Raymond Pettibon's Influence on Newer Artists

Punk rock, cartoon-like and text heavy are some common descriptors of cotemporary artist Raymond Pettibon’s work. His work throughout the last twenty five years is a compilation of image and text that has been influenced by previous artists and influences many newer artists as well. The artist known as Raymond Pettibon was born Raymond Ginn in Tucson, Arizona in 1957 the fourth of five children. He got the nickname Pettibon from his father a child and then changed it as an adult. He earned a degree in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977. While at UCLA, he started his artistic career being a political cartoonist for the school’s newspaper. After graduating from college, he became a high school math teacher and shortly after launched his career as an artist doing works in pen and ink such as album covers and flyers that were influenced by underground Los Angeles punk rock bands such as his brother’s band Black Flag (Duncan). His first solo exhibit was in New York in 1989 at Feature. Currently, Pettibon still lives and works in the Los Angeles area in Hermosa Beach, California. Pettibon has become internationally known as a contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Pettibon’s work from the early 1980s consisted of relatively small black-and-white, single-frame cartoons coupled with sometimes illegible scribbled writing (Levine). Throughout the 1980s his subject matter broadened and the drawings became larger, more complex and colorful, with numerous voices and handwritings competing for the viewer’s attention. In the 1990s, Pettibon began to move away from his smaller works on paper and started creating wall-sized drawings and collages. Throughout the mid to late 1990s, Pettibon continued to complicate his work and its messages. His recent drawings now include heavy doses of watercolor, making his painterly qualities more apparent. He has also become much more expressionistic with his

Cited: “Biography.” Art: 21. 2005. Public Broadcasting Service. 27 March 2007. Duncan, Michael