ANTHONY LISTER

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(1979, Brisbane, Australia)

Lister is a painter and Installation artist whoes work presents us with a grimy fusion of high and lowbrow culture with influences from a number of areas and genres, including street art, expressionism, pop art, and contemporary youth culture, often drawing from television and the "misguided role models" that result. Revelling in the "spirituality", and the "heritage" of Western popular culture he takes this joint legacy and remoulds it into something equally alluring and grotesque, a perfect representation of the society he seeks to depict. 

Taking influence from the dirtier and rough techniques of "Bad" Painting and merging it with the spirit and practices of graffiti art Lister has embraced an explosive, scratchy, scrawling form of figurative art using a variety of mediums from painting, drawing and installation to film and music.

Lister uses comic book imagery for his own means, redirecting popular culture for personal expression. Heroes and villains are taken out of the panel and placed in a new space, devoid of the usual storyline, dialogue and scenery. His paintings are not controlled by cartoon contexts. Rather, the figures in these portraits are reinvented through the artist’s hand. His mixed media technique, involving layers of ink, spray and brushwork, allow his paintings to simultaneously have soft ethereality and a garish, raw energy.

Watch his interview by We Love Street-Art:

ANDREA SONNENBERG

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(1990, San Francisco, US)

Sonnenberg’s photographs are sophisticated, poetic, and rebellious, all at the same time. Like the best documentary and street photographers, she captures a brash world and its characters with a style all her own. Her pictures are bold and unmistakably honest. Even when her scenes are obviously posed, the camera is merely incidental to the moment depicted. Perhaps the most important thing in her photographs is the collective experience she captures. When she turns the lens on herself, she becomes her alter ego, Teen Witch — a tagger running wildly through the streets, partying, and sometimes posing for introspective self-portraits. Above all, her photographs incarnate her relationship to the camera.

She shoots almost exclusively with cheap cameras because she tends to break them. But while her shooting process may be overtly careless, her attitude has become integrated into her craft. Unlike most photographers, Sonnenberg shoots entirely with film, and she develops and prints all her work herself. She maintains a small space at Hamburger Eyes, a do-it-yourself photography and darkroom collective in San Francisco’s Mission District that holds exhibitions and offers photography classes to the community. She’s been known to spend all night meticulously printing color photographs with the most basic technology. The results not only are highly composed, but also have the indelible mark of her hand.

Watch Andrea's interview by Vans:

ALEX PARDEE

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(1976, California, US)
 

Visionary American artist, Alex Pardee, and pioneer in what he calls, "trans-media artistry", brings his unique style and aesthetic to all platforms, including numerous creative director credits for music, animation, and film projects. He is a freelance artist, apparel designer, and comics creator writer, best known for illustrating The Used's album artwork.

Pardee's self-proclaimed influences include 1980s horror movies, pop art, graffiti and gangster rap. Alex has been featured in magazines, gallery shows, and notably in the designs for the clothing company he co-founded, zerofriends.

 

Join Alex Pardee as he teaches you his methods to draw a monster by zerofriends.

ALBERT REYES

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(1971, Los Angeles, US)

Printmaker and video artist Albert Reyes is a soft-spoken guy who loves art. He loves art for art’s sake. His goals are simple: make a living as an artist and use his talent to make a positive impact on people’s lives. This pious, Los Angeles-based artist sounds as pure as the medium he used to launch his career. The very medium Reyes has established himself in is liquid. Whether beer, water, or saliva, Reyes can make a sidewalk portrait that lasts only as long the heat allows. 

With pencil sketches, paintings, and his creepy maze Albert depicts people, known and unknown, and their relationships. He believes art is for all and creates artworks on the pavements of California, spitting out mouthfuls of water to form the lines of these ephemeral, public drawings.

Watch Albert painting art by Giant Robot:


ALA EBTEKAR

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(1978, Berkeley, US)

Through a steady career that has incorporated sculpture, photography and installation, Ala Ebtekar has continually returned to his initial passion of drawing and painting. The artist’s practice is informed by history, Persian mythology, science and philosophy, which he juxtaposes with contemporary and pop-culture elements – the works eventually exhibiting a collision of the past and present in a deconstruction/reconstruction of time and space.

He created his work with neither external themes nor the attention to proper anatomy and perspective. Ebtekar works entirely from his imagination and creative ability. It’s entirely fitting that Ebtekar found early artistic inspiration from the worlds of graffiti and the modern tradition of qahveh khanehei painting, as his work has encompassed comparable populist sensibilities spanning continents, celebrating the stories and lives of heroic everyday people across time.

Watch Ala Ebtekar's interview by KQED:

AKO CASTUERA

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(Claremont, US)

This painter, sculptor, and textile artist, Ako Castuera, is based in Los Angeles where she works as a writer/storyboard artist on the animated television show, Adventure Time. Ako has turned her focus to work on paper with a variety of media, primarily using watercolor and gouache. The works continue her ongoing interest in land, the life within it, and the life it sustains.

Her work is colorful and she likes to have the freedom to improvise and change. The materials she uses are an important part of that. Castuera tries to go for tools and paints that seem to have their own life and finds materials that she gets along with. Ako lets their characteristics influence her choices while she is working.The themes are often about the relationship between humans and our home planet.

