Anthony Ausgang After a short stint studying art at the University Of Texas in Austin, Ausgang succumbed to the myth of California and moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute. Disappointed that their curriculum did not encourage any of his pop culture influences, he dropped out and started making the rounds of local galleries, showing his artwork to any and all that would tolerate his frequent visits. He was finally accepted by the infamous Zero One Gallery, and made his first official sale - to a drug dealer. At his solo show later that year, Ausgang sold to a more diverse and socially-acceptable crew, as collectors and critics began to take notice. As the "official" artworld began to accept Ausgang's work, so too did the commercial artworld, and he began making record covers and posters and working as a consultant on computer-generated animation. In 1993, Ausgang was included in the Laguna Art Museum's seminal exhibit "Kustom Kulture," which investigated art influenced by gearhead car culture. In 2004, his work graced the pages of contemporary art survey Pop Surrealism, and in 2005, Weirdo Deluxe explained his art to the unenlightened. His monograph, Pick of the Litter, was released earlier this year by 9mm Books. Ausgang draws influence from as many outside channels as possible, preferring the toy contents of grocery store gumball machines over the latest exhibit at the Whitney. Opinionated but informed, he is able to see the beauty in both a Rembrandt and a rat rod. This variety of interests has led him to design his artwork on the computer, but complete it on the easel, the perfect combination of new technology and traditional media.
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Attaboy Atta is the co-founder of the critically acclaimed Hi-Fructose Under the Counter Culture Magazine, which has grown to a worldwide circulation. Hi-Fructose features interviews and exposés with a growing echelon of pop and visual counter culture artists like Mark Ryden, Chris Ware, Jeff Soto, and Tim Biskup. The first four volumes of Hi-Fructose will be reprinted in book form later this year, and will be published by Last Gasp. Too Many Robots, an animation created and directed by Atta premiered in May on the Disney Channel. It is now downloadable on ITunes and seen on YouTube. Atta's Art focuses on the disturbed childlike sensibilities that he values above all else and is centered in a world of goo-filled creatures; lust-filled and awkward, uneasy with their own cuteness or simply unaware of it or how it affects them or others, all imagined in a palette reminiscent of a rusted cruise ship. His images and collectables are glimpses into Atta's insecurities and currupt sensibility, often times providing more of a physical diary to his day to day undertakings...
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Paul Arden Arden's work has also demonstrated a resilient proclivity for falling through the art world's cracks. Disenchanted with commercial art, Paul left Art Center College of Design at age eighteen to attend UC Santa Cruz, where he studied traditional oil painting, as well as working in assemblage and collage. With a fresh bachelor's degree, he returned to a series of commercial art jobs, both in his native Los Angeles, and later, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The realistic techniques he used at these jobs, which ranged from retouching tiny photographs to painting enormous, pictorial billboards, were influencing the artwork he was beginning to exhibit. Arden returned to California in 1988 to attend the graduate art program at UCLA. His matriculation was perfectly timed to coincide with the conceptually and politically driven, text-heavy installation art which then dominated the curriculum. In those dark days, when painting was considered a crime against humanity, one of Arden's few allies on the faculty of the Art Department was Jan Stussy, whom Arden would ultimately co-author a biography on while working as an assistant to Art History Professor Albert Boime. Upon graduating with his MFA in 1991, Arden accepted a position at UCLA Extension as an instructor of painting and drawing, where he still teaches today. A series of his paintings was recently used in the Focus Features film, "The Shape of Things."
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Harry Blitzstein Blitzstein keeps a portfolio that just may underscore the driving philosophy behind his work. His three-ring folder is filled with “masterpieces” of contemporary and pop art artists: Rauschenberg, Johns, Lichtenstein. The difference: each picture plane is invaded, intruded and interloped upon by a freaky-faced Blitzstein creation. Blitzstein frankly feels that many of the darlings of the art world are overpuffed soufflés, and that critics and buyers alike cannot identify a great work of art beyond hype and celebrity. He has equal patience for the genteel, pompous portraits and landscapes that might fill a museum such as the British National Gallery: “One boring face after another. I want to just blow that apart.” Indeed, Blitzstein revels in blowing apart the pretentions of the modern. His art is all about escaping from the mind-numbing universe of minutiae and routine that intrudes on our everyday life. Anyone suffering from whiplash is advised to stay out of the Blitzstein Museum of Art, where you’ll spend much time looking up at the hundreds of dolphins, camels, rat-faced dogs and other critters ignoring the constraints of their canvas to reach out to you. They include dogs inspired by the knotholes in the wood Blitzstein paints on and toucans dating back to his L.A. High School days, when Blitzstein drew them on the margins of his schoolwork “so I could not listen to the teacher doing chemistry equations.” And if this zany menagerie seems to vie for your affection, that’s because, as Blitzstein puts it, “they’re little creatures that want to be loved.” The Blitzstein Museum of Art is located at 428 N. Fairfax Ave. For more information, call (323) 852-4830.
