ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
The miniature paintings of Joseph Martinez are exquisitely painted on matches. The eroticism and sensual poses of the beautiful women he paints are amplified by its small scale.
Watch more of his matchbook painting in this video by Crio Silvas:
John Duda is a street artist and illustrator. He created some designs for Upper Playground.
(1985, Mexico City)
Jesús "Dhear" Benítez's style is a mixture of illustration, painting and graffiti, which dominates all disciplines, practices and mergers. His works often represent animal and plant organisms that curious abstraction, without losing its essence of fantasy.
Watch this video by adidasoriginalsmx:
Jesse Reno is a mixed-media painter living and working in Portland, OR.
Watch this documentary by Joseph R. Faltyn:
Jeremy & Claire (aka Day19) are a husband and wife team that has been shooting together for a decade. They met on the east coast 20 years ago, decided to go to photo school in Boston and now split their time between Los Angeles and Big Bear with their two sons, Eli and Liam.
Watch this video of Jeremy and Claire:
(Los Angeles, US)
Jeremy holds a BFA (2001) and MFA (2003) in Drawing and Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. He is an interdisciplinary artist who was born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles. His most recent work was shown at the Helen Day Art Center in Vermont and Ever Gold Gallery in San Francisco. Jeremy spends his free time with his 5 year-old son, watching 70’s television, and listening to heavy metal.
(1974, New York, US)
With a degree in painting and a focus in screenprinting Jeremy Fish's education and work experience has lead to a career as a fine artist, and a commercial illustrator. Finding a balance between exhibiting his work both across the US, and internationally in galleries and museums. while maintaining a presence designing skateboards, t-shirts, vinyl toys, album covers, periodical illustrations, murals, and sneakers. The artwork is mainly about storytelling and communication, told through a library of characters and symbols. With an emphasis on finding a balance with the imagery somewhere between all things cute and creepy. Jeremy is based in North Beach aka little italy, and has lived in San Francisco for the last 20 years.
(1959, Bolivia)
Often times Javier Rocabado combines themes into installations that feature real US currency alongside human figures or icons and real objects. These icons are then embellished with 22 k Gold Leaf halos, cultured pearls, semi-precious stones, 18k gold and silver jewelry, the vials of used injectable HIV medications filled with holy water or olive oils. I also use inert bullets, maps, cloth and a myriad of common house-hold objects.
Although he uses a variety of materials, his theme and methodology is consistent in each of the art pieces in this series. All the pieces are linked by recurring formal concerns and throughout the subject matter. The subject matter of each piece thus determines the materials to be used and the form the piece will take.
(1971, Boston, US)
Jason Jägel received degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts and Stanford University. A monograph of his work entitled, Seventy-Three Funshine, was created with an accompanying ten-inch vinyl record with music by Madlib and published by Electric Works, San Francisco.
Jägel has been featured in numerous solo and group shows since 1995 including those in New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Milan, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Seattle, New Orleans and more. Jagel's work appears in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The UCLA Hammer Museum and the Portland Museum of Art, among others. Jason lives with his wife and two daughters in San Francisco.
Watch this video about his art by World Media TV:
(United Kingdom)
INSA was born in the United Kingdom and began painting at the age of 12. Prior to this age, he made low, low budget horror films with his friends, and even counts Nightmare on Elm Street’s monstrous Freddie Krueger among his creative influences. The artist is distinguished by the seamless mix of reality and fantasy apparent in all his work. His art is always changing, to the surprise and excitement of his viewers.
His strong opinions regarding popular culture and consumerism are what his art is all about. INSA wants to be known through his art, not by any personal characteristics. He keeps his private life very private, but is most willing to talk about his life and thoughts as an artist. This shrouded identity keeps others from pretending to be like him and allows his viewers to conjure up their own image of who INSA is and what he looks like. He may be of any race, age or physiognomy. In INSA’s view, whatever the viewer imagines, that is what the artist looks like. The one thing he does want his audience to understand about him is his belief that fantasy is always better than reality.
Watch this White Walls project video by Unit44:
(1979, Syracuse, NY, US)
Ian Johnson lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He creates portraits predominately of jazz musicians of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Johnson investigates the space between the spontaneous nature of jazz music and the physical structure of the human form.
Johnson is also the art director of San Francisco’s Western Edition Skateboards, which allows him to explore the fundamental nature of his portraits as both a cultural and commercial product.
Watch this video by Ando Nesia:
(1976, Newcastle, England)
HUSH, inspired by detritus, uses futuristic silvers and blacks clothed in a chaotic collage of colour to create a sensual blizzard of femininity, power and loss. Painted in grayscale, often with the eyes blacked out, HUSH's female faces are dehumanised. By reducing them to shells of sexuality, he perfectly encapsulates the transient nature of modern life as well as the timeless forces of passion and desire.
By action painting these faces from history, he achieves "pure expressionism". The collage-effect backgrounds are screen-printed and hand-painted, then the graffiti elements added by hand in the action painting style, sometimes over many months. The final layer of colour replicates sheets of flyposters peeling from our city's walls whilst the Bravura use of aerosol on the portraits lends the pieces a futuristic sheen, echoing the seductive promise of technological fulfillment.
"Some people think my women are serene, others that they're scary. What is clear is the power of their sensuality", says HUSH. The portraits he paints are imposing and alluring, yet confrontational and unobtainable. The implication being that while the pleasures of modern life are fleeting, the succubus legend remains the most potent, rewarding, and perhaps destructive compulsion offered to man.