"Suburban tracts sprawl over hills and are at once picturesque, parasitic, and fragile. They coexist with dinosaur like animal forms that suggest prehistoric life," she says. "Dinosaurs have always inspired awe and fed fantasies of the past. Their extinction forces contemplation of the future, of what's in store for the land, animals, and humans all."


Watch this interview by Giant Robot:

AKIRA BEARD

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(1976, Tokyo, Japan)

Akira is an artist living and working in San Francisco, CA. When not creating in the studio, his professional time is spent between exhibiting artwork and teaching painting/drawing. He is a faculty member at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he has taught Fine Art Anatomy and Fashion Illustration. Akira has shown at a variety of venues, mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area, including pop-up shows at the Academy of Science, live painting at the West Inn’s New Year Gala and other similar forms of contemporary exhibition.

Like the art itself, his professional practice stems from his ideas, beliefs and values. Akira's paintings are like tomes for the great spiritual teachers of the past, and also cleverly link contemporary culture with beautiful skills in portraiture. His work is relevant, moving, and powerful – truly spiritual, not upholding any outrageous or inhuman experiences but rather honoring the timeless power of what is here and now.

Watch Akira's Art Opening at The Emerald Tablet:

ADAM HARTEAU

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(1977, Los Angeles, US)

This self-made artist, Adam Harteau, works adroitly in a flurry of mediums, each informing the other, and serving its creative purpose as the project presents itself. An imaginative artist, designer, draftsman and problem solver, he moves with ease between painting, photography, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, graphic and fashion design. At 18, he moved to Los Angeles to attend Otis College of Art and Design, where he received a scholarship for fine art painting. He has remained in Los Angeles since then, balancing his diverse and eclectic artistic endeavors with grand explorations of the world, which have all brought great inspiration to his life and work.

Watch Adam, Emily and the rest of the Harteau family take a break from their endless travels to join us as the next in our Dreamers + Doers series. See what it really takes to start a life of adventure, a family and an exciting new business from the open road:

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ADAM CURRY

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(Vancouver, Canada)

Curry works exclusively with oil-based paints and varnishes on wood, classical tools and methods chosen for their proven stability over hundreds of years of art history. His paintings reveal his preoccupation with concepts related to disorder and change, especially the ever present relationship between the cityscape and the unpredictable forest.

Adam has been painting since 1985, after graduating with a Diploma of Fine Arts from Emily Carr College of Art and Design. His practice incorporates a wide range of available technology: digital photography, the world wide web, as source materials, having them reproduced electronically, and then applying Dammar Varnish layered oil  – sometimes 20 layers deep – painting techniques to create optical effects. Images are captured with a cell phone camera, then printed in large-scale format by a shop specializing in blueprints.

Layers of tinted varnish serve to gorgeously illustrate Curry’s concept that the conquered forests of Vancouver, are continually returning, threatening to blur the clean lines of the human landscape, even in the midst of the concrete jungle. His work references the past while challenging our notions of modern painting. Adam moves the viewer on a cinematically inspired narrative sometimes historical, sometimes fantastic or experimental in theme. The paintings in a series engage the viewer with wit and humour to reveal linear and nonlinear patterns.

Watch Adam Curry at Polychrome Fine Art:

ADAM CALDWELL

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(1963, Massachusetts, US)

Adam's paintings and drawings juxtapose elements of abstract expressionism and classical figuration. Throwing in layers of images of ancient ruins, social protest, war, and architecture, he seeks to explore  the contemporary depiction of sexy, southern, white-trash women, who are a stereotypical result of writings by Caldwell’s grandfather. 

During his training at the California College of Arts and Crafts, he began to create collage drawings that layered disparate images on top of one another; he now uses oil paint in a similar way, starting with an abstract background and then adding more photorealistic details, allowing the work to dictate its own construction. The resulting palimpsest of figures and abstract shapes represents the conflicted and paradoxical emotions that underlie his work.

Caldwell's paintings evoke the tensions between mind and body, self and other, present and past. They also raise questions about the nature of identity, particularly concerning issues of gender and sexuality. He is deeply concerned about the world around him, and his work reflects his reactions to social issues such as war and consumerism by contrasting images from American advertisements and popular culture with images of rituals from around the world.


Adam 5100

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(Albuquerque, US)

Adam 5100 hails as one of the top stencil and cut paper artists around, producing works that evidence meticulous execution and a high level of craft. His paintings strongly lend themselves to the process involved with creating them. His childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico was spent examining and interacting with the surfaces of the city through making graffiti art.  His awareness of the structures we use every day but often overlook has become the subject of his current work: the buildings, doorways, fenced trees, discarded buses and chipped alley walls that fill our cities and map our lives. Through an intricate process of hand-cut stencils and enamel painting, he explores the relationship between our perceptions of the temporary and the eternal, uncovering the stories we have transcribed on an urban landscape filled with utilitarian objects.

Adam5100's works have taken on a satirical look, challenging concepts of modernity, using spaces as a language to describe forgotten places, and light to evoke their story and context within the present. His stencils represent hundreds of hours of meticulous work and fine detail, evoking the stunning absence of form in an image. 

"We live in an ever-changing city sculpture, constantly being shaped, broken down and rebuilt again by countless personal human moments."

Learn the art of layering with Adam5100 by KQED: