you, I’d whip him.” I was fortunate because my father-in-law had a gold pass, and I finally got in.