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Home FEATURES Adam Scott Interview

Adam Scott Interview
Written by Ryan Christian   
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 07:08
A fucking megalon painter from Kavi Gupta's (Chicago) already very handsome roster. Go see one in person and then make your uncle (or whoever buy it). Ok. Go!

No real intro this time. You all have plenty to read as it is. Anything I could possibly say now, would just be said by him already into the 11th dimension (down there). Adam Scott, fucking megalon painter from Kavi Gupta's (Chicago) already very handsome roster. Go see one in person and then make your uncle (or whoever buy it). Ok. Go!

Adam tell us a little bit about your work, for those who have neither seen nor heard of it.

For the past 7 years I have been pouring heavy amounts of liquid acrylic paint onto super-cranked / tight canvases. On the surface, the work uses representational pictorial languages. Below the surface, the DNA code is made up of process based non-objective painting languages. The content of the work is totally immersed in American vernacular visual culture and hyper reified modern / contemporary art visual culture. The ridiculous and the sublime play equally important roles in my work. There is also a generous helping of good ol' American fear & paranoia.

Adam Scott, Lay Down, Lay Down And Wait (like an animal), 2005, acrylic on canvas, 46" x 40"

So you started out in California doing your BFA, and then came to SAIC. What kind of work did you start out doing? How did it come to this? Or were you making gigantic awesome paintings from the get go? How did you fall in with Kavi's space?

The art department at Long Beach State was quite conservative. When I started the curriculum was almost exclusively centered around figure painting, drawing, and sculpture. There was really no escape. When you are a freshman in an art department and all of the work produced by the older students has a super technical proficiency you naturally are drawn to it. I saw a big painting of a mustard bottle and a shoe in one of the display cases...I thought that that was the shit!!! All I wanted to do was reproduce that ... But you couldn't just paint it like you felt it; you had to paint it like Manet, or Sergeant, or Freud . . .the instructors were really dogmatic that way. It was really tough and pretty discouraging at times. But, as always the younger part-time faculty, were cool and would turn you on to what was happening in the Los Angeles underground art scene. This one faculty member named Michael Miller showed me that there are no rules and everything is permitted!!!! When I received that important piece of the puzzle I totally went off! It was as if I got plugged into giant electrical transformer. The rush of ideas was OVERWHELMING to say the least. From then on, everything I laid my eyes on became potential art objects. Soil, trash-cans, hang gliders, feathers, matches, found cassette tapes, eucalyptus leaves, spray string foam, snake skin hats etc . . .

Between experiments on the effects of LSD on my brainwaves, I would spend time in the school library devouring every book in the fairly limited and crusty art section. The art books stopped being current at about 1985. It was that they had a really deep section of texts dedicated to conceptual-dematerialized practices and minimalism / post-minimalism. I was on a steady diet of visual art from 1965 - 1975. I really loved it. I had really no conception of how outdated that stuff was. Now, it has all come back around. (i.e. the Whitney Biennial). Those books make the artists and the work from that period look so cool. Everything is photographed in black and white, totally drained of seductive aesthetics, super tough, smart, take no prisoners attitude.

I got my BFA in Painting & Drawing from CSULB, but I had not made a painting in 3 years. I was making big installations, like, 1000 blue-tip matches layered with dried up leaves surrounded by fucked up boom-boxes playing the Greenwich mean time signal. Total cluster-fuck aesthetics!!! I had also just seen the Helter Skelter Show at the Geffen Contemporary (MOCA), which really fucked me up in the best way!!!! The Helter Skelter show had the work of Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelly, Lynn Foulkes, Lari Pittman, Victor Estrada, Chris Burden, Manuel Ocampo, Liz Larner, Meg Cranston, and Nancy Rubens. The work was visceral, dangerous to the social order, smart, scary, hilarious, pathetic, and muscular. In fact the Helter Skelter show was an actual turning point in my life. I learned how to be an artist from that show. I learned how to get my attitude together. The timing for me was perfect.

After graduating with an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I started a DIY space with other recent graduates Danielle Gustafson Sundell, Carrie Gundersdorf, and Andy Moore called Deluxe Projects. We ran it for three years (2000-2003) and did only solo shows. Most DIY spaces do group shows. It makes sense, because the spaces are usually run by 4-7 artists. The M/O for most DIY spaces is to get your own work out there by any means necessary. We did that for our first show, but after that we thought that it was lazy to keep showing our own work. So, we decided to start showing other peoples work. One of the cool things about art school is that you meet all of these intense and awesome artists. We realized that Chicago was this really artistically fertile place. So we just started talking to people that we all graduated with and pretty soon were doing studio visits and then chose our first show!!! I learned as much about art making running a collaborative space as I did in grad school.

Adam Scott, installation view, Kavi Gupta/Leipzig

My own studio practice was very private after grad school. I really was really trashed-out on critiques. They were really great and brutal at SAIC, but I really did not want any more unsolicited feed back for a while. So, I got a cheap studio in a fucked up warehouse in Pilsen (between Chinatown and Little Village, Chicago's Latino community) and started making paintings again. I had fucked with various deconstructive modalities of late modernist and post-modern painting and sculptural languages in grad school, but it was really experimental, disposable, and not focused. Getting out of grad school was totally liberating!!!! I made money by hustling teaching gigs at community colleges in and around the "Chicagoland" area. I still teach to this day. For me, it's the best job ever. I really love it. It's not like work at all. I teach at SAIC.

While I was being a monk in my studio trying to figure out what I am about, I started making trips to various thrift-stores, junk stores, and antique malls around Chicago. I went with my wife, Julie Whaley (fellow Californian), to most of these because she is a fashion designer and is the absolute queen-bee of thrift style!!!! I started to become interested in the massive piles of old and shredded up postcards. The images on these cards were typically oblique, blank, and colorful. The grass is always too green and the sky is always way too blue. Most of them dated from around 1950 to 1970. I was fascinated by the way these postcards claimed to represent specific places . . . a Holiday Inn, an IHOP parking lot, a men's shoe store, the Kellogg's plant in Kalamazoo, the Grand Canyon. The postcards served simultaneously as souvenirs and portable monuments. I saw these postcards as extensions of American landscape painting and American photo/cinematic traditions. Postcards create mini narratives that re-thematize our perception of our collective identities. So, I started to appropriate the postcard imagery. To me, they seemed like finished paintings on their own. I started to cut up and re-collage different postcards together and use those as templates for paintings. I realized that the American landscape is really a constructed space. I started to construct fake landscapes made up of impossible elements from the recent history of American pop-visual culture.

Kavi Gupta opened his space, then called Vedanta, in 1997. As word of mouth spread about Deluxe Projects, Kavi, Julia Fischbach, and Kristen VanDeventer started showing up to our openings, which included our small gallery space (300 square feet), a hallway, and a couple of tubs of iced beer (one dollar donation, please!). Kavi had a space in one of his summer group shows and asked for one of my paintings. It was a painting of the Oklahoma City Federal building at the moment of its destruction. I then got a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was the first year of the 12x12 show cycle. Since then, I have been represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Adam Scott, Green Zone, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 70" x 76"

What influences your work? There is an obvious cartoon presence, but what else. I usually find an artist has some generally unseen inspirations in there work, to the public anyway. Where do the censorship elements in some of your work come from (like in Lay Down, Lay Down and Wait (like an animal)?

When I was 10 years old my parents took me to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and I saw a bunch of Ed Kienholz sculptures there. His work left an indelible mark on my mind. When you are 10, it's hard to process the often-complex cultural data that visual art can deliver. Somehow I did internalize the information, but it was for later use. Back Seat Dodge '38 stuck out to me the most. The sculpture consists of the shell of a 38 Dodge covered with a blue velvet, as if it was flocked with it. The side door is open to reveal two figures engaged in heavy back seat action. The woman is a plaster figure and the man is made out of chicken wire. Beer cans are strewn around the floor of the car and on the ground outside the passenger door. It is hard to tell if the act was consensual or forced. The car radio is continually crackling with weird-old music like Glenn Miller or something . . . very creepy. I remember thinking to myself that somebody made this object. In a very direct way, it made complete sense to me. The sound of the radio, the visuals, even the smell of the gallery, and the sound of people's footsteps reverberating off of the wood floors. I had a radical sense of belonging and I felt very calm.

