Artist: Sid Maurer
Title: Jerry Garcia, (from the Portraits of Luminaries Collection)
Year created: 2010
Medium: Original Mixed Media Painting on Canvas
Edition: Original Unique Artwork, Hand-Signed by the Artist
Height (inches): 30
Width (inches): 20
Depth (inches): 5/8
Signed by the artist
Signed Area: front
This original work on canvas comes stretched and ready for display, with a picture wire on reverse.
Description of piece:
Jerry Garcia (1942-1995) achieved international stardom as a musician best known for being the key songwriter, lead guitarist, and vocalist with the Grateful Dead. This masterful portrait by Sid Maurer captures Garcia mid-performance, his vibrant energy almost palpable.
Replete with fine detail, bold use of color, dramatic brush strokes and paint layering, this mixed media work on canvas is a fine example of Sid Maurer’s strikingly accurate, personal and intuitive portraits of luminaries.
Imbued with warmth and vibrancy, Maurer’s portraits capture the essence of his subjects, and synthesize Maurer’s artistic vision with his technical and compositional roots in graphic design. Bold, visible paint texturing brings added light, depth and dimensionality to the artwork, while the addition of graphic elements lends further dynamic quality to the composition, celebrating one of music’s most revered performers.
Fusing elements of rock, folk, country, jazz, bluegrass, blues, rock and roll, gospel, reggae, world music and psychedelia, Garcia’s music with the Grateful Dead, writes musician Lenny Kaye, "touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists”. In 2003 Garcia was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" cover story.
Sid Maurer’s self-titled Jerry Garcia is one of the largest single portraits in his entire Portraits of Luminaries Collection, measuring 30" in height x 20" width x 5/8" depth.
The artwork is hand-signed by the artist, in an especially large bold signature, in silver, lower right. This original work on canvas comes freshly stretched and ready for display.
Jerry Garcia is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, which comes in a clear, protective archival sleeve.
Artist bio:
Sid Maurer's (1926-2017) long career spanned decades in the world of Art and Music, beginning at age seventeen when he was hired as Assistant Art Director at Columbia Records in New York City. When the music industry exploded, Maurer designed album covers and promotional material for popular artists, alongside Columbia Records colleague Andy Warhol. Maurer expanded his commercial art studio to tackle a wide range of projects for the music and film industries, while his striking artistic style developed, influenced by artists he met including Pollack and Rauschenberg.
Maurer left the empire of music and art that he had helped to build to focus on his passion: painting. In the last decade, his work has been shown in a wide variety of venues, including the Georgia Capitol, the Carnegie Museum and U.C.L.A. His commissioned artwork includes work for ESPN, MotorSport America Magazine, David Bowie, Boy George, and Donovan.
As a painter, Maurer created large mixed media pieces that were very much a product of his varied training and experience. His style combined bold, dynamic colors and strokes with painstaking layouts and typographical elements. The result is the unique blend of a painter's passion tempered with the calculating compositional eye of a graphic designer, exploring his themes through the use of bold subject matter, symbols and graphics.