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Dave Burke Early roots in "lowbrow" and an introduction to Ed "Big Daddy" Roth yielded DB's painted covers for Rat Fink Comix in the mid 90's, as well as a two-man exhibit with Roth in 1999. Dabblings in kitsch landed his work alongside Margaret Keane's in The Laguna Art Museum's Keane and Keanabilia exhibit in 2001, which showcased early and current works by "big eyed art" masters. DB's Polynesian Pop renderings (or Tiki art) have been published in such books as Taboo: The Art of Tiki and Tiki Art Now! Among the three-dimensional customization projects DB has been involved with are the "Qeedrophonic" exhibit in 2004, "100 Circus Punks Invade N.Y.C." in 2005, and "Rat Fink's Revenge" in 2006 at L.A.'s Petersen Museum. Not limited to any one genre, DB's work has also taken the form of "G-rotic" foot and shoe paintings, "Beatnik" art, surreal and abstract shape paintings, and hard edge modern design, to name but a few. DB's creations have also appeared in movies, on billboards (as part of an award winning, art direction-free campaign aligning Converse with urban artists), graced the stages of industrial groups Skinny Puppy and Pigface in the form of sculpture, and exist as skateboard and apparel graphics, decals and collectible vinyl and resin figures.
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Dame Darcy While in San Francisco, she toured with her first band, Caroliner Rainbow, and produced her first independent solo music releases. Darcy plays banjo, electric bass, singing saw, and sings. To date, her albums, short films/animation, and comics collaborations have been released in the U.S.Canada, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. n 1992 Dame Darcy moved to New York City. She began working as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for the Village Voice, Jane Magazine, Paper Magazine, The New York Press, and Rollerderby, as well as doing design for Anna Sui, Courtney Love and others. In 2001, she moved to Los Angeles, but also continues to work in NY. Since then she has released the graphic novels Frightful Fairytales and Dame Darcy's Meat Cake Compilation, as well as the solo music releases Dame Darcy's Greatest Hits CD, My Eyes Have Seen the Glory, and Gem In Eye. She has exhibited her fine art in both solo and group shows, at the Richard Heller Gallery, Copro/Nason Gallery in Santa Monica, La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Hollywood, Bellweather Gallery, Milk Gallery in New York, Gelatin in Austria, CWC in Tokyo and the Comics Art Museum in San Francisco, among many others. In 2006, her graphic novel, The Illustrated Jane Eyre, was published by Putnam Penguin USA; a DVD/book, Dollerium, was released by Tokyo-based Press Pop; and her latest CD, Death By Doll, which she backed with a U.S. tour, was issued by indie label Emperor Penguin. Her current projects include Meat Cake Comix, as well as a graphic novel, Gasoline, which is currently in preproduction as a feature film (her band, Death By Doll, is providing the soundtrack for the film). She is also working on a graphic novel/animated TV series for young adults called The Excorsisters. Her books, fine art, handcrafted dolls, music, movies, fashion design, and current events can be seen and purchased on her web site, www.damedarcy.com.
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Marcel DeJure With a show already booked for 50 Bucks gallery in downtown L.A. about a month away, Marcel went to work. Using the discards from the hat shop and cuttings from stray couches, a variety of strange, awkward dolls were fabricated. At the opening some sales were made, and this was a creative turning point. One of the dolls left behind at the show ended up on the cover of a Youth Brigade album. Marcel's dolls have been held by models at fashion shows at the Sunset Junction fair in Silverlake. The dolls are stocked at various local shops in the neighborhood, including Come to Mama and Pull My Daisy, and on his web site, www.cinnamonrollgang.com.
