The Art of the Dead by Phil Cushway showcases the vibrant, charismatic poster art that emerged from the streets of San Francisco in 1964 and 1966. It traces the cultural, political, and historical influences of posters as art back to Japanese wood blocks through Bell Époque, on to the Beatniks, the Free Speech Movement, and the Acid Tests. Featuring interviews and profiles of the key artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley “Mouse” Miller, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso.

The book includes over 200 large and small reproductions of pieces relating to the Grateful Dead and offers a trip through time with a focus on the artists and the development of the rock poster as a modern art form.

The cover of the book was adapted from a 1995 Grateful Dead Mardi Gras poster by Troy Alders.

It was just announced that there is a special Art of the Dead limited edition art print box set by Stanley Mouse, a key architect of this legacy. Five 11″ x 17″ previously unpublished archival giclee prints were produced in San Francisco under Stanley’s supervision directly from his original oil paintings and incorporated into an edition of 225.

Read more about the Art of the Dead and the Limited Edition prints at artofthedead.com

Madonna of the Particle, 2013

Before the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art shutters its South of Market location for three years, during which it will spend almost half a billion dollars to more than double its size for the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, the museum’s restaurant on Third Street closes out its more modest exhibition program with nine acrylic-on-canvas paintings by Chris Shaw, on view through June 3, 2013.

Shaw has used his swan-song time slot to present a series of vividly colored Madonnas, each based on Madonnas by such 15th century artists as Bellini, Botticelli, and Ambrogio de Predis. For Shaw, the Madonna is just another propaganda icon, a vessel to be filled up with whatever one is trying to sell. In Shaw’s case, his Madonnas have set aside the Christ Child for a Kalishnikov, a bottle of Colt 45, and an orange squid, whose mantle resembles the Pope’s peaked mitre and groping tentacles suggest a fallen priest’s restless reach.

While the Madonna with the Kalashnikov and the one wearing a suicide bomb vest are the most obvious pokes in the eye of devout Christians, Shaw’s most subversive paintings may be his Madonnas of Science. One holds a magnet, another peers through a microscope, and a third cradles an armillary sphere, Shaw’s representation of what we think we might know about dark matter. And of course there’s a Madonna “holding” a Higgs-Boson particle, in which the son of God gets the heave-ho for the newly discovered God particle.

On Saturday May 3rd, 2013, Ben Marks of CollectorsWeekly spoke with Chris Shaw in his Oakland studio about his Madonnas.

Madonna of the Magnet, 2013

TRPS: So, gotta ask, were you raised Catholic?

Shaw: I was not. I wasn’t actually raised in any particular religion. I guess if there was a family religion, we were Unitarians, but that basically meant we went to the Christmas service, Easter, and that was kind of about it. But I know the stories. I grew up in the north end of Boston and I would see the Italian parades, and they’d have the Madonnas with the money. Some of those themes have carried into my work, so I know there is some of that influence coming back. It’s not personal or even spiritual. The Madonnas become a vehicle to express an idea.

TRPS: So they’re similar to any other icon?

Shaw: They’re almost similar to any other icon. I like the idea behind that, that basically icons can support every idea imaginable. A lot of times, when I get criticism around some of the Madonnas, people are like, ‘how can you portray Jesus as a magnet,’ or ‘how can you put a bottle of malt liquor on this? These things have sacred meanings.’ I actually know my icons pretty well. They’re this evolving story that has changed from the beginning of Christianity to where we are now. You had these heavy Masonic Madonnas and icons from before the Masons and the Catholic church split up. Right now they would be completely sacrilegious, but back then they were woven together. The symbols change, people change, and the stories change.

TRPS: In South America, the Madonna is a much different symbol than it is in the United States.

Shaw: Yeah, in Eastern Europe, too. They give it a whole different slant. I think that’s super interesting. Mostly, I guess, I really like the Madonnas because everybody has their own twist on them. The orthodox ones all have this very unique style, which I love to adapt, and I also really like the Italian ones and the Western European ones. Everybody’s got their version.

