Post #14: Shepard meets David

O.K.  Shepard Fairey is a printmaker in southern CA who is well known for his OBEY giant images that date back to high school days for him, when he made stickers by the million featuring the wrestler known as  "Andre the Giant".  The sticker said that Andre "has a posse" and gave his height and weight (7'4" and 540 lbs. if I remember correctly)  these stickers followed Shepherd and his friends wherever he went.  Needless to say our hometown of Charleston was well plastered with the silly image.  It was fun nonsense and though the elder generation saw it as vandlism, it wasn't terribly destructive, and it always brought a smile to my face to pull up to a stop sign and see Andre there.

Fast forward 20-25 years and Shepard is a very talented and well known printmaker whose work you may know, including the Obama Hope poster and the George Orwell book covers and many other fine prints.  

He had to reinterpret his Andre when the heirs of Andre's legacy challenged him, so he stylized the image giving it some malice and adding the word OBEY.  This of course (as any kid who has ever touched a skateboard knows) is a coded message telling us to resist with every ounce of strength we have.

 

On the fourth view of this pot which I somehow missed with the camera, I salute two great craftsmen, Michelangelo and Shepard Fairey.

Shepard's giant enjoys an almost cult-like following, but its is far from his best work.  It does resonate strongly for anyone (all of us) who has ever been oppressed or repressed.  But I think it is like a hit song that has allowed the artist (oops! I mean craftsman) to create a rich body of very beautiful work.  I haven't spoken with Shepard for about fifteen years, but when we were kids we built a half-pipe together and skated it until it was destroyed as a public nuisance.

--Matt Jones