The Pizz’s last artistic statement was a bleak black and white photo of an unmade bed in a Long Beach hotel room near the airport. Its sheets and blankets twisted and bunched, a sign of a restless sleep, perhaps, or maybe just staged to look like it.

On the wall behind the bed the artist spray-painted the word “Ozymandias,” the title of a Shelley poem about the hubris of kings and the inevitable turning-to-dust of their magnificent works and empires.

The Pizz posted the photo on Instagram on Sunday and then wrapped a towel around a .357 handgun and shot himself. The Long Beach artist was 57.

He was born in Orange as Stephen Pizzurro — “but don’t use his real name,” a friend urged. “He hated it” — The Pizz left home at 17 and launched himself into a career in punk rock, art, and punk-rock art and eventually became one of the most important artists in the so-called lowbrow art movement, using the familiar themes of the movement — hot rods, surfing and tikis — the holy trinity of Kustom Kulture.

He came up fast, working for the epic cartoonist Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and others. One of his first supporters was Long Gone John, the legendary founder of the Long Beach record label Sympathy for the Record Industry, who signed such acts as the Geraldine Fibbers and the White Stripes.

Long Gone John, who now lives in Olympia, Washington, hired The Pizz in the late 1980s as his art director to turn out album covers and posters.

“I saw that photograph on Instagram as The Pizz’s last artistic endeavor,” said John. “His last exclamation mark. I’m just thankful that he had the presence of mind at the end to go to a hotel where his wife wouldn’t discover his body.”

The Pizz’s mentor and idol was artist Robert Williams, now 72, one of the pioneers of the underground comic movement as part of the Zap Comix collective with R. Crumb, Rick Griffin and others. Williams was also at the vanguard of the punk-rock art movement, which is where he met The Pizz more than 30 years ago. The two were part of the Art Boys club, a raggedy group spoofing San Francisco’s snooty Artistes club, with such members as Matt Groening, Gary Panter, Mark Mothersbaugh and Neon Park.

“You look for a word for The Pizz that means cool or hip or with it. My pedantic word for him is zeitgeistically poignant,” said Williams by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “He was a fountainhead of style. I liked him the moment I saw him.

“Panter was the father of punk rock art, but The Pizz was right behind him. He had a strong personality, a tremendous presence. Not everyone liked him. If you were sensitive he could come across as abrasive. But he had a poetic nature. He was mentally a cut above the people he hung around with,” he said. “He felt more comfortable with them. Me, I try to drag my trash up to a higher level, he wasn’t like that.”

Williams described The Pizz as “a street fighter. I always thought he would go down fighting, not by suicide. I guess things had just ganged up on him.

“It was like someone hit me with a hammer when I found out. His passing leaves an enormous vacuum. He will never be replaced.”

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, tim.grobaty@langnews.com, @grobaty on Twitter.