Madonna of the Microscope, 2013

TRPS: The Madonnas in the show have an almost Middle Ages look to them as opposed to High Renaissance.

Shaw: Actually, they’re a little bit of both. The three large ones, the “Madonna of the Microscope,” the “Madonna of Evolution,” and the “Madonna of the Magnet” were all appropriated poses. The one that’s maybe the most recognizable would be the “Madonna of the Microscope,” which was a Botticelli. It was a Madonna and Child. One of the things I love about Renaissance art and particularly Italian Renaissance art is the depth of geometry that goes into them. They do a great job of rounding everything out and taking it away. That’s a pretty big influence on me.

TRPS: What do you mean by rounding out and taking away?

Shaw: Well, they tend to obfuscate the foundational framework, which is very angular. They use curves and shading and color to disguise the underlying structure. A lot of times, the underlying foundation of those Renaissance paintings was very symbolic and completely tied to sacred geometrical concepts that carry their own story, if you know how to read them.

Madonna of Dark Matter, 2013

TRPS: When you were painting your Madonnas, did you start with the foundational geometry?

Shaw: Generally, yeah. I built them up in the same way. The orthodox icons are about the most uncreative thing you can imagine. They’re completely formula. You can probably go buy a book that’ll tell you step by step how to make one. But I like that idea. It’s a very non-art idea, but I like taking that non-art idea and then twisting it, moving the arms around, switching it up. The old masters changed the central pieces, but I try to build from the bottom up in a geometric way to reconfigure the image right down to its root, to give it a new foundation.

TRPS: There is this push and pull in your work between scholarship and its rejection.

Shaw: Well, yeah. I carry a certain chip on my shoulder for whatever reason about definitions. When I was at the California College of Arts and Crafts, we took a lot of art history classes. You learn about all this religious art, but your work is supposed to be about your ideas, art for art’s sake in the modern world. But I like religious art. It’s pure propaganda. It’s formulaic. It’s non-original. A lot of times people think the color palette is really bad because the colors are all very symbolic, too. They’re put together for a different reason than color harmony. So in a lot of ways, religious iconography breaks almost all the aesthetic rules of modern art. That might be another reason why I choose them. I like to push this religious propaganda from back in the day into its modern equivalent that is maybe based a little bit on concept and my influences. I guess I’m more influenced by the Berninis the Botticellis the Bellinis, all the B guys in Italy, than I am by some of the better conceptual artists of today.

TRPS: Let’s start with the Madonna holding the God particle as opposed to the son of God.

Shaw: That one was about as straightforward as they get. Some of them actually go quite a few layers deeper in terms of the different types of metaphors that I put into the piece. But yeah, the God particle. I had to do it. How could I not make that?

I’m kind of a natural shin kicker, always have been. Coming out of an art-school background where the abstract and the conceptual is the highest thing, I just naturally want to say no to that. As a poster maker, I’m supposed to make images that are supposed to affect people. White on white is not going to help me get my point across.

Madonna of Evolution (Simian Vanitas), 2013

TRPS: And posters are supposed to be functional.

Shaw: Yes, they have this actual function, they’re not art for art’s sake. They have a purpose. Icons have a purpose, too, to communicate and get things across. That’s why I choose them.

TRPS: We’ve talked about the God particle. Tell me a bit about the magnet.

Shaw: I’m a huge fan of magnets.

TRPS: So, uh, you’re attracted to them?

Shaw: Yeah, I’m attracted to magnets. I love magnets in all ways. I wish I could say that painting was more metaphorical, but that one’s almost… it’s not a self-portrait but it’s a self-portrait of a lot of things I care about. The actual paint I used was all copper or iron-based only. A magnet will stick to the painting. Anyway, I had to do something with the magnet because it’s been a project of mine for a few years, to try to develop magnetic paint, which I’ve done it, but I haven’t been able to do it cheaply enough. Anyway, the curves in that piece, they’re all based on magnetic flux curves.

TRPS: So, the potential symbolism of a magnet taking the place of the baby Jesus, that’s like the farthest thing from your mind?

