Want to meet John Van Hamersveld? The legendary artist will be making an appearance at Bloomingdales in Santa Monica Place on Friday, March 18 from 6 to 8pm. He’ll be signing limited edition posters created specially for the event. You can get one as a gift for purchasing Hoyle Jackson apparel. Check out some of his work, and the stories behind it, from the man himself below.
1) Endless Summer: In 1963 I was in the middle of an early form of the Surf Industry as a student of design — by 1966 the Endless Summer Poster I created in 1963 was a poster product sold into the youth culture of the 60s. Today it is the icon for Surfing around the world.
2) Jimi Hendrix Pinnacle Poster: One day I found my drawing style in the portrait of Jimi Hendrix as a fan in 1967. By 1968 I designed the drawing into a Pinnacle Poster to promote a concert. I printed up about 3500 of them and shipped them to NYC, they sold-out the poster… today it’s in its forth edition and credited as the classic rock poster of all time.
3) Exile on Main Street: Meeting Mick Jagger one on one and Robert Frank lead to an artistic collaboration for the “Exile” project in 1972. I think everyone heard Mick and Keith recently go on about the record, they still using the graphic style to sell the media and their audience another round of my design work.
4) Johnny Face: The way one writer put it… I was on a “Masculine Jag” and had a vision, and did the drawing as if I were in a manic dream. I named it Johnny Face and it became media history with 224 billboards posted then around LA in 1972. On Abbot Kinney this summer the image had its 40th birthday as a street art image.
5) Hoyle Jackson Star/Bloomingdales Poster: mesmerizing… the relationship of the falling wave and Hoyle Jackson Logo floating in the bay with the abstract clouds going by make the poster a piece of a dream.