Posted 14 years ago
Belltown
(241 items)
One of the coolest things about The Rock Poster Society's Festival of Rock Posters, held every fall in Golden Gate Park, is the proximity of diverse artists that occurs. For example, at the most recent show on 10/9/10, the great Victor Moscoso was just steps away from up-and-comer Alexandra Fischer.
In case you don't know, Moscoso made a name for himself in the late 1960s, creating posters for such San Francisco rock temples as the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore, Winterland, and a club called the Matrix. Moscoso basically took many of the rules of good design and set them on fire. Most famously, he routinely placed colors that normally live at the far ends of the color wheel right next to each other, which caused his posters to vibrant and hum.
I grew up in the late 1960s with one of Moscoso's Neon Rose posters for a band called Sopwith Camel. It lived for years on my bedroom wall, but, alas, the orange poster did not survive my childhood, so these days I collect postcards of posters Moscoso created for the Family Dog and Bill Graham. I'm especially fond of his artistic collaborations with Rick Griffin—as duos goes, Moscoso and Griffin ranks right up there in my mind with Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and Hunter and Garcia.
A couple of tables away was an artist who also gets color, Alex Fischer. In recent years, she's worked with her husband, Chris Shaw, on posters for a band called Moonalice, which has commissioned more than 300 posters for its shows. Fischer does her own stuff, too, like the gorgeous poster she created for a recent Sharon Jones show at the Warfield in San Francisco. I don't claim to be an expert on Fischer's work, but to my eye, she's doing to best stuff of her career right now.
The learn more about Victor Moscoso, visit http://www.victormoscoso.com/index.html
To learn more about Alexandra Fischer, visit http://www.facebook.com/Afishcalledalex?v=info