Individual Paintings from Various Group Shows
Find your Desert Dessert at Sparkles in Quick Sand
Paintings inspired by Vintage Vegas Matchbooks
August/October 2003, Barsac Braserie Universal City
Sparkles in Quick Sand (Desert Diamonds and Granular Glints of Glamour) is an homage to the glitz and glitter of Lost Vegas. This series of paintings by Cherry Capri are inspired by the vintage matchbook art of famed Vegas hotels from the 1950s and 1960s. All the hotels represented in this collection took their names and imagery from their desert setting and include the Sahara, El Morocco, Algiers, Desert Inn, and of course the Sands.
As a member of both tiki and roadside fan groups, Cherry Capri has a great appreciation for signage and commercial vernacular building and the auto-friendly roadside of the Mid 20th Century landscape. Cherry’s specific interest in Vegas casino architecture and signage began many years ago. She met boyfriend and musical partner C.B. Howlie during a luau at the Tropicana Hotel. More recently, she hosted the “Mondo Vegas” tour of Sin City with Eric Lynxwiler from MONA in conjunction with a stellar performance at the Hard Rock Hotel’s “Mondo Tiki” Event over Easter, 2003.
Cherry’s series of acrylic with prismacolor paintings on panel, Sparkles in Quick Sand, is motivated by the current popular interest in the architecture of the Rat Pack era of Las Vegas history. In the words of renowned architectural critic and author Alan Hess and his recent book, Viva Las Vegas – After Hours Architecture. “Las Vegas has helped mature the ordinary vocabulary of the commercial strip… it is the ultimate version of the commercial strips found on the fringes of almost all American cities.”
Cherry has amassed a large collection of rare matchbooks from 1940s, through 1970s including many from Las Vegas. Matchbook art, especially the illustrative style art produced during the Golden Age (1920s through 1950s) is still under-appreciated. The role of the designer and illustrator in creating these ephemeral artifacts should not be underestimated. The seminal book, Close Cover before Striking, by Thomas Steele, Jim Heimann and Rod Dyer, brought the art form to popular consciousness in 1987. In it they state “These mini billboards, tucked away in pocket sized convenience, free for the asking, still stand as ‘striking’ examples of early graphics in both simplicity and design.”
Each painting in this series is inspired by a real artifact of history – vintage 1950s and 1960s matchbook art that needed to be exposed in a much larger forum. Thus, tiny matchbooks are recreated literally twelve times or more their original size. Many layers of restrained color with the addition of glitter accent evoke an authentic distressed matchbook feeling. These paintings not only bring an appreciation for matchbook cover design to consciousness in a way that Andy Warhol provided exposure and recognition for the work of package design in the 1960s, but offer rare looks at romantic retro cultural icons of our past. They offer a gritty look at the faded flash of these desert diamonds lost forever to the sands of quick sands of time.
Come for Sun Swim Fun
Paintings inspired by Vintage Palm Springs Matchbooks
October 25 through November 15, 2003, M Modern Gallery, Palm Springs, CA
Come for Sun Swim Fun revisits a glamorous era in the desert vacation community
of Palm Springs. This series of acrylic paintings with prismacolor, glitter and sand on panel by Cherry Capri is inspired by vintage matchbook art of Palm Springs from the 1950s and 1960s. The work is also motivated by the rediscovery and preservation of
Mid-Century Modern architecture in the Springs.
Over the years Cherry has amassed a large collection of rare matchbooks from 1940s, through 1970s including many from Palm Springs. Matchbook art, especially the illustrative style art produced during the Golden Age (1920s through 1960s) is still under-appreciated. The role of the designer and illustrator in creating these ephemeral artifacts should not be underestimated. The seminal book, Close Cover before Striking, by Thomas Steele, Jim Heimann and Rod Dyer, brought the art form to popular consciousness in 1987. In it they state “These mini billboards, tucked away in pocket sized convenience, free for the asking, still stand as ‘striking’ examples of early graphics in both simplicity and design.”
So each painting in this series is inspired by a real artifact of history, a vintage 1950s or 1960s matchbook exposed in a much larger forum. Thus, tiny matchbooks are recreated literally twelve times or more their original size. Many layers of color with the addition of glitter and textural accent evoke an authentic distressed matchbook feeling. Nicks and dings on the paintings only serve to further enrich the ephemeral quality of the work. You may also see non-photo blue pencil lines indicative of early paste-up.
It is interesting to consider that the original art for these matchbooks was probably on a similar large scale to these paintings. The original images pre-date our age of computer generated graphics and fonts by decades. Traditionally commercial art was hand drawn and lettered and then shrunk through the analogue process of cameras and photostats. So maybe somewhere in the backs of the artists’ garages the original works still exist.
These paintings attempt to bring an appreciation for matchbook cover design to consciousness in a way that Andy Warhol provided exposure and recognition for the work of soup and soap labels and other package design in the 1960s. They also offer rare looks at romantic retro cultural icons of our past; a gritty look at the grandeur of surviving Palm Springs landmarks and those that are literally lost forever to the sands of time. In the recent book Palm Springs Weekend, architectural historians Alan Hess and Andrew Danish say, “Palm Springs is a true oasis of progressive design… unparalleled in the world.”
