Eric and I stopped for a happy hour drink on the way home the other evening at Olive in the Tenderloin. Great bar, tasty drinks! We parked a few blocks away and walked down Larkin towards the bar, finding ourselves in front of a gallery that I had read about but had no idea we were near, White Walls Gallery, displaying a show by Mike Giant and Mike Davis. We wandered around the big airy space, enjoying the serendipity of stumbling upon such a great show.
Mike Giant paints large-scale urban scenes. His draftsmanship is incredible. I love how the clean lines of buildings and wires give way to the loops and organic shapes of the tags he "defaces" his buildings with. He was a tattoo and graffiti artist in past decades, and the specific styles needed for those genres are very evident in his work; he paints stunning girls as well as buildings.
Mike Davis, also a former tattoo artist, had some haunting work in the show. It reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch (he says his influences include Van Eyck and Bruegel). Some I liked more than others, but they were all inventive and technically brilliant. The one below was my favorite, and it was a pleasure last night to come home and find the latest issue of Juxtapoz magazine with this very image on the cover and an interview with Davis inside.
Richard Colman was not in the show, but he is another artist profiled in the magazine this month. I love this stuff, it's odd and funny and slightly stiff. I wish I had his imagination. He makes me want to draw men with ringmaster mustaches and ladies with giant buns of hair.
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