Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1957. After graduating from college, Pettibon worked briefly as a high-school math teacher, but soon after set out to launch a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Pettibon is as likely to explore the subject of surfing as he is typography; themes from art history and nineteenth-century literature appear in the same breath with American politics from the 1960s and contemporary pop culture. In his 1998 anthology, “Raymond Pettibon: A Reader,” the viewer can read over Pettibon’s shoulder to discover a handful of the artist’s muses—Henry James, Mickey Spillane, Marcel Proust, William Blake, and Samuel Beckett, among others. In the 1990s, Pettibon extended his work beyond the printed page and onto the walls of the exhibition space, creating wall-sized drawings and collages.

via art21:

http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/pettibon/index.html