My website was just featured on a blog I was recently turned onto, Lost At E Minor. Featuring inspiring art, illustration, photography, music, fashion, film and more, it’s the cure-all if you’re seeking creative inspiration. Pop culture is always changing, Lost At E Minor is keeping step.
At the age of three Stephen Wiltshire of London was diagnosed with autism. Living within the walls of his own mind Stephen developed his love of drawing, first animals, then London buses and eventually cityscapes. Stephen, now 35, draws entire panoramic city-scapes from memory after only a 20 minute helicopter ride over the city. Stephen just finished a panorama of New York City at Pratt Institute which is just stunning.
To check out video of Stephen drawing his masterpieces and images of his amazing portfolio visit his website.
Applause for great packaging, minimalist design, and letting the product name do the heavy lifting.
As seen at Whole Foods in Berkeley, CA.
Check out ricks’ picks.
On Saturday, June 20th, following TRPS Rock Art by the Bay at Ft. Mason, Merle Becker’s documentary American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art, had it’s world premier at The Red Vic on Haight St. in San Francisco. The movie is a must see for any rock poster collector or fan. Not only are you seeing poster artists in their studios talking about their craft, you also get a solid history lesson about the rock poster evolution from Elvis to Pearl Jam. Visit americanartifactmovie.com for the screening schedule.
I took some photos outside the theater while waiting in line and also during the Q&A segment after the screening. Below are some of my favorites.
This is a video promoting the French artist Invader’s solo show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in Manhattan next month. Invader is known for creating art out of tiles and Rubik’s Cubes to replicate vintage 8-bit video game characters. His website is also very fun and worth a look.
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Mike Shine creates paintings on driftwood he finds in the sand and rocks on beaches he surfs at. An advertising art director during the day, Mike escapes from being a desk jockey the only way he knows how to, he retreats to his cabin in Briones, CA and makes art. “The Shack” as it is affectionately called, is part art studio, part art gallery and part home. The entire cabin is covered in his art, either hung on the walls or murals covering the walls. Mike’s art is rooted in carnival imagery and colors from a time long since gone. He’s influenced by Faustian imagery and stories and likes to paint with a lot of people around.
Mike recreated his lovable “Art Shack” for The Museum of Craft and Folk Art’s Inside/Outside: Artist Environments show and recently sat down with skateboarding legend and successful filmmaker Stacy Peralta for an interview which was turned into a mini-film called Raw Meat On the Doorstep. Whether you are familiar with Mike Shine’s art or not, this film is worth watching for a peek inside the Art Shack and Mike Shine’s creativity.
Selections from my Montreal Doors and Vehicular Style of California series will be showing at Hermosa Salon on College Avenue in Berkeley. The show opens Monday, June 1 and will be up for all of June and July. If you are in the neighborhood stop by and check it out. Hermosa is located at 2703 College Ave, Berkeley 94705.
So perhaps menu collecting is our attempt to take the culinary experience with us. When the food is digested and the meal is just a memory we still own a piece of it. But, it has become more than just a vehicle to recall the meal, it is visual texture in and of itself. Especially in a day and age (and place) when so many restaurants create seasonal or even daily menus, each one can be considered a piece of art, or at least an artifact of the experience. There is almost as much to deconstruct about the menu as there is about the meal–the typeface, the size, the alignment, the graphic elements, the paper quality, etc. And well, these are things we talk about here at visual texture.
Here is a smattering of our collection. The hope is to one day create a tabletop or kitchen wallpaper out of our favorites.
Back in 1994 Robert Williams, the Godfather of the Low-Brow art movement, founded the art and culture magazine Juxtapoz. In an era where magazines start and fail in a heartbeat Juxtapoz has managed to keep itself going for 15 years and is celebrating the release of its 100th issue. Nearly impossible to find an actual printed issue #1 these days (I managed to find one finally on eBay), you can view and read the entire first issue of Juxtapoz at Issuu.com.
I purchased my first issue of Juxtapoz (issue #4) while working as a screen printer in Ft. Collins, Colorado in 1995. My mind was blown by the detail and craftsmanship of the art presented in those pages. Not all of the art was to my taste but I still respected the talent that produced the pieces. Being a fine artist as well I was heavily influenced by Juxtapoz and the artists it promoted in the magazine.
After three years in Colorado it was time to move on and having been a loyal reader of Juxtapoz for those three years I was destined to travel further west to Los Angeles where a lot of the art in the magazine was being created. I needed to be there, tossed into the mix of low-riders, Latino culture, the beach and west coast style. It was paradise and while living a block south of Sunset and a block east of Doheny, I was able to surround myself with the sound and vision that drew me to the magazine in the first place.
I got to meet Robert Williams at the Juxtapoz 10th Anniversary Party at 111 Minna in San Francisco five years ago. I don’t usually get star struck, but in this case I was standing next to a living legend, hero of Zap Comics, established low-brow art icon and founder of the best art and culture magazine in print today. He snapped a photo with me and we got to chat for a few minutes before Mark Ryden walked over to say hello.
Today Juxtapoz is run by editor Matt Revelli and has a new visual identity. There are two cover versions, one for subscribers and one at newsstands for all the collectors out there. The interior pages have a cleaner design, there is more content and more advertising but the true vibe of the magazine continues. Juxtapoz has grown up in the last 15 years, having started as a art and culture magazine dedicated to introducing the world to a movement who up until then was underground and obscure, it is now a grown up art and culture magazine continuing to blow minds while introducing us to the artists who are making waves in the New-Brow art movement of the 21st century.
The Sunday New York Times had two articles on social media: a Facebook story in the “business” section and a bit about Twitter in the “style” section. Both were accompanied by compelling infographics.
The Facebook graphic, called “The Road to 200 Million,” employs lines and dots to show how people interact with their networks.
The Twitter graphic, titled “Strange Webfellows,” uses a series of lines and celebrity photographs to illustrate random celebrity interconnections in the Twittersphere.
They were each so perfectly geared to their section and audience. The FB graphic didn’t just inform but furthered our understanding of how people in online communities interact. The Twitter graphic entertained more in the vein of a supermarket tabloid than it was informative. It is fun to know, for example, that MC Hammer and Governor Schwarzenegger are following one-another’s tweets but it doesn’t serve to help us understand the world of Twitter, or beyond. They also remind that if we fall too deep into the vortex of these social media webs we might become nothing more than a series of dots and arrows.
Each graphic however evokes visual texture in that they layer incredibly simple visual elements to entertain and inform. They are not your father’s bar graph.
Musings on all things visual.
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