Barry McGee
Featured on the DH board.
Taken From Wikipedia: Barry McGee (aka Twist aka Ray Fong aka Robert Pimple; born 1966, San Francisco, California) is a painter and graffiti artist. McGee rose out of the Mission School art movement and graffiti boom in the San Francisco Bay Area during the early nineties. His work draws heavily from a pessimistic view of the urban experience, which he describes as, "urban ills, overstimulations, frustrations, addictions & trying to maintain a level head under the constant bombardment of advertising".
McGee's paintings are very iconic, with central figures dominating abstracted backgrounds of drips, patterns and color fields. He has also painted portraits of street characters on their own empty bottles of liquor, painted flattened spray cans picked up at train yards and painted wrecked vehicles for art shows. McGee was highly influential on the urban art scene that followed in his wake. He popularized the use of paint drips in urban-influenced graphic design, as well as the gallery display technique of clustering paintings. These clustered compositions of pictures are based on similar installations he saw in Catholic churches whilst working in Brazil. He also was an early participant in the practice of painting directly on gallery walls, imitating the intrusive nature of graffiti.
Barry McGee Video from Vice TV's Art Talk:
