ARTIST INFO

..started his artistic endeavors as a child, creating prolifically since the age of 5. Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, he started his commercial art career providing illustration for local newspapers, murals in nightclubs, and posters for underground rock clubs while working at a variety of record stores, fostering the early synthesis between music and art that permeates much of his current work.

Moving to Portland, Oregon provided a more dynamic, progressive and supportive artistic landscape and his work flourished. Featuring original pen and ink work, GUYBURWELL's distinctive black and white posters were soon wallpapering Portland, advertising local and national acts for the many venues in the city. Local attention to his poster art brought a financially lucrative position designing big budget television commercials for Vinton Studios, the stop motion birthplace of Claymation.

GUYBURWELL designed characters and commercial content for M&Ms, Three Musketeers, Kraft, Chili's, Planters, UPS and a wide variety of dancing cleansers and talking foodstuffs. He worked designing The PJ's television series and various television pilots before pulling up stakes and heading to Los Angeles for a year in the Hills before making his way down the coast to lounge in the San Diego sun before returning to the Pacific Northwest. He screws around in Austin at SXSW most years, so...yeah.

Adding album cover illustration and design, painting, clothing graphics and magazine work to his portfolio, he also designed conceptual material for video games and animated projects for Nickelodeon and snowboards for K2 while continuing his newspaper work and poster work. He should also update his biography information soon. Oh yeah, Guitar Hero III. He is in there, too. His nephews enjoyed that part. They said.

GUYBURWELL's paintings have sold in gallery shows in San Diego, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manchester, England, and other cities, states and countries. He has thrice toured Europe displaying his poster works in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Holland, Germany, France, German, Switzerland and Germany. His posters are collected around the world. Pretty fancy, right? He goes to work in his pajamas half the time. He will be returning to Europe this season for several shows.

"My paintings and illustrations don't handle serious topics in a head-on manner. Some of them have underlying currents that project my own skewed sense of humor on a certain topical notion. Sometimes the work makes a wry comment on social issues in the undercurrents of a piece. I try to go for 'fun' or 'cool' in my work and that seems to hit the right chords with my viewers. The point is often left to be discovered in it's own time, the proper details surfacing to coherence over time. You're sitting on the couch two years later and you realize: hey, that fellow in the painting is picking his nose! Things like that. Smart stuff. With heart."

"I am a commercial artist, foremost, and bring a degree of popular class appeal to everything I do. Ultimately I want to produce what I want to produce, whatever the venue, outlet, medium. I work constantly, be it for pay or pleasure, day in and day out. All day every day. Home or away, I am always thinking about work. It's not manic, but it's always there. I have a photograph of myself on my wall, age three or four or five, bent in concentration over a sheet of paper, pencil nub in hand, and it's been a constant reminder, and an ideal to live up to. Who wouldn't want to do this? Nobody, that's who."

GUYBURWELL's distinctive line work can be like a kick in the teeth, all hard lines and action, giving the impression that the art might cut your skin if you get too close. At other times, he can fill the lines with helium, floating the images just beyond the grip of reality in pools of color that aren't meant to coexist peacefully. Any which way you approach the images, give them a good close look because there are things to see well beyond the cursory glance. But never. Ever. Turn your back on them. If you want flat, boring, empty, meaningless, common, pseudo contemporary counter culture corn, you can get that anywhere. For GUYBURWELL, you can only come to the source."

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