Born in 1970 Shepard Fairey is a contemporary American street artist and activist who has blurred the lines between commercial and traditional art. He first came to prominence in the late 1980s through the "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign before cementing his place on the international art scene with his 2008 "Hope" poster of then President-elect Barack Obama. Originating from the underground skating scene, Fairey understood the importance of images in modern society, whether to convey information, manipulate ideas or raise awareness.
"Obey Giant Star" was given to the current owner by the artist as a gift for helping with printing posters earlier in his career. We extend our thanks to Shepard Fairey for providing the following description of this unique work:
“The canvas is based on the very first image I made of the Obey Giant star in January of 1996. January of 96 was when I developed the clean icon face, the star, the three-face vertical filmstrip series, and the three-face horizontal series. I had been really interested in moving my work away from a direct reference to Andre the Giant, the wrestler, and towards a more streamlined, iconic, Big Brother-esque image for the face. And this was fueled by my love of Russian constructivist art, especially Alexander Rodchenko and the Sternberg brothers, their work that was really, really advanced for work that was happening in the, you know, around 1920, the late teens to the early 20s. And the other reason that, other than just the aesthetics that I liked that work was that I knew that Americans had, you know, a conditioned fear of anything that seemed communist because of all the Cold War stuff. And they had a fear of anything that seemed like communist propaganda. And I found it amusing that people would fear that kind of propaganda, but American propaganda, which was, you know, frequently advertising, was not something they had any fear over, even though that was more of a direct threat to them than communist propaganda stuff.
So, you know, there was an aesthetic and a conceptual consideration. When I developed the original streamlined Andre face, the way I did it was I took a sheet of Rubylith, which is a screen-printing graphic arts tool that’s translucent. It’s red gelatin on a clear acetate backing. And you can see through it. So, I just put that over the original Andre face and did a streamlined illustration of one half of the face. And then I flipped that over and xeroxed it so that I could make a symmetrical merging of the two. I did not know how to use the computer when I created all these icon face variations. So, the first iteration of the star was created by cutting a star-shaped window out of a sheet of paper and then moving it around over the illustration of the face that I had made, which I turned symmetrical, which included, you know, the entire outside of the head and the ears and everything. But it looked kind of goofy when it was just a really smooth egg-shaped head. But what I found was when I cropped the face, I cropped it into a rectangle or a star, it achieved the more ominous, mysterious, big brother look that I was hoping for.
So, after a couple of years of him helping me to print posters without asking for any money because he knew that I was broke and I gave him prints and that was all the payment he was interested in, he asked if I’d be willing to make him a painting of the star image. Oh, okay. So, I did, and the painting was created, and it’s the only one of that iteration of the star that exists as executed in that way. I have done other painted iterations of the star, but this is the only one done on a white canvas with acrylic brush paint.
For this, I just projected the image onto the canvas, transferred it with pencil, and painted it in with black and red acrylic paint. And the reason that I did the giant instead of all the fussy type that’s in the original poster is one, that he wasn’t into it just saying obey giant, but two, it was gonna be a lot more tedious technically to put in all that type transferred with pencil from a projector. So, this is a little bolder, a little more simple, but this is the only iteration of that painting that exists. And so, I think it’s a pretty special piece for that reason. It’s from an era when I hadn’t started to do the collage backgrounds and the stencil mixed media paintings. So, it’s just pencil and paintbrush and acrylic paint and paintbrushes on a white canvas.”
