Photography by Lanny Nguyen, Ian Lundie and Jasper Wong
Robbie Api / Amine Rastgar
Mural Location: No longer available
Sean Boyles
Mural Location: No longer available
Sean mostly draws and paints. His day job is teaching others to do the same whether at Mission College, CSU Monterey Bay, or at The Arsenal, which Sean opened with his wife Roan Victor in 2011. His work has exhibited in galleries in the Bay Area, the West Coast, NY, and a couple times in Japan. Sean paints almost anything he can get his hands on….walls, in print, on the screen, skateboard decks, shirts, stickers, buttons, and many other products.
The aesthetic of Sean’s work comes from watching cartoons, playing video games, painting graffiti, collecting garbage pail kids, reading comic books, watching Star Wars, kung fu, ninja , sci-fi, and giant monster movies. Sean creates his work between his heart and head; between what he knows and what he feels. Sean tries to be both detailed and gestural, clean and messy, smooth and gritty, fluid and structured, soft subtleties with loud splattery edges.
Lacey Bryant / Ben Henderson
Mural Location: 1068 The Alameda, San Jose
Lacey’s nostalgic vignettes feel at once hauntingly familiar and like a strange dream. Within each painting is a search for meaning through a string of discarded treasures and hand me down fairy tales. Some works are fully fantasmagorical with figures posed and surreal in pastel hues while others are quiet and understated representations of distant scenes or intimate still lifes. Lacey’s larger scale work combines figurative, landscape and still life elements into layered and collage-like narratives collapsing time and space into a single picture. Anachronistic elements and repeating motifs are used to examine dichotomies such as connection and isolation, decay and growth, life and death. She paints on found objects, patterned papers and within salvaged frames. Lacey weaves the surroundings she finds herself in and the discarded objects she finds and the people she meets into the narratives of her work. It all creates some sort of greater story eventually, she is sure of it, if only there is time to paint it all into existence.
Ken Davis / Lauren Napolitano
Mural Location: 1043 Garland Avenue, San Jose
Lauren Napolitano’s work is about celebrating the handmade and the imperfections that come along with it. She is incredibly influenced by her mother’s Mexican heritage and leans heavily on these ancestors as she create and gather inspiration. Using symmetry and traditional Mexican craft as her starting point, each line is truly unique, and any flaw is simply showing the beauty of the human hand. Lauren finds it important to achieve depth with simple lines and dots, taking something so simple and creating a complex world within. Much of what she creates falls between the themes of being surrounded or the movement of energy among every living organism. As a woman, Lauren loves to explore bold lines and shapes, creative a symbolic language all mine own while adding a clearly feminine mark. She often finds herself inventing delicate pattern work to incorporate a sense of balance and motion…growth…or healing through it all.
Aaron De La Cruz
Mural Location: 398 King Road, San Jose
Aaron De La Cruz’s work, though minimal and direct at first, tends to overcome barriers of separation and freely steps in and out of the realms of painting and design. The act and the marks themselves are very simple but tend to take on distinct and sometimes higher meanings in the broad range of mediums and contexts they appear in and on. His work finds strengths in the reduction of his interests in life to minimal information. De La Cruz gains from the idea of exclusion, just because you don’t literally see it, doesn’t mean that it’s not there.
Doper
Mural Location: No longer available
Kristin Farr
Mural Location: 490 W. San Carlos Street, San Jose
Kristin Farr’s paintings are directed by color and influenced by folk art practices. She also makes art videos, interview artists and curate art projects. A women of many hats, Kristin has responsibilities within these organizations: Deputy Editor, Juxtapoz Magazine / Curator, FB AIR Program / Creator, KQED Art School / Contributor, New York Times
Girafa
Mural Location: No longer available
Girafa is a native Bay Area artist who is widely recognized for his giraffe character and his Long Neck 4 Life vision. His work remains familiar to experienced admirers while also luring in new spectators. Within the past decade, Girafa has showcased the evolution of his aesthetic through murals, canvases, collaborations and collectible items sold exclusively through his online store.
