Find out more at: Mr. Cartoon, REVOK1.com, Tloks

1. Where were you born, and were do you reside?

I was born in Santa Monica, CA and I live in the San Fernando Valley

2. What types of hobbies do you do besides photography/music video directing as a profession.

As a hobbie, I still take pictures and film, I like to look at art, go to art shows, photo exhibitions, ride my motorcycle, lowride, hangout with the family, bbq and hangout with the kids. I also used to skateboard when I was younger at the Del Mar Skate Park, play volleyball, chess, surf, whatever. That’s pretty much it besides working

3. How many kids do you have?

4, one boy, 3 girls.

5. You mentioned going to art shows and photo exhibitions, who are your favorite artists or photographers?

Chaka, Saber, REVOK, RISKY, a lot of Seventh Letter Artists, Retna, Chaz, and more.

6. I know you did that wall piece with Retna as a collaboration, that was really sick.

Yeah, it’s up on Pico and Fairfax. We are going to do a couple more coming up soon. Going back to some of my favorite artists, I like OG Abel and Cartoon of course. Then there are tattoo artists that I like Jack Rudy, Mark Mahoney, and Jose Lopez.

7. I know you started taking pictures of Cypress Hill during the mid ‘90s. Give me a history of how you go into photography.

My dad and my step-mom gave me a camera in the early ‘90s and then I started taking pictures here and there and then during the mid ‘90s people started noticing my photos, and then I started getting professional work around ’97. Around that time I started doing videos and directing them, and I haven’t...................

Read the rest of this interview HERE

NEWSSTAND COVER

SUBSCRIBER COVER

Chaz Bojorquez is a legend of Los Angeles' graffiti and street art culture, and now is finally on the cover of the newest March 2009 Juxtapoz magazine. Inside he is interviewed by another LA graffiti king, Saber. In March, we also feature Risk, D*Face, Dan Witz, Mr Jago, and DZINE, as well as the newest exhibitions from James Jean, Shepard Fairey, Cold War Design, and Rip the Ripper. And, if you look closely, there is a Marlon Brando as Vito Corelone Godfather bust in these pages. Enjoy.

The underground artist has found his scrawl space in the mainstream, with his work emblazoned on movie billboards, custom cars and video games. He gives products ’street cred’ and counterculture cool.
By Chris Lee
April 4, 2009
Mister Cartoon eyeballed a blank spot on the giant graffiti mural and rattled his can of spray paint. An aerosol hiss filled the air. With a few fluid swipes of his beefy arm, an image began to take shape: a cluster of storm clouds massing above a Windex blue hot rod.

“If I knew the cops were coming to bust me, I could probably finish this whole thing in an hour,” the street artist joked.

Cartoon is standing atop a ladder in front of a 14-by-48 canvas in his cavernous warehouse studio in an industrial cul-de-sac just past L.A.’s skid row. His work in progress would hardly qualify as vandalism. The billboard was commissioned by Universal Studios to publicize the latest entry in its street-racing movie franchise, “Fast & Furious.”

The burly Cartoon, with a shaved head and gang-inspired tattoos creeping down his forearms and up his neck, has become one of corporate America’s hottest image makers. He’s in demand to imbue products — even celebrities — with “street cred” and counterculture cool.

Cartoon (born Mark Machado, but call him that at your risk), 39, readily admits he perfected his craft practicing public defacement as an outlaw tagger. He’s a big shot in lowrider circles — the artist has 11 prize-worthy customized show cars. His ability to create visuals encompassing Chicano gang and lowrider culture, ’70s New York graffiti and Japanimation has made Cartoon a sought-after tattoo artist, car customizer, illustrator and fashion designer.

“It’s definitely a rush seeing your art on a billboard,” Cartoon said. “Working with design agencies, designing concept cars — it’s a long way from my dad telling me to get a real job.”

Cartoon’s graphic designs, illustrations and artwork have also been used to add visual punch to a crazy quilt of pop cultural offerings:

He rendered the gang scrawl seen throughout the bestselling video game “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.” He designed clothing for companies including Levi Strauss, Stussy, Vans and Supreme. He designed a customized T-Mobile Sidekick. He did detail work for a concept car for Scion. In 2005, Nike hired Cartoon to create limited editions of its Air Force 1 and Cortez shoes.

“The mainstream is coming around to his aesthetic, not the other way around,” said movie producer Brian Grazer, who is planning a film based on Cartoon’s life. “He doesn’t change. He’s still hard-core. He’s a gatekeeper to that world.”

Aaron Rose, an authority on underground art and co-director of the street art documentary “Beautiful Losers,” has showcased Cartoon’s creations in three exhibitions. He said the artist’s identification with the corporate establishment has helped distinguish him from the scrum of street artists trying to go legit.

“The corporate apparel brands embracing him and promoting his work was a big step in rising out of the underground,” Rose said. “Nike is a big stage. Suddenly he’s got 5 million more fans. It gave Cartoon cult celebrity status.”

Mister Cartoon grew up in San Pedro, the son of working-class parents who operated a printing shop. As a youngster, he fell in with a crowd he describes as “knuckleheads and sickos,” but he stops just short of admitting gang membership.

“I have been affected by gang culture up close and personally from a young age,” Cartoon said. “My parents would go to work and I’d run the streets. I could have been locked up or killed.”

When he was a teen, his style was heavily influenced by the abstract, brightly colored graffiti — usually letters — found on New York subways. When he was 17, authorities charged him with $30,000 worth of vandalism. The artist — who augmented his tagger alias Cartoon with “Mister” in a bid to be seen as grown up — was prosecuted as a minor. He avoided going to juvenile hall by pleading guilty.

He says he was put on probation and fined $3,000 — in that era, juvenile graffiti vandals were responsible for repaying one-tenth of the damages they caused. Cartoon said he paid the sum almost immediately by accepting one of his earliest commissions: a mural for a boxing gym.

“I used graffiti to pay my graffiti debt,” Cartoon said, chuckling.

But within months, the tagging lifestyle had lost its allure for the artist.

Through a fluke, a photographer for Car and Driver magazine asked him to make a gang-graffiti backdrop for a photo shoot, resulting in Cartoon’s first portfolio-worthy tear sheet.

“Some guy pulled up to San Pedro High School and said, ‘Hey, who’s the best graffiti artist in school? I’ve got a job for him doing a magazine cover,’ ” Cartoon recalled.

Obsessed with car culture, he began airbrushing T-shirts at custom car shows and gradually picked up pointers on painting murals on car doors and hoods. At age 20, he landed a job as an illustrator at Hustler magazine and soon parlayed his work doing ribald cartoons there into a sideline designing album covers for Southland hip-hop artists.

At a record release party in 1992, he met Estevan Oriol, manager of the stoner rap trio Cypress Hill. They became friends around the time Cartoon was getting a lot of tattoos. Oriol convinced Cartoon that tattoo art would be a natural progression from the kind of art he already was doing. The manager hired Cartoon to create an album cover for Cypress Hill and brought him on tour with the hard-partying group.

“I let him sketch on me,” Oriol said. “I showed the guys from Cypress Hill and made them get tattoos. When we’d go on tour with Goodie Mob or OutKast, I’d say, ‘Get tattooed by my boy.’ ”

Photos: Mister Cartoon
The tattoo that finally earned him a reputation, though, was created for Eminem. In 1999, less than five years after his maiden efforts with a homemade tattoo gun, Cartoon rendered a city scene on the rap superstar’s upper left arm. Thanks to Eminem’s towering cultural presence at that time, Cartoon’s business achieved a critical mass. He hit the mainstream.

Cartoon has since etched his stark black designs (working in the style of prison tattoo artists, he never uses colored ink) onto a Who’s Who of pop stars and pro basketball players, including Utah Jazz forward Carlos Boozer. His minimum fee is $1,000 per session. (”If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it,” Cartoon likes to say.) Although he refuses to be pinned down on the dollar amount, a large-scale tattoo like the “50″ that he inked over most of rapper 50 Cent’s back and shoulders reportedly costs about $20,000.

It was in 2002 while shooting the movie “8 Mile,” recalled Grazer, Imagine Entertainment co-chief, that he heard about Cartoon from Eminem. He traveled to the artist’s studio and, on the basis of a strong first impression, Grazer signed a deal to produce the artist’s biopic, tentatively titled “Ink.” He also hired Cartoon to executive-produce another Imagine feature, “Lowrider.”

“He had this giant underground following,” Grazer said. “I like his tattoo stuff, the car stuff, his detailing. He’s original and smart. His story is interesting.”

Nike, however, balked when Cartoon proposed designing collections for the company in 2004. “It took a year to convince Nike. Proposals. Meeting after meeting. ‘Cartoon? He’s a tattoo guy. What does he know about fashion?’ ” he recalled hearing from Nike representatives. “I didn’t take it as an insult. I was just working. Multitasking. I thought: ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ ”

The artist persisted, and now his limited-edition sneakers — a model he designed in collaboration with Lance Armstrong is due out in July — regularly sell for hundreds of dollars above suggested retail.

Nike says it now counts Cartoon’s limited-edition redesigns of its Air Force 1 sneakers (such as the model he emblazoned with a skeleton, spider webs and “L.A.”) among “the most coveted releases in our history.”

In keeping with his image as a hero to the lowrider set, Cartoon drove his heavily customized ‘64 Chevy Impala from skid row to the Sunset Strip for the unveiling of the “Fast & Furious” billboard late last month.

Once there, the artist hit switches to make the car’s front end bounce up and down on hydraulic springs before photographers, reporters and cameramen assembled for the event.

Michael Moses, executive vice president of Universal Pictures’ marketing and publicity, said the studio hired Cartoon — whom he described as “the foremost graffiti artist of our city” — to create the billboard in an effort to reconnect the “Fast & Furious” franchise with its street culture origins.

The studio gave Cartoon an unusual degree of independence to depict key scenes and vehicles from the movie, personalized with his signature visuals: There were mucho macho muscle cars, an idealized femme fatale, a Mexican Dia de Los Muertos skeleton and the movie’s name emblazoned in gothic gangster font.

Neither the artist nor the studio would comment on the price tag for the mural. Local graffiti artists Revok and Toomer assisted Cartoon in painting it.

The billboard is Cartoon’s second movie assignment. He established his film publicity bona fides last year with a poster featuring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in the crime drama “Righteous Kill” — an image reminiscent of faded newsprint, a wanted poster and a graffiti stencil.

“He’s real. His whole group is,” said Peter Adee, president of marketing and distribution for Overture Films, who picked Cartoon to design the “Righteous Kill” poster and Oriol to photograph it. “They’re into trying to get to an idea that’s as commercial as possible without selling out. They do mass production of images, but at the same time it’s not homogenization. They stay true to their art and roots.”

Mister Cartoon, a married father of four, traces most of his personal and professional success to the awakening he experienced in 1997 when he made the decision to give up drinking and other “mind-altering substances” he favored after years of touring with Cypress Hill. A friend from the tattoo world, Baby Ray, helped Cartoon improve his tattooing technique but also provided a dose of tough love and spiritual guidance.

“I don’t expect a trophy or a cookie or a pat on the back,” Cartoon said. “I made a decision to change my life and help my family.”

That decision resulted in the clarity to pursue his ambitions. But to hear the artist tell it, making good on those plans is also a matter of following the rules.

“Am I gifted or especially talented?” Cartoon said. “No. I got all this through hard work. Through respecting my old man. From taking direction from people. From painting when everyone else was asleep. I just found something I really love and practiced at it my whole life.”

MR CARTOON | REVOK1.com

Amandalynn is one of the most well rounded artists you will ever encounter.

Born to create, Amandalynn’s artistic career spans cities, interests, and genres, infusing raw talent and drive into every endeavor she takes on.

As the only female artist that can lay claim to The Seventh Letter (Juxtapoz #78), Amandalynn has engaged in her fair share of legal and illegal and street art, but her interests take her far beyond city walls and into everything from studio painting, stained glass, sculpture restoration, set composition, apparel design, and custom motorcycle and car artistry. See, we told you she’s well rounded.

Learn a bit more about this visionary artist and peep Amandalynn’s answers to our 20 Questions below:

Read entire interview HERE

Other artists blazed the trail that brought graffiti from the urban landscape into galleries. But no street or graffiti artist who came before Barry “Twist” McGee had executed the transition with such finesse. Born in San Francisco in 1966, a city he continues to make his home, Twist began painting graffiti in 1984 at the age of 18. He began showing his work in local galleries, slowly building a following, and, in 1991, he received a Bachelor of Fine Art in painting and printmaking from the San Francisco Art Institute. This was quickly followed by grants and fellowships—one notably sent him to Brazil, where he observed clustered framed artworks displayed in churches. McGee incorporated this presentation style into his art shows, which brought a kinetic, urban immediacy to the staid gallery space.

Read the rest of the interview HERE

I first interviewed Ewok (HM, AWR, MSK, SEVENTH LETTER) about five years ago when he and Chen AKB were doing live-painting for the Third Annual Twin Cities Hip-Hop Festival & Celebration. Since then he’s changed his address to the much nicer climate of Southern California, and joined MSK and THE SEVENTH LETTER, two of the most prolific and innovative graffiti crews in the world. He also happens to be a founding member of Life Sucks Die magazine as well as a member of Minneapolis super-design firm, BURLESQUE of NORTH AMERICA.

In wanting to kick up dust for WACTAC’s event “Don’t Sleep On It,” I thought it would be good to check in with Ewok and see if we can pressure his Burlesque affiliates to bring him out for the event.

What were you like as a kid?

I don’t know, that’s kind of hard to talk about who I was or who I am now. I think I was pretty normal though, you know, played sports, did a lot of skateboarding, those sorts of things. I have a younger brother who’s seven years younger than me, so I think that’s a big reason for why I got into art, being an only-child for so long I had to entertain myself. I think sitting down and having to be imaginative was a big part of that. I always remember drawing though. I always was very interested in art, like I remember going to my grandparents’ house and they’d have these portraits of my aunts on the wall and I remember just staring at them for a really long time, kind of getting lost in them at the dinner table.

Read the entire interview HERE

EXILE (rocking a Bert Krak t-shirt from The Seventh Letter) recently sat down with the good folks at Yours Truly in the Mission District of lovely San Francisco, and broke down making beats from the car Radio, as well as recreating a joint called "In Love" from his recently released album, "Radio."

Look out for Part 2 of this session coming soon....

Find out more at STATUS MAGAZINE

Read interview on BombingScience.com

Getting Augor's feature article locked down was a blast, as (almost) all features are for the Magazine. I'd already been following Augor's work for a while when we at Juxtapoz decided to run a feature on him for our April 2009 issue. Originally, we were going to run it in July or August 2009, but I was so hyped on his new shit that we pushed it up.

What initially struck me about his billboard work in particular was how obviously well-planned and thought-out the entire production was. There was a message there in the way he manipulated the advertising I found intelligent and really fucking ballsy. I've hung out with graf artists since I was in high school, but never with a writer doing things on this scale, which really intrigued me. Originally, when I decided to write the piece (way back in September 2008 or so), I asked Augs if he'd be down to take me out bombing with him in LA one night. To my surprise, he was totally willing. So I got to planning.

Augor and I kept in touch throughout the months leading up to our planned meeting and his work and its level of skill and boldness only seemed to increase during that time. It was great to watch him progress, knowing we were going to collaborate on this feature.

When I got off the plane in LA, I immediately called Augor and couldn't get a hold of him. I hit up some other cats I figured might know where he was, but still couldn't pinpoint him. "Great, he's probably in jail or something," I thought. True to my nagging suspicion, Augor had been rolled up on by LA's finest while doing a piece a few days prior, and had only just been released when he called my cell. We agreed to meet up at his place the next day- a day that turned into a full 14 hours of talking, watching fellow writers paint a legal wall, eating, hanging out, drinking, and getting to know a young artist hell-bent on changing the way the public, and even other writers and artists, see graffiti and public space.

Overall, having the opportunity to meet up with world-class artists and get to know them in an intimate enough way to be able to try and write their life story in less than 3,000 words, while keeping it informative and interesting, is a big challenge but I love it. Talking with Augor reminded me of my frustration over what a bad rep graf artists get, because not only is he a really nice guy but he holds his art (graf, illustration, graphic/apparel design, whatever) to really high aesthetic and moral standards. Only in respecting what you do, will others around you feed off that, and in turn respect your artwork.

So read the Augor's article in the April 2009 edition of Juxtapoz and get to know an artist I have no hesitation in saying is a rising force to be reckoned with.

-Katie Zuppann

Find out more at:
estevanoriol.blogspot.com
therealmrcartoon.blogspot.com
soulassassins.com