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Andrew Foster
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Germs See more art at www.germs4u.com
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Walt Hall
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Howard Hallis
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Stephen Holman Holman graduated from NE London Polytechnic in 1983 and emigrated to the US the following year. Inspired by NYC’s Lower East Side arts scene, he formed his first mixed-media ensemble, "Torture Chorus," and performed regularly in seminal NYC venues such as 8BC, Danceteria, and Franklin Furnace. In 1987, he moved to Los Angeles, where he co-founded "Theatre Carnivale," a ‘splattervillian’ performance troupe/venue located downtown in the music hall-style environs of LA’s Variety Arts Center. Outsider luminaries such as Johanna Went, Harry Kipper, John Fleck, and Charles Schneider performed regularly – alongside authentic magic acts, novelty stripper acts and works by experimental LA musicians. In 1989, Holman started diversifying his fields of expression with comic books (No Such Thing as Monsters and Weird Burlesque); solo exhibitions of his paintings at the Bobo Gallery in San Francisco, and EZTV and the Onyx Gallery in LA; and retrospectives at the Morphos Gallery in San Francisco in 1994, and at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica in 2006. In 1993, with wife and creative partner Josephine Huang, Holman started his production company (W)holesome Products, and has since created original TV series and specials for various networks including Life with Loopy and We are the Shrimpskins for Nickelodeon, Phantom Investigators for Kids!WB, and Dudley and Nestor Do Nothing for Disney.
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Jason Maloney He has exhibited his oil paintings and highly-rendered pencil drawings in such prestigious galleries such as La Luz de Jesus Gallery in L.A., Billy Shire Fine Arts and Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, California. His paintings and drawings have also graced the pages of Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine, Artweek, ISM Quarterly, O.C.Weekly, and International Tattoo Magazine. You can see more of his art at www.jasonmaloneyart.com.
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The Pizz You can discern Pizz's tendency away from the status quo if you plug into some of his influences: Mad Comics, Zap Comix, loads of cartoons, but especially Tex Avery, choppers, bobbers, hotrods, black light posters, the Cramps, Black Sabbath, Foetus, the Stooges, Big Daddy Roth and Robert Williams. His legend only grows as he continues to produce new artwork, most recently showing a new batch of paintings deemed "his best work yet" at the infamous La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Hollywood, CA. Known primarily as a painter, The Pizz has always explored other artistic avenues, including magazine illustration, commercial design for television, and computer animation. He was notorious a few years ago as the mastermind behind the Murderer's! Trading Cards, which ended up gaining Pizz the attention of such media outlets as CNN and the somewhat dubious honor of being banned in all of Canada as a commercial artist. His designs have graced books, comics, tattoo flash sets, t-shirts, the team mascot for a Japanese major league basketball team, innumerable skateboards, surfboards, outlandish car-concept designs for television commercials and movies, apparel, fast food joints, watches, murals and banners, tikibar glasses and mugs...in short; anything under the sun.... and more. Read an interview with the Pizz on hotweird.com.
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KRK Ryden KRK was born in Seattle, Washington but didn't stay there long. Leap forward to Canyon High School, Castro Valley, 1968. In his sophomore year, an art class assignment would define his painting and drawing style, and consequently influence the artistic style of his brother, Mark Ryden. An art teacher had each student reach in a hat and pick a slip of paper with the name of a particular art movement scrawled on it. The student was to write a paper on the movement of art randomly chosen. When KRK (then Keith) picked "Surrealism," he was peeved because he wanted to write about the Italian Renaissance. Another reason for the upset was because he had no clue what Surrealism meant. The word had looked utterly foreign. But after checking out a few school library books and seeing for the first time the art of Dali, the artist's art and life was changed permanently. This art triggered a sort of rebellion; it created a disdain for the norm. There was no turning back to the imagery of landscapes, still-life, and puppies. Read more at www.krkland.com
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Scott Saw In 2004, Scott self-published his first art book titled Curtains, the Wonder of Life and the Mystery of Death.” The work provides a unique view of the life cycle by portraying ‘stages' of life being acted out by strange, yet familiar creatures. More recently, Scott created a series of paintings entitled "Microcosm," which was introduced at his solo show in Palm Springs at M Modern Gallery during the summer of 2006. The paintings were created during the first months of his new son Kai’s life. They are full of iconography relating to space, nature and technology. Rockets take the form of birds and fish, cities grow into tree-like structures and robots have tree trunk torsos. Saw was born in 1971, and was raised in San Diego, California, by artistic parents who encouraged him to learn the fundamentals of art and design at a young age. Scott received degrees in both Art and Marketing from San Diego State University in 1998. He currently runs Sawblade Design, a freelance design company and lives in San Diego, California with his wife, son, dog and cats. Read Scott's process blog about the creation of the "Rocket Birds" series here.
