Blackout

As Chicago has been the gravitation center of pinball design and manufacturing for decades, so too have Chicago-based artists been integral to pinball art. For Blackout, Williams reached out to the painter Ed Paschke (1939–2004), who was an important member of the Chicago Imagists, a group redefining contemporary art in their own surreal style. Many Imagists were themselves influenced by pinball—as demonstrated by a 2017 exhibition at the Elmhurst Art Museum—and Paschke himself owned a Gorgar machine (Williams, 1979).

Unfortunately for Paschke, his avant-garde style was not what Williams wanted. After producing his concept painting for this machine, also titled Blackout (1980), the company thought it was too “far out.” Its amorphous, masked astronauts, its multicolored cosmic rays, and its pock-marked green planet were too strange. The company tapped Constantino Mitchell—himself a student of Ray Yoshida, another Chicago Imagist—to redesign Paschke’s painting in a more conventional style. But, according to Mitchell, “I want Ed Paschke to get credit for [the] Blackout backglass design. He did the original art concept. Ed Paschke was my teacher and mentor at the Art Institute of Chicago. His usage of color influenced me for the rest of my life.”

Paschke went on to curate an exhibition of pinball art in 1982 at the Chicago Cultural Center with Mitchell’s collaboration.