Overall, I am very influenced by growing up in Los Angeles, Venice, and Santa Monica specifically. Los Angeles is equal parts visual seduction / pleasure and profound alienation. To get a better idea of what I mean read Mike Davis' City Of Quartz and Ecology Of Fear. Growing up in the belly of media culture is pretty intense. The visual perception of America has been, and to a great extent still is, produced by Hollywood. That's where I intuitively learned the idea of the visual hook. The mix of Hollywood glitz, Skid-Row, The Bloods, The Crips, Lowriders, Scientology, and Disneyland's fake wholesomeness is all pretty weird.

In junior high, I discovered the underground music scene of Los Angeles. Black Flag, The Minutemen, Germs, X, Circle Jerks, Fear, Suicidal Tendencies, 45 Grave, Tex And The Horseheads, The Gun Club, The Mentors, The Mau Maus, The Berlin Brats, the Decedents, Aggression, Ill Repute, Rich Kids on LSD (that's more Nardcore or Oxnard to the uninitiated), Dr. Know, DRI (the first two albums) etc . . . the album art and flyer art of the punk subculture was the first ART that I felt was mine!!! I plastered my room with flyers like punk-rock wallpaper and started a band. The visual culture of the punk movement was high velocity, raw, brazen, disposable, and manic. The images these bands used were culled from literally any open source. I equate the visual tactics of punk to a non-ideological cultural butchery where no image was safe form the Exacto knife and the Xerox machine. In many ways, the punk aesthetic continues to inform the subatomic machinery of my own visual art production. The L.A. punk scene was my first art school.

Another influence on my work was the sense of impending catastrophe and cataclysm that was cemented in my mind by living through the Los Angeles Rodney King riots / uprising in the early 1990's and the devastating fires, mudslides, and earthquakes that are indigenous to the southern California landscape. . Armageddon in the noonday sun. Pop noir.

The cartoon look really came from the flat blocks of color I was using. I was actually trying to replicate the offset litho post card look. During my first solo show with Kavi Gupta Gallery, someone commented that the space in my work looks cartoon-like. After the show, I started to research American post-war animation. Obviously I had grown up watching Popeye, Tom & Jerry, Bugs, Daffy, Yosemite Sam etc . . . as most children of the 1970's and 1980's did.

I started to butcher up the different characters and sample them in my paintings. I also started to look at very politically incorrect animation of the post war period. Most of these now "banned" cartoons were used for propaganda purposes. Like Walt Disney's Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi. This animation chronicles the story of Hans, a boy indoctrinated into the Nazi belief system. One of the most wrong animations I have ever seen. I also started to re-examine the animations of Ralph Bakshi. Films like Fritz The Cat, Heavy Traffic, Wizards . . . etc. The pixelization or the black-bar-blocking of the faces and genitatila of the various figurative elements in my work has to do with pictorial violence, witness protections programs, anonymity, and modernist abstraction.

Adam Scott, View Of An Ideal Landscape, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 30" x 36"

So you just finished up a solo show @ Kavi Gupta's Leipzig space. This isn't the first time you have showed in Germany. How is your work responded to in Europe as opposed to the states?

My work gets a very interesting response in Germany. Other than Leipzig, I've shown in Berlin and Frankfurt. I've also shown in Oslo at the GAD, and in the Prague Biennale. I really love showing in Europe. People in the art scene are less interested in HOW you got the show and more interested in what your work is about. Here in the USA, we live in a more cutthroat and desperate way when it comes to navigating the gallery scene.

The European interest in my work has to do with its content. Every since 9/11 the world has been wondering what the fuck are we doing? There is both an exaggerated interest in our culture and a huge amount of skepticism about our role in the world. The content of my work deals directly with the visual residue of our "Americaness".

The show I just wrapped up at Kavi's new space in Leipzig was really interesting. I was showing in the belly of the Leipzig scene. My work looks very different from the work that permeates Leipzig. The opening was packed and I had a bunch of great critical conversations with other artists, gallerists, and collectors. Germans do not fuck around when it comes to supporting the visual arts.