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Sonik Mercury Sonik has worked as a scenic painter, mural designer, action figure designer and developer, illustrator, and storyboard artist. At present, his focus is on his art, which is a futuristic, H.R. Geiger-inspired mixture of paintings, installations, and bio-morphic free-standing fabric environments. Sonik's art has appeared in several group shows, including a live mural painting at the opening of "Crosswire: Community Through Art, Architecture and Music" at the DADA Gallery in Los Angeles, and the IMAROBOT show at the John Davis Gallery in Los Angeles, in 2001. In 2003, he participated in a show at Materials and Applications in Silverlake called "Skinn and Eclipse," an outdoor exhibition focusing on experimental architecture, for which he covered the entire front of the building with lycra material using fiberglass rods, bendable piping, and strategically-placed lights to create a three-dimensional installation.
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Treiops Treyfid "It is and has always been my earnest desire to create distinctive art works of a high quality. I wish to create meticulous and strange objects that are singular, provocative, and non era specific. "My paintings are not necessarily of something. Some paintings have themes, some are purely abstract, some allude to meaning. Some abstracts will contain objects that exist, some contain faces or human forms. I rarely will consciously decide to paint something that exists. I feel I am most successful and most lucid when I work abstractly with a subtle theme or with no theme and can be free to decide what will happen on the canvas immediately. I love curious and puzzling objects and I endeavor to create them. "Transparency is important to me. I like to see every stage of the painting. Not because I wish to draw people's attention to the process or delineate how the painting is made. In fact, I generally endeavor to hide the evidence. I like transparency because it builds subtle textures and juxtaposes imagery. "The painting surface and starting point are important to me. I rarely work from a blank canvas. Most of my finished paintings have previously completed or partially worked canvasses underneath. I find that this helps with idea generation and creating pleasing accidents that result in imagery. Also, I like to take old paintings, mine or otherwise, and glue them together to make a canvas. I will also take old canvasses, cut them into equal geometric shapes, rearrange them randomly, and use the grid to paint an image upon. Transparency of paint and transparency of content placement play a large part in the overall look of the art. "I do not have a set library of icons or symbols, although it may seem so. I use whatever imagery is appropriate at the time. The use of the peculiar and particular imagery in my paintings is often just an excuse to have objects exist in the two dimensional plane rather than to express a certain feeling or to illustrate a story."
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Dani Tull An accomplished musician, Dani played lead guitar for the band Polar Bear, an offshoot of bassist Eric Avery's former band Jane's Addiction. He continues to hone his chops performing in fellow artist and friend Marnie Weber's performance art-rock opera, Spirit Girls: Songs That Never Die. Although he wouldn't call it autobiographical, much of Dani's art derives from his position on the shoulders of a long line of California bohemians. A large part of his thrift-store aesthetic derives from Aardvark’s Odd Ark, the still-thriving vintage-clothes store his painter-parents co-founded in the ’70s. His studio is crammed with ephemera from his grandmother’s research, his grandfather Sam’s photography, his great-uncle Herman Cherry’s painting, and scads of Beat Generation detritus, including a box of drunken living-room rants by one of Tull’s formative childhood influences, Charles Bukowski.
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Keith Weesner Keith's work reflects his obsession with cars and vintage pinup illustration. As an artist and hot rodder, he appears frequently in American, English, and Japanese car magazines, including Rodder's Journal, Automobile, Street Rodder, Hot Rod Deluxe, ` Custome Car, Hop Up (cover illustration), Car Styling, Cruisin', Burnout, Daytona, and Model Car, which featured an article on his Hot Wheels design proposals for Mattel. In addition, his artwork appeared in "DUTCHED!" as part of the Von Dutch exhibition at CSUN, and his dynamic hand-inked designs -- inspired by Rex Burnett's cutaways in Hot Rod Magazine -- can be found on numerous T-shirts, including many of those at So-Cal Speed Shop. A versatile artist, for more than a decade Keith has been designing animation backgrounds for various studios, most notably at Warner Bros. for Bruce Timm's Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League. And he has also worked on Cartoon Network's The Power Puff Girls feature and Gary Baseman's Teacher's Pet for Disney.
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