D e s e r t E x p o s u r e May 2010

Our Cover Artist

Silver City painter, sculptor and mixed-media artist Gary Lund is also an accomplished designer and illustrator for films, books and magazines.

Gary designed the film, characters, storyboards or backgrounds for such notable films as "The Point" by Harry Nilsson, an Emmy Award-winning ABC Movie of the Week in 1970; "Peace at Last" by John Lennon and Jason Leen; and "The Legend of John Henry," which received an Academy Award nomination in 1973 for Best Short Subject, Animated. In 1989, he was honored with the Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence for his design and illustration of the book LIFE: Before, During and After. His illustrations have been featured in such leading publications as Rolling Stone magazine and the Los Angeles Times.

He's a graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, which was later merged with the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the California Arts Institute in Valencia, Calif.

His prints currently on display at Seedboat Gallery in Silver City, from which this issue's cover was selected, evolved from five short animated films done over the past two years. "The artwork, music and form of the films came through as I worked on the pieces with little preconception," Lund says. Some of the forms were dictated by traditional rhymes and songs. "Easychair," the film from which the cover image was derived, was created with still art — drawings scanned and then colored — and put through a photo-story program with the music for the film done afterwards. Other film images were created with markers, then scanned into a computer, or from manipulated still photos. The prints were then created from selected sequences of images.

Seedboat Gallery, 214 W. Yankie St., 534-1136. Monday - Saturday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., seedboatgallery.com