From 1986 to 1990, I hand-painted billboards for Art & Sign Production, a sign shop in the San Fernando Valley. The finished panels went up on billboards on Sunset Boulevard — painted by hand, panel by panel, before any of this was done on a screen.
The Strip, Not the Studio System
The clients were record labels and home video distributors, and the boards hung on both Tower stores on Sunset Blvd — Tower Records and Tower Video, across the street from each other. Album covers, soundtrack campaigns, video releases. Paint it big enough for Sunset traffic to see, then watch it go up on the Strip itself — that was the job.
This was the work that taught me everything I bring to a portrait today — how light falls across a face, how to hold a likeness at any size, how to make paint look like skin, leather, and hair. The deadlines were real, and the surface was enormous — panels ran from five feet by five up to the Dances with Wolves board at roughly ten by twenty.
Documentation, Not for Sale
These boards reproduce work owned by the studios and labels that commissioned them. I’m showing them here as part of my history, not as pieces for sale. What I can do is bring that same hand — and forty years more of it since — to something of yours.
A few of the campaigns
These are some of the pieces I painted during those years.