Shaw: That’s almost the farthest thing from my mind, yeah. If you’re a born-again Christian, it’ll piss you off because it’s almost sacrilegious, but that’s really not what it’s about. I used the Madonna to hold the things that I chose to comment on. She’s literally the vessel to hold these ideas, as she was with Jesus. She’s my icon.

Madonna of the 40oz., 2010

TRPS: To hear you describe it, it’s almost a benign piece.

Shaw: It’s super benign, but it’s also one of the ones that bugs people out the most. The older piece that’s in the show, the “Madonna of the 40oz.” is another that really annoys people. However, that’s about the deepest painting I’ve ever made, and again, it’s obfuscated. It’s kind of turned into a cartoon in a way, but I was shot at in my corner store at point-blank range, and the guy missed. It happened the day after the Rodney King thing; it was wrong place, wrong time. I had bought my friend a 40oz, walked up to the counter, dude that stood next to me pulled out a gun, pulled the trigger, and missed. And so that piece is all about going to the corner store and meeting your maker.

TRPS: What happened after the guy missed?

Shaw: I dove into the chips and he took another shot at me. The guy behind the counter dove underneath the counter. The guy grabbed my eight bucks, or whatever, and my beer and the rest of the money from the cash register, and ran out the back door. I went home, smoked a joint, went back over there and made my police statement.

Left: Bad Religion screen print, 2010. Right: Madonna of the Suicide Vest, 2012.

TRPS: You used the “Madonna of the Suicide Vest” for a Bad Religion poster. How did the “Madonna of the Squid” become a Soundgarden poster?

Shaw: That was about necessity. Chuck and I were going to make these Soundgarden posters for Fox Oakland. I had been working on an image with a squid but it was going south on me. I drew it like nine different ways but didn’t like it. And then I was like, well, I could put it in a Madonna. I had painted all these Madonnas who weren’t holding anything yet. It’s like whatever they were going to hold, I had them on ice. So I incorporated the squid into it and I was like, that works. It was exactly what I needed. It was almost too easy. It’s also about the most religiously subversive painting I’ve made.

TRPS: How so?

Shaw: It’s all about the pope. It’s all about the pope and the pope is the monster. The shape of the squid’s body is the same as the pope’s hat. People started figuring that one out.

Left: Soundgarden screen print, 2013. Right: Madonna of the Squid, 2013.

TRPS: As an artist, if you use Madonnas in a series of paintings, you have to be prepared for the fact that there are people for whom that image means specific things and will never mean anything else.

Shaw: It’ll never mean anything else. I get off the BART train sometimes and there’s a Filipino guy there selling newspapers. Underneath his little desk-cart thing, he has a shrine of the Madonna. And every time I walk by I go to check it out. He keeps it up and moves it around and stuff. My intention is not to piss that guy off. I actually really like what he’s doing. I think that’s cool. I just don’t think that we’re going to be singing on the same page about this stuff. We could argue it all afternoon and it’s not going to matter. So it’s not really a jab at him as much as it’s more of an exploration for me. That’s a tough differentiation for some people to make.

Artist Zoltron has designed a rock poster for the upcoming BottleRock Napa Valley Festival, featuring the best in Music, Comedy, Wine, & Food from May 9–12, 2013. Rock poster fans won’t want to miss this video, shot at Gammalyte studio.

More information on the festival at BottleRockNapaValley.com

420 Moonalice Poster Set — 2013

Rock poster fans in the Bay Area will want to make note that Moonalice is hosting their annual 420 Tribal Pow-Wow this Saturday at Slim’s in San Francisco! Moonalice always makes their April 20 shows very special, and this year is no exception. Everyone who attends will be treated to a free packet of posters, totaling 15 in all, by artists  Wendy Wright, Car­olyn Fer­ris, Dar­rin Bren­ner, John Mavroudis, David Singer, Den­nis Loren, Den­nis Larkins, Dave Hunter, Lau­ren Yurkovich, John Seabury, Stan­ley Mouse, Lee Con­klin, Ron Dono­van, Wes Wil­son, & Alexan­dra Fis­cher!

This year’s Moonalice Tribal Pow-Wow also serves as a benefit for Sweet Relief where all proceeds from the show will go to help Jim King get a surgery he desperately needs. In addition to ticket sales, priced at $4.20, a silent auction is also being held with many cool items including rock posters! More information on the items and event at  Moonalice.com & MoonalicePosters.com or Buy Tickets now.

Directions:

Slim’s San Francisco, CA

Phish, June 19, 2009, Noblesville, Indiana.

Tyler Stout was born under a bad sign in a crossfire hurricane. Raised by a pride of pumas in the Chilean Andes, Stout learned draftsmanship from a seven-fingered alien, who found himself stranded in the Southern Hemisphere after being lured there by the lines and symbols scratched into the nearby Nazca Desert. As it turns out, the marks were a cruel prank on Stout’s multi-digit mentor, perpetrated by a rival race of three-thumbed creatures known as slurgs, who were mostly into sculpture. To this day, Stout hates three-dimensional art.

Or not. But if you talk to the artist, or just trade a bunch of emails with him as I did recently, you get the strong sense that while Stout is ultimately a generous individual (he looks disarmingly like Ron Howard), he’s also a person who values his privacy, hence our email exchange rather than a telephone call. It’s as if, to paraphrase the song, he doesn’t mind being a painter where everyone comes to look, but he’s squeamish about doing anything where his life’s an open book.

The Black Keys, March 23, 2012, Norfolk, Virginia.

Personally, I think it’s because his fans are so damn crazy. Stout can’t even make an obvious joke about retiring from posters, as he did following a rare public appearance at Mondo’s Austin, Texas, gallery, without having his rabid fanboys take him seriously. For his part, Stout took the troll-driven kerfuffle that resulted on ExpressoBeans.com seriously enough that he posted a subsequent clarification on his blog. In short, he’s learned to be careful about what he says, so much so that in a video shot for Mondo, even Rob Jones couldn’t get a straight answer out of the affable artist.

So here’s what I think I know about Tyler Stout. He was born approximately 35 years ago (“I don’t feel a day over 50,” he quips), roughly between Portland (where the hipsters live) and Mt. St. Helens (yeah, the volcano). “I grew up in Brush Prairie, Washington, USA,” Stout says. “My great grandfather had 14 acres, my grandparents built their house here, and my parents built their house here. It’s a somewhat rural area, tractors driving down the road, that sorta thing.”

Flight of the Conchords, May 14, 2009, Portland, Oregon.

This does not sound like childhood landscape of an artist who is known for his illustrations of South Korean movie monsters and blood-soaked posters for Quentin Tarantino films, but to hear Stout tell it, there was menace even in the idyllic surroundings of his youth, as a response to a boilerplate question about his earliest childhood memory suggests.

“Weirdly enough, it was being on this hill covered in daisies,” Stout recalls. “There was a fence and this road, and I just remember it being really sunny. I think we actually had like a picnic lunch, my parents and us,” by which he means his two sisters (one older, one younger) and his younger brother. So far so good, but then: “And I might have been bit by a spider and had an allergic reaction, or that could have been another time; the memories just swirl together. Maybe it was of my great-grandparents’ house burning down. I was four, I think.”

Showoff or Shutup, August 24–27, 2002, Bellingham, Washington.

Stout’s dad was a truck driver, first for Bowers Trucking then Yellow Freight Lines. “My mom was what they used to call a ‘desktop publisher’ but now would just be called a freelance graphic designer.” Perhaps that’s where he got his license to draw. “I wasn’t very good,” he allows, “but like most kids, I drew all the time.”

A child of the ’80s, Stout found one of his biggest inspiration in Disney afternoon cartoons, shows like Rescue Rangers, TailSpin, and DuckTales. Later he graduated to comics, but not the usual Marvel fare. He preferred “Garfield,” “Calvin and Hobbes,” and “The Far Side.”

Les Savy Fav, April 20–21, 2003, Seattle, Washington.

Two years at Clark Community College (go Penguins!) in Vancouver, Washington, earned Stout an associate degree “in something weird like graphics and design,” then it was off to Western Washington University in Bellingham, where he completed a bachelors in new media. “I remember liking the big lecture classes because I could sit in the back and draw, and sleep. My least favorite class was math. I am the worst at math.”

Sometime around 2001, Stout started creating flyers and posters for small shows in Bellingham (The Showoff Gallery), Seattle (Graceland), and Portland (Berbati’s Pan). “I screenprinted my early stuff like ‘Showoff or Shutup,’ then eventually just did posters for venues who would outsource to different printers, like Brian Taylor of BLT.” While Stout made posters for bands like Mars Volta, Death Cab for Cutie, and The Shins, he was mostly into hardcore punk bands like Botch, Harkonen, and Akimbo, “I am in no way musically talented,” he adds, “but some people say I have the voice of an angel.”

Tenacious D, September 28, 2001, Winooski, Vermont.

Stout’s first big break occurred while he was still in Bellingham, where he was asked to contribute illustrations of Jack Black and Kyle Gass for a poster advertising a Tenacious D show at Higher Ground in Winooski, Vermont. “A guy named Joe Peila, who had graduated from Western Washington, was back visiting and saw my stuff. He was working on that Tenacious D poster in Vermont and asked me to do some stuff, which I did.” Peila was creating the poster for Jager Di Paola Kemp Design (JDK) in Burlington, Vermont. In 2002, Stout moved to Burlington to work for JDK, for whom he illustrated, among other things, the official screenprint for the 2004 music festival at Bonnaroo and an album cover (“Undermind”) for Phish.

“We had a couple different versions,” Stout recalls of the album cover, “some with cartoons, some with sketches. I believe they gave us a bunch of photos and the final result came from drawings of those. Originally, the portraits were going to be on different layers, in different colors, with each portrait combined with a letter (or letters) spelling out Phish. Many factors prevented that from happening, but they liked the portraits.”

Bonnaroo, June 11–13, 2004, manchester, Tennessee.

In his spare time, Stout produced posters at Iskra Print, which he describes as “kinda a screenprinting-collective-type deal in the basement of the JDK building.” From Burlington, he also designed his first images printed by Steve Horvath and D&L Screenprinting in Seattle for shows at Berbati’s (The Incredible String Band, with support by Joanna Newson, 2004) and a Portland club called The Meow Meow (Explosions in the Sky, also 2004).

In 2005, Stout moved back to the Pacific Northwest and also began his relationship with Mondo, the Austin-based movie-poster publisher, whose fascination with Quentin Tarantino and monster movies mirrored Stout’s pop-culture obsessions. “Rob Jones contacted me and asked if I wanted to do a poster for a film festival the Alamo was putting on called QTFest. I wouldn’t say I was ready to give up on rock posters; I was young and looking for poster work and this came along and it worked out.”

Incredible String Band, October 11, 2004, Portland, Oregon.

Indeed. Since 2005, Stout has created several dozen images (not counting variants) for Mondo, most of which hew to what the artist loosely describes as his “people/face/action-type collage” format. The roots of that style can be seen in posters like the one he did for a 2003 show at Graceland for Les Savy Fav. “Sure, that’s probably correct,” he agrees. For some, Stout is only a movie-poster artist, but he never gave up on the gig stuff. From 2005 through 2007, he continued to produce posters for shows at mostly smaller venues in Portland, as well as art prints, including the glow-in-the-dark gem for Copious Creative.

But his career really took off in 2008: The number of assignments he received from Mondo increased, he produced his second album cover for Phish (“At the Roxy”), and then there was his relationship with Flight of the Conchords, for whom he created 10 different posters for the band’s summer 2008 U.S. tour, as well as a handful of others the following spring. One was a riff on a Beastie Boys album cover (May 14, 2009, Portland), another suggested the look of his movie posters (May 30, June 1, 2008, Los Angeles), and one even predicted the bucolic look he would give to his first Phish poster (April 19, 2009, Kent State).

Explosions in the Sky, October 21, 2004, Portland, Oregon.

“That was a challenge, definitely,” he says of his 2008 work for Flight of the Conchords.” I think it was the only time I’ve tried to make a whole series like that. I’m not sure why I’ve done so much work for them. It just worked out that way. You find people you enjoy working with and they come back and ask for more and you keep doing it. They’ve asked me more than Phish has, for sure.”

But Phish did ask, and Stout’s first poster for the band’s June 19, 2009, show in Noblesville, Indiana, remains one of my favorites by the artist. In it, Stout melds the loose, cartoony style of his college days with the almost color-by-numbers graphics of his Mondo stuff. The band’s name dominates the top half of the poster, imagined as a kind of patchwork sign that might have been cobbled together from scraps of lumber and discarded shingles found in the scene’s ramshackle barn buildings below.

Pearl Jam, November 6, 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Are we looking at the old homestead back in Brush Prairie? “My parents were kinda hippies back in the day,” he says. “They bought a farm out in the middle of nowhere and raised us kids pretty freely. We were outside a lot from a very young age. I guess that could have translated into ideas for Phish posters, but the person I work with at Phish headquarters is also pretty good about a free exchange of back-and-forth poster ideas, so it’s probably a mix.”

By New Year’s Eve of 2009, Stout had been tapped to create the posters for the band’s four-night run at the American Airlines Arena in Miami, Florida. But instead of individual images for each show, Stout produced a quartet of variants, known in the trade as colorways. Today, variants are a staple of poster artists, sometimes being the only way they can make any real money off their work. Stout freely admits to their monetary benefits, but for him, colorways are also an important part of the process to find out what an image can be.

The Decemberists, November 29, 2008, Portland, Oregon.

“I think my very first poster I ever printed had several colorways,” he says, “printed on different types of paper. It’s always fun to play with the printing process and try out different types of materials, different colorways, discovering which colors you prefer as you print. When I started working with Alamo, Rob Jones encouraged me to try a few colorways, and we ended up doing two for my first Alamo job, QT6, a yellow colorway and a pink colorway. People seemed to like having the option of choosing which colorway they preferred, I was able to see which I preferred, and it kinda grew from there.

“Part of the reason I still do them now,” Stout continues, “is tradition, sure, but part of it is that I’ve just spent several weeks or more working on a piece and am finally ready to screenprint it. I could put all my eggs in one basket and say ‘print it this color, I am 100 percent sure about it,’ or I could do two colorways and have the ability to chose which colorway I like best after it’s printed. I feel like I’ve put so much work into something, I’ve earned the right to play a little bit with colorway options. Ultimately I do this sorta stuff for me, trying to create that one perfect piece. So variants are part of that process, part of me trying to achieve that goal.”

Pearl Jam, July 11, 2012, Werchter Rock Festival, Belgium.

In recent years, Stout’s most sought rock posters have been for The Black Keys and Pearl Jam, crowned by his ‘versus’ collaboration with Jeff Soto for a Pearl Jam show in Belgium. “We were paired by the guy who organized the series, Chris Siglin, which was a real pleasure since I’ve been a fan of Jeff’s since college. He is one of the greats out there right now, and I definitely tried to let him take point. He’s the master; you have to listen to the master. He fought for the diecuts, the printing on the back, the works.”

Other than the Soto collaboration, a poster for Phish, and a pair of images each for The Black Keys and Mondo, 2012 was a relatively quiet year for Stout, so much so that some of his hardcores began to wonder if something was amiss. “Ah, the tough questions come out,” he says. “2012, what a year. Two posters did get moved back to 2013, so that might be part of it. Plus I had sad, real-life things that posters had to kinda take a backseat to, just getting things right in my life. I believe (and I am probably wrong) that things are better now, and I’m hoping 2013 is a good year. I’ll probably be hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Phish, May 27–29, 2011, Bethel, New York.

A few days later, when asked in a subsequent email to clarify his remarks, Stout reconsiders them instead. “It’s completely uninteresting,” he asserts. “I don’t want to come off as mysterious. I should have phrased it this way: A few prints got pushed back to 2013, and a few prints got cancelled. Hopefully 2013 is a bit better of a year, a bit more productive.”

For what it’s worth, I liked his original colorway better, but I totally get why he wanted to try out a second answer to that question, just to see what it looked like.