Black Velvet Paintings Get Geeky
July 19th, 2015
At Gallery1988 in Los Angeles right now you’ll find something you probably thought you would never see – beautiful paintings done on black velvet. The show is titled, “Cult of Personality: a Velvet Art Show from Bruce White,” and the fabulously talented painter has taken many sci fi characters as his subjects for these works.
For most people, black velvet paintings conjure up poorly executed images of Jesus, Elvis and Unicorns. Not so with White. His subjects are clever and his skill is keen. My favorite images from the show are an amazingly creepy yet cool Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from Blade Runner.
The paintings range in price from $600 to $900(USD), and the show runs through July 25. But if you can’t make to LA to see White’s work, you can check it out and buy it at his new site, VelvetGeek.com, whose tagline is, “Black Velvet Paintings for Your Inner Nerd.” On the site, images you won’t see at the show include paintings of characters from Star Wars and Star Trek, and monsters from Frankenstein to Godzilla.
On VelvetGeek you can even commission White to paint you an original work. As the artist explains, “As you can tell, I prefer to do sci-fi characters from movies and television, but I do not limit my work to just science fiction. I am open do doing portraits of family members, even your pets, if that is your choice.” And yes, I will be ordering my black velvet family portrait soon.
