THE FAMILY / Gary Panter

 

Texas born illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician, GARY PANTER, after surviving the underground during the ‘70s, finally made his mark in the ‘80s as head set designer for the successful TV show Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a job which brought his jagged art and surreal cartoon ideas into the homes of America and bagged him three Emmy Awards. Gary Panter has been everything from an underground cartoonist to an interior designer. He is also the creator of Jimbo, a post-nuclear punk-rock cartoon character featured in the ‘70s LA hardcore-punk paper Slash and later in RAW magazine.
As an illustrator, Panter pushed the underground punk attitude he had nurtured since the ‘70s into his commercial art, for magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker. His fame as an illustrator grew, when commissioned by Warner Brothers to produce album sleeves for Frank Zappa., as well as creating a cover illustration for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. This enormous body of work has earned Panter the moniker of “King Of Punk Art” and roused fellow painter Robert Williams to dub him the “King Of The Preposterous”.