Simon Evans

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein

Ernesto Caivano

Sigmar Polke

Max Beckmann

Barron Storey

Trenton Doyle Hancock

Raymond Pettibon

Dave Mckean

Zak Smith

Dina Goldstein

Willem De Kooning

Jeff Koons

TV Boy

Tim Burton

Jim Henson

Artist Statement

I grew up in the metropolis of Los Angeles when suburban living was altering the American popular culture. The neighborhoods were arranged with alleys running behind the houses to service the trash pickups. This afforded me opportunity to explore. My wanderings took place as I walked the alleys studying the cast offs and picking up discards.

Later on as an adult my indulgences with found objects turned me into a flea market “junkie”. It was these finds that I used to combine and create assemblage art, which has now been transposed into my current collage work.

My amalgamation of images comes from an untidy place in my subconscious. On the surface it appears that I pick images at random but in fact they interrelate on many levels in many places, and then not at all in others. My interest in surrealism allows this loose association to be acceptable and even desirable to my working process. My interests in science, astronomy, world religions, and alchemy also play a part in how things fall together. I use images as visual embodiments of cultural “ clichés” in combinations or odd juxtapositions with the ambition of reinventing a setting and setting up an invention.

Michael Mew 2007

Albrecht Durer was born in Nuremberg, Germany in 1471. As a painter, engraver and designer, he was one of the foremost artists of his country during the Renaissance. His multiple talents earned him the nickname "Leonardo of the North". He died in 1528.

Durer probably learned how to engrave from his father who was a goldsmith. As a youth he was apprenticed to Michel Wohlgemuth for three years. He felt German art of the time was clumsy and old fashioned. As a result, he became the first north European artist to travel to Italy solely to study Italian art. He refined his painting skills by working with Venetian and Flemish artists. In engraving he combined the methods of Martin Schongauer with the lessons of Andrea Mantegna. His woodcuts were amazingly detailed, inventive, and sometimes grim. In his art he combined a love for the ancient world with a deep Christian spirit. Durer also became the favorite painter of Emperor Maxmillian I. Pictured above is his "Knight, Death, and the Devil" (1514). Other famous works include: "The Four Horsemen" (woodcut, 1498), "The Great Piece of Turf" (1503), and "Hieronymus Holzschuher" (oil on wood, 1526).

Mark Ryden

Ryden studied Illustration and graduated from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, in 1987. His solo debut show entitled "The Meat Show" was in Pasadena, California in 1998. He currently lives and works in Eagle Rock, California, in a studio that he shares with his partner, artist Marion Peck.

Ryden's "The Tree Show" exhibit in March 2007 opened to acclaim at the Michael Kohn gallery in Los Angeles -- and featured a selection of oil paintings and sculptures. A separate chamber contained many of Ryden's detailed studies for each of the paintings and exquisitely carved frames and was also made available. The largest of the paintings, "The Tree of Life," sold for $800,000 before the exhibit opened.

Banks Violette

Banks Violette uses such dark material as death metal, ritual murder and teenage suicide as points of departure for his slick and ghostly sculptures and installations. His aesthetics probe into American culture and are used as a commentary on the anxiety of youth. Violette blurs the boundaries between reality and pure fiction as he recreates the landscape of the teenage mind. The artist has selected contemporary music lyrics that have instigated violence and destruction amongst youth and attributed these lyrics to sculptures and installations that visually incite a similar or opposite emotive response. The artist has used salt to cast the music equipment from rock band Sunn O and has used disassembled forms such as a coffin as a relic of past performances and as an icon of aggressive subcultures. Violette received his BFA from the School of the Visual Arts (SVA) in New York (1998) and is an MFA graduate from Columbia University (2000), also in New York.