dark inspiration

L.A., says Helnwein, "has this strange magic." He'd been visiting for years, and something about the city took hold. "I can give you a long list of things that are going bad right now, but if you want to look for something good, if there is a place that comes close to really, total freedom, L.A. is that place. . . . L.A. allows you the freedom to dream up impossible things."

'Struggling with the world'

He walks the seven minutes to the studio from his home, often in the dark of morning, always surrounded by the theater of his thoughts. "I read a lot and study every day," he says. "The ideas are always in me. Most of the time I'm working in my head, not on the canvas. It's like I'm struggling with the world around me."

By the time he's in the studio and has made a cup of tea, Helnwein has already processed the morning's news. It hums in his head. The walk allows him to synthesize.

Helnwein stands in the studio's entry room, a spacious, high-ceilinged space surrounded by 13 grand, new canvases in various stages of near-completion -- a bandaged young girl with a bloody head wound; the nose of a gun pointed at a doll; a raging Mouseketeer in blackface. Helnwein himself is as shrouded as one of the gauze-wrapped, back-lighted figures in those paintings -- his forehead is wrapped in a bandanna, and glasses with opaque lenses hide expression, intention. He's just nose, a flash of smile, a slick cowlick of hair jutting up, eluding capture.

Although he lives with a loop of disquieting images in his head and on his walls, there are plenty who eagerly pay to possess them -- Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn and Robert Wilson among them. He's collaborated with Marilyn Manson, done cover art for the Scorpions, designed sets and costumes for U.S. and European operas, including a much-discussed L.A. Opera production of Richard Strauss' "Der Rosenkavalier" in 2005.

On the afternoon of this visit, an exhibition deadline breathes down his neck. "But!" he stresses, extending an index finger, pressure is the best catalyst for his work. "My canvases always arrive wet. They dry on the wall. Now it's like the last days of Pompeii." One of his sons will come by later to carefully cart up and ship the work. "That's why you have children. They have to help you." A flash of teeth, a laugh follows. "Seriously, we have four children," he says. "I like it when kids are running through the studio. We are like a band of Gypsies."