I’m excited when I get an assignment from an art director to solve their problems visually with my style, talent and choices. It’s challenging, and an illustration could go South so easily if I make poor choices so the challenge is in coming up with a strong concept and executing it with skill, craft and as much panache as I can afford.
In 2016 and 2014, Adam designed billboards for LAXART’s LA Public Domain Project, which were displayed on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood and La Cienega Blvd. in Culver City. He has also created site-specific works for the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles and the LA Art Fair.
He wanted a moment from the final sequence of the Apartment where (spoiler alert) Jack Lemmon’s character finally expresses his love for Shirley MacClaine’s character and the only way we know how she feels about him, is by her facial expression as well as how she takes the cards from him.
This is a recent piece I did of Steve Martin from the poster for the Jerk, for an old friend. It is a perfect example of the extreme jump from one form of painting to another. On the one hand, the end goal of a detailed likeness (and doing a good job of it) to the freedom of creating shapes and using color without that particular pressure, just the joy of it AND the goal to do a good job of it (still considering the formal issues of the aesthetics of abstracts from what little I know of art history). I’m still informally a student of it.
Playing with shapes and colors, Bonno chuckles when he explains that he loves the “f…k it factor.” Basically, that means going mad in his own world and giving himself permission to be loose. That freeing spirit is found in all of Bonno’s work. “I don’t leave a painting until I believe in it” he says, “until it impresses me.”
When I asked Bonno what advice he would give for aspiring artists, without flinching he stated, “Get out of your own way!” He feels that everyone has their own, private and personal relationship with art and it shouldn’t be marred by the critical voices in our head.
Joe’s style is whimsical and has been seen in such magazines as Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Time, Forbes, The Village Voice, Fantagraphics Press, Disney and countless others.
