Royal Young’s artist father found it in everything from personal ads to historical figures. Young, also an artist, found his muse in stacks of old Playboys.
The titillating result — “Lush Doom,” a show of 17 colorful acrylics — goes up Saturday at the Figureworks gallery in Williamsburg.
Culturally speaking, that’s light-years from where they began: at his grandparents’ home in Great Neck, LI.
It was to their attic that Young, now 30, decamped last year — and where he found his uncle’s old girlie magazines. In fact, Young’s still living there, saying he’s grown weary and uninspired by life on the Lower East Side, where he grew up.
Back then he was Hazak Brozgold, son of neuropsychologist Alizah Brozgold and artist Lee Brozgold, whose murals you may have seen in the subway.
The mosaic panels of Manhattan’s early settlers, made with students at PS 41, still grace the Christopher Street station. When they were unveiled in 1994, 9-year-old Hazak got the day off from school to celebrate.
“I really thought my father was decorating my city,” says Young, whose gritty memoir, “Fame Shark,” came out in 2013. “It was so special to see his art inspire everyday people who were going to work.”
He himself was inspired by a childhood spent scribbling away in his father’s studio. It was his dad who told him, “There are no mistakes in art.”
Alas, Young discovered, one can make mistakes elsewhere. At La Guardia High School he majored in visual art and minored in sniffing turpentine. At 20, he had what he calls “an inappropriate, but not sexual,” relationship with a 14-year-old girl.
It was she who dubbed him Royal. He got the “Young” from his younger brother, Yuvi, who took it from baseball’s Cy Young. (Yuvi — now Fury Young — works for a special-effects shop, whose Plexiglas movie sets Royal repurposed into canvases for his “Lush Doom” paintings.)
Lee Brozgol, who also works as a social worker (and who dropped the “d” from his surname a while ago), says at 18 his son told him “he wanted to be a singer, a writer, an actor and an artist — there was a whole list of things. I said, ‘You really have to narrow that down.’”
Ironically, the 74-year-old’s latest project is also Playboy-inspired — a series on masculinity for which he’s rendered Hugh Hefner as a papier-mâché bunny with testicles made of golf balls. (Next up: Dick Cheney!)
He says he sees elements of Andy Warhol in his son’s work: “You’re drawn in by the vividness of the color, but when you see what’s depicted, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is scary stuff!’ ”
So: Is he proud of his son?
“Of course!” he sputters. “He’s my boy!”