Watch this installation video by carmichaelgallery:
(1981, Germany)
Since 2004 the German street art duo Hera and Akut form a fruitful partnership having worked together on various successful global art projects. Their art works can be found in big cities around the world – from Toronto to Kathmandu, from San Francisco to Melbourne. Their joint creative art process is dialogical, among themselves as well as towards the outside by embracing the public. It’s about storytelling, the creation of imaginary worlds and inspiring their figures with individual characters. Hera sets the characters’ form and proportions, whilst Akut paints the photorealistic elements. The further process is determined jointly by the two artists.
Together they experiment with different formats, materials and methods. Their art works ‘natural home’ is the public space, where everyone can take a pause from the city buzz in front of one of their massive murals. Equally, their gallery pieces, installations and canvases are characterized by their narrative style and their ability to lead the viewer into the imagination of those two exceptional artists. There is a pictorial and textual component in their art pieces. The short quotes, passages or descriptions written next to the figures are references to the character’s life. As a central theme, their figures can be seen in the context of social fractions and collective constraints, but also embedded into fabulous quotes that tell us of love. Thus, the figures reflect the diversity of life.
Herakut’s paintings are sensuous, savage, and always remarkable for their powerful dualism. Akut’s photorealistic details play out against Hera’s expressive, more gestural, line-work in canvases that seem poised to articulate stories of triumph and hardship. Humor and text are weaved their way into the work effortlessly.
Watch this video:
Henry Lewis is a San Francisco-based painter/tattooer/graphic designer. In his studio is where Henry sits and paints and smokes cigarette after cigarette, ostensibly for hours and hours every single night, after he leaves Everlasting Tattoo.
Henry's been working almost exclusively in oils over the past year, and has become incredibly adept with the medium. Theres something about oil paint that you cant get with any other paint; it has to do with luminosity. The layers all build on each other and when handled with some skill, the canvas fairly glows. Its also a very subtle medium and difficult to master.
(1947, Japan)
Hajime Sorayama is a Japanese illustrator, known for his precisely detailed, erotic hand painted portrayals of women and feminine robots. Using brush, pencil and acrylic paint, airbrushing only finishing details, he creates memorable images in a hyper-realistic style. He is often referred to as the contemporary Vargas by those familiar with his pin-up style works, and is respected by artists and illustrators for his perfect technique.
In retrospect, Sorayama's work has been remarkably prescient. Beginning in the 1970's and evolving into the 21st century, the futuristic aura of the robotic, mythic and fantastical figures in his art have always been ahead of their time.
Watch him at his studio here:
(1982, Wisconsin, US)
Greg Gossel has a background in design, his work is an expressive interplay of many diverse words, images, and gestures. Gossel’s multi-layered work illustrates a visual history of change and process that simultaneously features and condemns popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, and London.
His commercial clients include Levi's, Burton Snowboards, Stussy, VICE Magazine, and Interscope Records while his work has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, Artslant, and ROJO Magazine. Greg currently resides in Minneapolis, MN.
Watch this video about him by MN Original:
(California, US)
Franky Aguilar was tired of drawing family-friendly cartoons. The young designer, in early 2012, started hanging out at a Starbucks in Walnut Creek, Calif. with his cracked MacBook and a $100 Wacom tablet. He began scribbling fire-spewing cat heads and flying squadrons of fuchsia donuts, odder visions that harkened back to his high school graffiti days.
Aguilar, who had taught himself programing, cobbled his drawings into a photo editing app called Catwang and released it for free in April 2012. A month later the app had more than 130,000 downloads by people pasting his cartoons on photos they would share on Instagram. Aguilar’s crucial next move: giving his doodles a 99-cent price tag. Within two months the app was bringing in $400 a day.
Soon after, Aguilar and street-apparel maker Upper Playground sold rapper Snoop Dogg on an app called Snoopify, which offers packs of cartoon pimp hats and dreadlocks. On a whim Aguilar designed a $99.99 cartoon marijuana joint called the Golden Jay. Incredibly, 1,000 people have since bought it to garnish their Instagram selfies.
Watch App Art with Franky by KQED Art School here:
(1999)
FAILE is the Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Their name is an anagram of their first project, “A life.” Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide ranging multimedia practice recognizable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage. While painting and printmaking remain central to their approach, over the past decade FAILE has adapted its signature mass culture-driven iconography to vast array of materials and techniques, from wooden boxes and window pallets to more traditional canvas, prints, sculptures, stencils, installation, and prayer wheels.
FAILE’s work is constructed from found visual imagery, and blurs the line between “high” and “low” culture, but recent exhibitions demonstrate an emphasis on audience participation, a critique of consumerism, and the incorporation of religious media, architecture, and site-specific/archival research into their work.
Watch this video on their permanent installation by Vice:
(1959, New York, US)
Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American hip hop pioneer, visual artist and filmmaker. He emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a camera operator and a regular guest on Glenn O'Brien's public access cable show, TV Party. There he met Chris Stein and Debbie Harry. He was immortalized in 1981 when Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture", "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Fab 5 Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking and first internationally telecast hip-hop music video show, Yo! MTV Raps.
(1972, Berlin, Germany)
With a degree in product design, street artist Evol has become known for his urban installations and paintings made on reclaimed cardboard. Evol is interested in depicting the urban lives of ordinary people in decaying buildings. For his public practice, he turns electrical boxes and street fixtures into miniature architectural models of austere apartments, using a process that combines pasting paper, stenciling, and painting.
He also stencils and paints urban street scenes and buildings onto cardboard and incorporates its tears, markings, and folds into his compositions as part of the buildings’ facades. Evol believes that the character and history of any space is manifest on its surface, and many of his works are narrative or suggestive of the turbulent history of Berlin.
Watch this video of his work:
