Artist of the day: January 2025

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Artist of the Day, January 14, 2025: Gary Grimshaw, an American graphic artist, illustrator (#2191)

Gary Grimshaw (1946 – 2014) was an American graphic artist active in Detroit and San Francisco who specialized in designing rock concert posters. He was also a radical political activist with the White Panther Party and related organizations.

Grimshaw was a graphic artist of exceptional talent who had an extraordinary history and character; meeting life on his own terms and often against the establishment. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and graduated from nearby Lincoln Park High School. His Grandfather was a designer at GM’s Fisher Body Oldsmobile plant, his Dad a mechanical engineer. Marjory Grimshaw instilled a love of books and music in her young son Gary who loved to draw cars and comics and considered himself a writer. The oldest with two younger sisters, Gary left home at an early age but continues to be close to his sisters. He has created art work professionally since the age of twenty - that’s four decades of music-related graphic art and counting. In 2011 just months after returning home from a serious health odyssey, Gary worked on the Concert of Colors poster and several PJ’s Lager House designs. In 2012 he began a licensing of his work in earnest; partnering with Detroit Urban Design Studios. Laura Grimshaw, his wife of twenty years, closely contributes to keep Gary’s past body of work in the public eye.

At the start of his career Gary became well known as the Grande Ballroom artist and later as the MC5 artist. These works stand out as the centerpiece of an enormously prolific output of art from the mid-1960’s to the late 1970’s. He became part of a dynamic collective of intellectuals, promoters, poets, artists, musicians - people that spent many years together in some form or another and in different circles of interest. For instance, as a Vietnam veteran he was an anti-war activist and a key player in the White Panther Party; he worked to reform unfair law and unjust incarcerations. His contribution was through art and his art inspired and energized the people. He was a member of Trans-Love Energies and The Rainbow People’s Party. He worked on newspapers, magazines, did posters to advertise music events, did record album covers. Gary worked with Underground Press Syndicate icons The San Francisco Oracle and the Ann Arbor Sun. Gary has just completed a book with Leni Sinclair that documents this celebrated era in the history of Detroit. It features a sample of his enormous output during the first fifteen or so years of his career and dynamic photography of his friend Leni Sinclair and is called “Detroit Rocks!”. Back in the late seventies he also worked with the legendary rock magazine Creem as an associate art director. During this time he and his then-wife had a son named Alan Morgan Grimshaw. Gary’s son continues the Grimshaw art and design tradition with his own career.

© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Gary Grimshaw or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Gary Grimshaw

Young Gary at work

Sun Ra and His Myth - Science Arkestra, MC5, 1967
Wayne State University, Detroit

MC5, Spikedrivers, Charles Moore Ensemble, 1967

New York Rock & Roll Ensemble - 1967
Postcard - Grande Ballroom

MC5, 1967
Poster, See Theater

MC5, 1967

Handbill, 1967
See Theater, Detroit

MC5, Spikedrivers, Livonia Toll and Die Co., 1967
Grande Ballroom

Chambers Brothers, 1967
Grande Ballroom

Love-In Los Angeles, 1967
Elysian Park

Blue Cheer 1967-68
Grande Ballroom, Detroit

MC5, Troggs, The Who, Raja, 1968

Big Brother and the Holding Company, MC5, Tiffany Shade, 1968
Grande Ballroom

Doors, James Cotton Blues Band, Crazy World of Arthur Brown, 1968
Grande Ballroom, Cobo Arena

Jimi Hendrix Experience, MC5, Rationals , 1968
Grande Ballroom, Masonic Temple, Detroit MI

Yardbirds, Frost, 1968

John Mayall, Stooges, 1968 Poster

Velvet Underground, Nice, Earth Opera, 1969

Pacific Gas and Electric, MC5, 1969

Congress of Wonders, MC5, 1969
Straight Theater, Grande Ballroom

Grateful Dead, Gary Grimshaw, 1971

John Sinclair Freedom rally, John Lennon, 1971

Ann Arbor Blues Fest '72 Poster

Canned Heat, Chambers Bros., 1973
Poster, Bogota Colombia

Free John Sinclair, Bob Seger, Stooges, 1970

Iggy Pop – 1980
First Printing Bookie's Detroit

Spinal Tap, 1992
Warfield Theater

Oasis 1995
Royal Oak Theatre, Michigan

White Stripes, 2003
The Paybacks Detroit Masonic Temple Poster

Detroit Cobras, 2004

The Catalyst, Patty Smith and Band, 2004 Santa Cruz

Monday, January 13, 2025

Artist of the Day, January 13, 2025: Stuart Davis, an American painter/modernist (#2190)

Edward Stuart Davis (1892 –1964) was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century. With the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the most abstract to the clearest. Contrary to most modernist artists, Davis was aware of his political objectives and allegiances and did not waver in loyalty via artwork during the course of his career. By the 1930s, Davis was already a famous American painter, but that did not save him from feeling the negative effects of the Great Depression, which led to his being one of the first artists to apply for the Federal Art Project. Under the project, Davis created some seemingly Marxist works; however, he was too independent to fully support Marxist ideals and philosophies.

Davis was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt Davis, art editor of The Philadelphia Press, and Helen Stuart Davis, sculptor. In 1909 he entered the Orange High School, but during his first year he dropped out and began commuting to New York City. Davis began his formal art training under Robert Henri, the leader of the Ashcan School, at the Robert Henri School of Art in New York under 1912. During this time, Davis befriended painters John Sloan, Glenn Coleman and Henry Glintenkamp.

In 1913, Davis was one of the youngest painters to exhibit in the Armory Show, where he displayed five watercolor paintings in the Ashcan school style. In the show, Davis was exposed to the works of a number of artists including Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Davis became a committed "modern" artist and a major exponent of cubism and modernism in America. He spent summers painting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and made painting trips to Havana in 1918 and New Mexico in 1923.

After spending several years emulating artists in the Armory Show, Davis started moving toward a signature style with his 1919 Self-Portrait, in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. In the 1920s he began his development into his mature style; painting abstract still lifes and landscapes. His use of contemporary subject matter such as cigarette packages and spark plug advertisements suggests a proto-pop art element to his work. Among Davis' practices was his use of previous paintings. Elements of harbor scenes he painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts can be found in a number of subsequent works. Another practice was painting series, works with similar structures, but with altered colors or added geometric embellishments, essentially creating variations on a theme. Some commentators suggest that this aspect of his work parallels his love of jazz in which a basic chord structure is improvised upon by the musicians.

In 1928, he visited Paris, France for a year, where he painted street scenes. In 1929, while in Paris, he married his American girlfriend, Bessie Chosak. In the 1930s, he became increasingly politically engaged; according to Cécile Whiting, Davis' goal was to "reconcile abstract art with Marxism and modern industrial society". In 1934 he joined the Artists' Union; he was later elected its president. In 1936 the American Artists' Congress elected him National Secretary. He painted murals for Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration that are influenced by his love of jazz.

In 1932 Davis was devastated by the loss of his wife, Bessie Chosak Davis, who died after complications from a botched abortion. Also in 1932, Davis executed a mural commission for Radio City Music Hall which the Rockefeller Center Art Committee named "Men Without Women" (after Ernest Hemingway's second collection of short stories completed the same year). According to Hilton Kramer in a 1975 piece on the work in the New York Times, Davis was happy neither with the location in which the mural was placed nor with the title it was given.

In 1938, Davis painted Swing Landscape, a modernist mural now considered one of the most important American paintings in the 20th-century. That same year, Davis married Roselle Springer. Davis spent his late life teaching at the New York School for Social Research and at Yale University.

Along with his paintings, Davis was also a printmaker and was a member of the Society of American Graphic Artists.

From 1945 to 1951, Davis worked on The Mellow Pad, an abstract work inspired by jazz music.

In 1952, Davis received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

One of his last paintings, Blips and Ifs, created between 1963 and 1964, is in the collection of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

In 1964, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Davis' 'Detail Study for Cliche'.

© 2025. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Edward Stuart Davis or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only