Adam Scott, installation view, Kavi Gupta/Leipzig

For the Paint By Numbers show you pretty much made a variation of the exact same image ten times, this is unlike you past exhibitions. What made you decide to do this?

Recently, I have been making a lot of work to be shown at art fairs around the world, which can get weird and disembodied very fast. Art fairs require single pieces and I really wanted to make an entire trajectory... The Paint By Numbers show was for the DoArt gallery in Seoul, Korea. I wanted to experiment and take a risk. I never thought I would be showing my art halfway around the world. It was such a crazy idea that the only route to go was equally strange. I wanted to make a hybrid of my decidedly horizontal western landscape ideas and the more vertical compositions that come out of the Korean/Eastern traditions.

The show also had to do with repetition as pictorial violence and alienation. The title "Paint By Numbers" comes from a review of a past show of mine that said my work looks like "paint by numbers on steroids". I really loved that comment. I happen to be a fan of the paint by number phenomenon. It is a dirty pleasure of mine. It is so quintessentially American, flattened out, and democratic in the worst way!!! I was also thinking about "Waiting for Godot" and Becket's leanness.

The Paint by Numbers series was a way to put my practice under a brutal regimen. It's really monotonous to paint the same work over and over again. It was mentally and physically exhausting. What is really weird was that when I finished the 10 paintings, Cho Seung-hui shot up his classmates at Virginia State. I thought the cultural folding and imagery of that incident and my series of gun toting chopped up critters were strange and kind of morbidly perfect.

Adam Scott, Untitled #4, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 57" x 42"

I actually had never seen one of your paintings in person until the NEXT fair. (The big train one, what is the title for that?) There is a lot of surface activity that gets lost in the internet/in person translation. How do you pour/ or manipulate paint on such a massive scale?

I started pouring my paintings in 2001. After Gerhard Richter, I had no idea how to use a brush anymore. I felt that any brush mark was too referential for me. Plus, I'm really not a painter's painter. I'm more interested in Art. Techniques come out of necessity. I wanted to make blank, flat, gooey, thick, and colorful images. I wanted the surfaces to be homogenous. I want the viewer to try to figure how the work came into being.

I've always been interested in both ideas and processes. I am about thinking and playing. My journey as an artist has been about reconciling seemingly opposed actions. I spend months researching and making digital collages and studies on my computer. When I get into the studio, I just want to act in the moment/play in the mud. For example, the piece you saw at the NEXT show titled "Painting", had a 6-month research trajectory. The actual creation of the material object did not take nearly as long. I love the idea of representational imagery bubbling up out of a giant ocean of raw liquid plastic.

How do I manipulate the paint? I'm going to keep that secret. Mysteries are good for art.

Adam Scott, Painting, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 70" x 180"

Why are all you paintings really big?

I really don't think they are that big at all. I've only done two paintings that I consider big. The first would be the painting I made for my 12X12 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2002 and the work I just made for the Next Art Fair. Those were both about 70" x 180".

My usual measurements are 70" x 76" or 60" x 66 (a more satanic measurement) or 30" x 36". The 70" x 76" proportion is the measurement of my body with my arms and legs stretched out. I view art scale in direct relation to human body scale. When a work is smaller than you it says one thing, if the work is as big as you it says another, and if the work is bigger than you an entirely new content unfolds.

Adam Scott, Yes / No / Shut It, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 66"

Do you have a favorite painting of yours? One that everytime you think about, you say, "Damn! I'm awesome".

I don't have a favorite painting. I tend not to think about best works or about how awesome I am. That can be a very slippery slope. All I want of my work is to effectively perform the material and conceptual tasks I set out for them. Actually, I think my new music project is pretty kick-ass!!!

Adam Scott, Wait For It, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 70"x 76"

What things do you love to do in Chicago? Like if some San Fransisco nerd was here and asked you what they should do for a weekend, you would tell them?

Eat at AVEC or Cafe Lula. After that, check out a live show at the new Bottom Lounge or the Empty Bottle or Mr. City (DIY noise/psychedelic) or the Lucky Gator Loft (DIY punk rock). Wake up the next day and go vinyl shopping at Permanent Records. Jam it on over to the West Loop to check out the galleries (go to Kavi Gupta Gallery first), have a snack Bari Foods (take a sandwich to go for the Airplane), then get your butt on the Blue-Line to O'Hare or the Orange-Line to Midway airport and cruise on back to SFO or OAK!! Do nerds exist in San Francisco?!?!?

Adam Scott, Shit Creek, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 70" x 76"

What do you have in stock for the future?

My wife, my sister and I just bought a beat up Victorian mansion to share in Wicker Park. Its right across form a state lockdown mental institution, quite charming and rustic in a Stanley Kubrick kind of way. We've been rehabbing it for 3 years and are about to finally move into it in August! I'll have my first in-house studio. We're stoked!

Name drop list!

Barack Obama (Props to Chicago!!!), Ed Ruscha, The Pets (Oakland!!!), Down at LULU'S (Oakland!!), Wowsville Records (Berlin), Julie Whaley and Dawn Reed's designed objects for the body (watch for them, buy them, freak on them), Let It Bleed (Berlin), The King Khan and BBQ Show (Berlin / Montreal / the World), Monsieur Vuongs (Berlin Vietnamese food) The Birds Of Avalon (Raleigh, NC), Aquarius Records (Mission District!!!), Cellar Rat (Chicago), www.victimoftime.com (Chicago/ Planet Earth), Wr. Mysteries of the Organism, & Sweet Movie (Dusan Makavejev), Holly Mountain (the Film by Alexandro Jodorowsky), The Wooden Shijps (San Francisco), Dexter (Showtime), Mourning the loss of the Wire (HBO), My new garage/punk/psych band (no name yet), The GO (Detroit), Human Eye (Detroit), The Dhaba Indian Restaurant (Santa Monica, CA!), Mr. City (Chicago), Lucky Gator Loft (Chicago), Wide Eyed (by Trini Dalton), Little House On The Bowery (Douglas Cooper), Palazzo Grassi (Venice, Italy). Dr Brian O'Blivion's Cathode Ray Mission (Videodrome)

Adam Scott, Untitled #10, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 57" x 42"

Invent something right now, what is it?

I recently had a dream about a giant sunflower plant that also grew marijuana buds. You could get high and then munch on the seeds. Sunflower Weeds.

Adam Scott, installation view, Kavi Gupta/Leipzig

Any good (possibly controversial to internet kids) advice you have been given or could give to us folks?

Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!!!!!

All these fine images, my ability to talk this guy and maybe some others things... Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago/Leipzig {moscomment}

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Gone Fishin'
Tuesday, 13 October 2015 11:39

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

Hit me up if you have any ECommerce related questions. - trippe.io


 

SF Giants' World Series Trophy & DLX
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I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

IMG_9585_sm

SF skateboarding icons Jake Phelps, Mickey Reyes, and Tommy Guerrero with the 3 SF Giants World Series Trophies


 

Alexis Anne Mackenzie - 2/28
Wednesday, 25 February 2015 10:21

SAN FRANCISCO --- Alexis Anne Mackenzie opens Multiverse at Eleanor Harwood in the Mission on Saturday, Feb 28th. -details

a_m


 

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
Wednesday, 21 January 2015 10:34

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

lead

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

 

"Six Degrees" @FFDG
Friday, 16 January 2015 09:30

"Six Degrees" opens tonight, Friday Jan 16th (7-10pm) at FFDG in San Francisco. ~Group show featuring: Brett Amory, John Felix Arnold III, Mario Ayala, Mariel Bayona, Ryan Beavers, Jud Bergeron, Chris Burch, Ryan De La Hoz, Martin Machado, Jess Mudgett, Meryl Pataky, Lucien Shapiro, Mike Shine, Minka Sicklinger, Nicomi Nix Turner, and Alex Ziv.

17_ms

Work by Meryl Pataky

 

In Wake of Attack, Comix Legend Says Satire Must Stay Offensive
Friday, 09 January 2015 09:59

Ron-Turner

Ron Turner of Last Gasp

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

 

Solidarity
Thursday, 08 January 2015 09:36

charlie

 

SF Bay Area: What Might Have Been
Tuesday, 06 January 2015 09:36

tiburonbridge

The San Francisco Bay Area is renowned for its tens of thousands of acres of beautiful parks and public open spaces.

