In the tradition of the Photorealism and Hyperrealism movements that had evolved as offshoots of Pop Art, the paintings of musician, songwriter, and figurative painter Paul Roberts exist in the liminal space between perceived glamor and kitsch, taking their cues from the archetypes of genre fiction and the heightened realities of cinema and photography…
With the passing of Christmas and the arrival of the NFL postseason, minds turn to one of the premier football toys from the era before kids were able to hook video game consoles up to the living room TV. Before Madden, before Tecmo Bowl, before Atari Football even—there was Electric Football…
From the early ’70s through the early ’90s, Canadian artist and activist Carl Chaplin produced and exhibited a series of paintings depicting the atomic destruction of major cities from around the world “to point out the horror of what would happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” The series was called Art Nuko, and it became quite controversial…
High Times arrived on newsstands in 1974, initially intended to be a single-issue lark by founder Tom Forçade. But the magazine ended up becoming an underground institution, a harbinger of increasingly liberal points of view among the Baby Boomer generation on cannabis consumption and the increasing establishment of a domestic American hemp production market…
Despite a tragically short life, and despite still being almost completely unknown, Greg Irons has exerted an extraordinary influence on the course of underground and mainstream comics, graphic design, and the tattoo world, where he is regularly cited as a legend. Irons was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and moved to San Francisco during 1967’s Summer of Love, where he immediately found work designing event posters for music promoter Bill Graham…
Thanks to the record covers he drew for Rudimentary Peni, the band for which he was vocalist and guitarist, artist Nick Blinko’s initial audience was mainly confined to the members of the thriving British anarcho-punk scene of the early 1980s. Despite apparently operating in the same aggressive idiom as their peers, however, it was immediately clear that the Peni were unique…
In pondering an exhibit to do for Thanksgiving week, I thought it might be interesting to check out what the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade looked like the year I was born: 1975…
A collision of imperial phase-Young Artists—the London-based illustration agency whose imagery would dominate and define British science fiction and fantasy art throughout the 1970s and ’80s—and an attention to graphic design detail that bordered on the unhinged, Tour of the Universe was a bold attempt to create an immersive world of science fiction art and prose that still looks as wildly ambitious today…
Positing a fantasy world where Renaissance and Enlightenment values co-existed with the joys and preoccupations of the coming technological age, the Rondo Veneziano orchestra was the brainchild of Italian record label owner Freddy Naggiar, who noticed the lack of Italian instrumental music on the international scene and charged orchestra director and arranger/composer Gian Piero Reverberi to come up with someone or something to fill the gap…
Blade Runner was not an immediate success upon its June 25, 1982 release, a fact that has become part of the film’s lore over the years. It had quite a bit of competition that same summer: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Tron, Poltergeist, and John Carpenter’s The Thing…
