American Illustration 29

I'm extremely honored to hear that I got these 2 illustrations accepted into the American Illustration 29 annual. The top one is titled "Miscellaneous TV Outerwear", and it was made for the group show Idiot Box at Gallery 1988 in LA. You can see my original post about that show here. The other one was done for Amtrak's Arrive Magazine back in October. You can see info, spots, and sketches here.

Thanks so much to the AI jury for being awesome and hooking me up with this great honor. I have been denied plenty of times in the past, so it's great to see that sometimes the effort (and $ spent) does eventually pay off..

"Now Playing" show at Gallery 1988 SF

I just finished this piece yesterday for a show at Gallery 1988 in San Francisco called "Now Playing". It's a group show where each artist was sent an original movie poster to customize with their own artwork, in whatever way we wanted. We didn't get to pick what poster we'd get, so it was a surprise when the poster tubes were shipped out. I was psyched to get the Terminator 2 poster.. it was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. I recall trying to emulate Eddie Furlong for a couple of months, at least, after seeing it. I even rocked the same haircut..

After playing around with some other more serious ideas I decided to go with something a little more wacky. I wanted to change "Judgment Day" into something totally different.. like a holiday, for instance. Valentines Day seemed like the funniest choice to me, given the Terminator character and his cold, robotic personality. Plus I had the perfect opportunity to make his hand holding something other than a shotgun.

All of the artwork and type changes were collaged directly on top of the poster. I used a bunch of different types of papers and pages out of books for the background, to give the whole thing a warmer, more stylized feel. Then I drew, painted and collaged more stuff on top of that, including all the flowers and leaves.

The show opens this Friday, September 18th at Gallery 1988 San Francisco: 1173 Sutter St. / Polk St.

"Idiot Box" - Opening April 2nd!

The group show "Idiot Box" opens at 7pm tonight, April 2nd, at Gallery 1988 in LA. It's the gallery's 5-year anniversary, and they're celebrating with a show devoted to "guilty pleasure television." They even got Mr. Belding from Saved By the Bell to be the host of the show!

I contributed these two pieces, nodding to several of my favorite shows from the past. The top one is a piece based on the shows Alf and The X-Files, titled "The Alf-Files". It's a play on the concept of Mulder's and Scully's relentless search for aliens, and finding a rather silly one in the form of Alf. The second one is titled "Miscellaneous TV Outerwear" and is pretty self-explanatory, unless you've been living as a Neo-Luddite for the past several decades.

I picked these frames for their gaudy, kitschy flavor, to reflect the feeling of most of these TV shows. There should be a great mix of killer work, given the lineup of artists and the subject matter, so be sure to check it out if you're in the LA area. Here's the gallery website for more info: http://www.nineteeneightyeight.com

"Cover Band" piece for Gallery 1988

I finished this piece today for the "Cover Band" show at Gallery 1988, which opens October 7th. It's a group show with about 60 artists, each of whom got to pick their 10 favorite album covers from the Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 500 Albums of All Time. From those ten options, the gallery sent out one original cover to each artists for use as a canvas... basically making it into a sort of collaboration. I luckily got one of my top 3 -- the self-titled Led Zeppelin album with the burning Hindenburgh -- and wanted to try to keep as much of the original art as possible. Thankfully there was a lot of white space!

My attempt was to take this iconic, tragic image, and give it a different feel. More like a cute "whoops" rather than a horrific "oh the humanity". If it's just a little girl's balloon catching fire it's not quite so dramatic, is it? Well, maybe she'd be more freaked out if she knew there were people in there. Also, I wanted to do something that had nothing to do with the actual songs or the band, since I felt that would be... well, almost an insult to the original cover. It's such a perfect cover for that album, I would never presume to make a better or more poignant version.

- t