What many people don't know is that these lands were almost lost to large-scale development. link

 

1/5/14 - Going Back
Monday, 05 January 2015 10:49

As we work on our changes, we're leaving Squarespace and coming back to the old server. Updates are en route.

The content that was on the site between May '14 and today is history... Whatever, wasn't interesting anyway. All the good stuff from the last 10 years is here anyway.

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Jacob Mcgraw-Mikelson & Rachell Sumpter @Park Life (5/23)
Friday, 23 May 2014 09:22

Opening tonight, Friday May 23rd (7-10pm) at Park Life in the Inner Richmond (220 Clement St) is Again Home Again featuring works from the duo Jacob Mcgraw-Mikelson & Rachell Sumpter who split time living in Sacramento and a tiny island at the top of Pudget Sound with their children.

Jacob Magraw will be showing embroidery pieces on cloth along with painted, gouache works on paper --- Rachell Sumpter paints scenes of colored splendor dropped into scenes of desolate wilderness. ~show details

park_life

 

NYPD told to carry spray paint to cover graffiti
Wednesday, 21 May 2014 10:37

nyc_graffitiNYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

 

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Wednesday, 16 June 2010 17:39


 

 


 

 

 

Alison Blickle @NYC's Kravets Wehby Gallery

Los Angeles based Alison Blickle who showed here in San Francisco at Eleanor Harwood last year (PHOTOS) recently showed new paintings in New York at Kravets Wehby Gallery. Lovely works.


Interview w/ Kevin Earl Taylor

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...


Peter Gronquist @The Shooting Gallery

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.


Jay Bo at Hamburg's Circle Culture

Berlin based Jay Bo recently held a solo show at Hamburg's Circle Culture featuring some of his most recent paintings. We lvoe his work.


NYCHOS @Fifty24SF

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.


Gator Skater +video

Nate Milton emailed over this great short Gator Skater which is a follow-up to his Dog Skateboard he emailed to us back in 2011... Any relation to this Gator Skater?


Ferris Plock Online Show Now Online as of April 25th

5 new wonderful large-scale paintings on wood panel are available. visit: www.ffdg.net


ClipODay II: Needles & Pens 11 Years!!

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.


BANDES DE PUB / STRIP BOX

In a filmmaker's thinking, we wish more videos were done in this style. Too much editing and music with a lacking in actual content. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.


AJ Fosik in Tokyo at The Hellion Gallery

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.


Ferris Plock - Online Show, April 25th

FFDG is pleased to announce an exclusive online show with San Francisco based Ferris Plock opening on Friday, April 25th (12pm Pacific Time) featuring 5 new medium sized acrylic paintings on wood.


GOLD BLOOD, MAGIC WEIRDOS

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.


Jeremy Fish at LA's Mark Moore Gallery

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.


John Felix Arnold III on the Road to NYC

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.


FRENCH in Melbourne

London based illustrator FRENCH recently held a show of new works at the Melbourne based Mild Manners


Henry Gunderson at Ever Gold, SF

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.


Mario Wagner @Hashimoto

Mario Wagner (Berkeley) opened his new solo show A Glow that Transfers Creativity last Saturday night at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco.


Serge Gay Jr. @Spoke Art

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.


NYCHOS Mural on Ashbury and Haight

NYCHOS completed this great new mural on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco on Tuesday. Looks Amazing.


Sun Milk in Vienna

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding


"How To Lose Yourself Completely" by Bryan Schnelle

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle


Tyler Bewley ~ Recent Works

Some great work from San Francisco based Tyler Bewley.


Kirk Maxson and Alexis Mackenzie at Eleanor Harwood Gallery

While walking our way across San Francisco on Saturday we swung through the opening receptions for Kirk Maxson and Alexis Mackenzie at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in the Mission.


Jeremy Fish Solo Show in Los Angeles

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.


The Albatross and the Shipping Container

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.


The Marsh Barge - Traveling the Mississippi River from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.


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