Alton Kelley gave a signature look to the San Francisco sound. The posters, handbills and album covers Kelley and collaborator Stanley Mouse designed for 1960s psychedelic rock scene started out as casual counterculture but blossomed into rock’s visual aura. Kelley’s June 1st death dates rock’s sinewy, incandescent image. Yet the image hasn’t gone anywhere. While generations of musicians have rehashed the sounds of the 60s, the visuals that accompany rock still uncannily resemble Kelley and Mouse’s psychedelic designs. (more…)

By now, everyone has heard of the Turkish phenomenon who goes by the name of Esref Armagan. On the off chance you haven’t heard of him, Esref is an amazing artist who didn’t let his blindness stop him from becoming a painter. In fact, Esref has both convinced and astonished his most critical skeptics.

Esref has been creating beautiful works of art for 35 years, (more…)

What inspired you to become a fine artist?
I enjoy the challenge of making images. I’ve always made images my whole life. It’s not really a choice, more like a “healthy habit”. When I work, I like to juxtapose marks or images and give myself the challenge of seeing how I can make them work together. Some marks are random and serendipitous, (more…)

What inspired you to become a fine artist/designer?
I started relatively young. I saw a movie called, “A Dog of Flanders”, about a young boy who paints and it somehow struck me. So I bought some paints and got started in about 4th grade. I really enjoyed the work of Marc Chagall and Paul Klee. Their paintings were magical and felt truly connected to the universe. In high school I got interested in Illustration. Brad Holland, Maxfield Parrish, Aubrey Beardsley, and Alan Cober were among my favorites. I took classes in painting and received some awards and scholarships towards college. (more…)

The design world is haunted by a ghost shared in many other facets of our society: it whispers in our minds about past wickedness, inspires guilt, and warns us of the present dangers of blind hatred. Discrimination forces many minorities to forgo the innate genius so many have to offer to the art and business worlds, among other venues for their talents. All forms of discrimination and segregation were designed to create and justify tyrannical holds of power by one group of people - just as there is a design in how we sometimes interact with other people [or in other words, manipulate them] for our personal gain. There were very few professional artists and designers in any industry who were not white up until the past two or three decades as a result of racial discrimination. But there were people, such as the infamous Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams (who was Black), who overcame these prejudices and discriminations to make huge strides in the arts and design worlds for all other minorities that dared chase a dream.
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Prima facie, there are two Georges Batailles: one the writer of fiction, one the philosopher. Yet there is a persistent effect in Bataille of an overlapping, of an entanglement, concerning these distinctions. As Foucault asked in his text »What is an Author?«, where does the concept of the author’s oeuvre begin and end - should a mundane account of Nietzsche’s grocery lists be added to Nietzsche’s collected works?

Barbara Kruger, certainly one of the most recognizable and influential contemporary female artists, is a woman whose style and statements transcend the mundane designs of modern signage. Appearing in such places as on the back of matchbooks, billboards, shopping bags, t-shirts, television, and in subway cars, as well as exhibited in public spaces around the world, Barbara Kruger’s work sneaks up to viewers and makes them pay attention.
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The mark of a truly unique artist is when one can distinguish an artist’s work instantaneously. A simple glance at one of Victor Gastelum’s pieces and there is no mistaking that they are his. Mexican, working class and punk influenced, Gastelum’s work has his historical DNA scattered all over it. One can feel the influence marked by watching hours of Mexican wrestling and digging through old photos albums. The eyes carry the weight of comic books, Teen Angel magazines and punk rock in his sketches. As much of a private person Victor Gastelum is, his artwork reveals it all.
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