Overspray

Cool panel discussion at Art Center, featuring 3 "Kings of Airbrush," who pioneered the medium of airbrush in the 1970's for editorial illustrations. Once snubbed by art directors who viewed airbrush only for photo retouching, these three artists--Dave Willardson, Charles E. White III, and Peter Palombi created super slick images of surreal images that could only be possible in Los Angeles and made popular the use of airbrush for illustrations. And now they have a book out: Overspray, which compiles their best work and the heyday of airbrush art. There's also a blog up describing them and clips of some of the artists speaking about their art: www.overspraybook.com. I thought the discussion was great, and it's cool that they weren't just about airbrush...they also have created installation art, a short film or two, two of them had a greeting card company at one time, and Dave has his own gallery in Glendale. It was also cool that during the 70's Dave and Charles created quite a buzz with their marketing promos...putting up 5 billboards in Los Angeles with a snapshot of Charles who had quite the handlebar mustache at the time, and the heading read "Charles E. White III rules the world" in big capitalized letters. It has been compared to the iconic graphics of Shephard Fairey. I just thought it was supercool. They made a short film to go with it, in which they show the makings of a couple of their installation pieces, one where Dave is painted like the American Flag, sitting in a room also painted like the stars and stripes. Very provocative and forward thinking artists for their time.