Casey Gray
Mural Location: 87 S. Autumn Street, San Jose
Casey Gray is an contemporary artist working primarily in painting and occasionally in printmaking, illustration and site-specific murals. Through a filter informed by past experience and a hopeful albeit dystopic future, Gray composes disparate subject matter into visually complex still life arrangements inspired by personal and universal narratives. His work is characterized by his commitment to aerosol paints and laborious hand cut masking techniques, resulting in a type of skewed hyper-realism.
Jeffrey Gress
Mural Location: No longer available
Jeffrey Gress’ designs blends current vibrations from local and global communities to produce creative and meaningful communication. He is also the operations director for POW! WOW! and the man behind Lana Lane Studios. His sidekick Kaia dog is always accompanying him on his adventures.
Griffin
Mural Location: No longer available
Whether the final artwork is illustrative, abstract and or character driven, each piece tells a unique dream-scape story somewhere between time, function, the familiar & unknown! The fusion of our modern technological age, embodied in design and form; counter-balanced with nature and elements of the Old World – are central themes that emerge in the majority of my work.
Jet Martinez
Mural Location: 87 S. Autumn Street, San Jose
Jet Martinez is known for creating vibrant works of art that put a contemporary spin on folk art motifs. Originally from the small beach town of Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, Jet takes inspiration from his native culture’s rich traditions of pottery, weaving and embroidery. Much like the craftspeople who create the ceramics and textiles that inspire him, Jet prioritizes technical skill and embraces the imperfections of the handmade. His latest murals enliven the rigid architecture of cityscapes with ornate patterns and entrancing, abstract visuals.
Jeff Meadows
Mural Location: 486 W. San Carlos Street, San Jose
Jeff Meadows has been a professional screen printing artist for over 15 years, and started a print studio called Nifty Sign & Print that is in Richmond CA. Working as a designer/illustrator has been one of his favorite parts of being a working artist. With a love for vintage cartoons and hand painted signs, much of Jeff’s work is a combination of the two styles.
Mesngr
Mural Location: 1068 The Alameda, San Jose
Mesngr classically trained in the 80’s, a generation that took advantage of opportunities to get creative with spray paint on the city’s landscapes. Mesngr has painted several monumental pieces throughout the years and has been contributing to the graffiti movement for several decades now both in the Bay Area and nationally. Mesngr doesn’t really plan to cause conflict through his work but merely expresses a merge of pop, skate, punk culture he finds interested and enjoys. He expresses that “if my work does in fact raise a brow, isn’t that what art is supposed to do? In that sense I’m doing something right.”
Adele Renault
Mural Location: 87 S. Autumn Street, San Jose
Adele paints realistic portraits of pigeons and people. Her subject matter may live in the gutter or in an ivory tower and the size of her work ranges from small canvas to giant mural. Adele is fascinated by the inconspicuous beauty of every day objects and subjects. She observes closely those and that not considered worthy of a second look. She paints portraits of faces, the elderly, the homeless and pigeons in a realistic style. Her subjects are pictured as photographed, yet are then isolated from their context, enlarged and flooded in sunlight. She captures moments and expressions full of stories and meaning. Suddenly a scruffy pigeon and a woman in the last days of her life emanate a quiet grace and irresistible force of life.
TRAV MSK
Mural Location: 490 S. 1st Street, San Jose
Roan Victor
Mural Location: 140 Jackson Street, San Jose
Roan Victor is a painter who works in watercolor, oil and latex paint. Watercolors keep her in order and oil painting is a party. When Roan paints walls, encountering various scales, proportions and settings excite her. She revels in the different ways she can present a figure in such a large format.
Ricky Watts
Mural Location: 45 N. 1st Street, San Jose
Ricky Watts is a visual artist based in Northern California, most notably recognized for his abstract works of psychedelic color gradients and fluid shapes. A forever student of the D.I.Y. movement, Watts’ self taught techniques derive from his adolescent graffiti years. His versatility allows for easy transition between large-scale murals and intricate works on canvas. Ricky’s art can be found on public walls and galleries throughout the United States. His commissions list includes work for Louis Vuitton, Mercedes Benz, Google, YouTube, IBM and Hansen’s Natural Soda.
Wisper
Mural Location: No longer available