Artists speak: Raymond Pettibon.

Raymond Pettibon's pictures place an equal emphasis on drawing and writing. Working with a cast of characters drawn from worlds as different as Saturday morning cartoons and politics, he tells stories that can be both amusing and critical.

"I think the life of the drawing is that you're always kept in suspense. It's like a serial, which goes on from day to day in the paper.... Even though my work is usually just one drawing, it is more of a narrative than it is a cartoon with a punch line and a resolution and a laugh at the end. "

"Gumby is a kind of metaphor for how I work. He actually goes into the book, goes into a biography or historical book, interacts with real figures from the past, and he becomes part of it. He brings it to another direction. And I tend to do that in my work. That's why Gumby is a particularly important figure to me. I have to give credit to the figure of Gumby himself because it's not something that I'm raising up by his bootstraps and putting in this high-art realm. Gumby's creator, Art Clokey, was a pretty brilliant guy, and it wasn't like the original Gumby cartoons weren't worth paying attention to and that I'm rescuing him from Saturday morning children's cartoons. Gumby represents an alter ego for my work as an artist. He represents me as an alter ego. "

"What you see are these motifs that keep recurring in my work. They never started as something that I chose--as something that was important to say over and over and over again. They started as one image and for whatever reason they did have this kind of resonance to me and that brought them back. And some of them have had a fairly long life.

But with sports, and baseball in particular in America, there's a lot more to it, there's a lot more nuances. Not just in the game itself--but that's also important too. My work on the subject does tap into some of the nuances of the game--the pitching of the baseball for instance, or hitting a baseball--but also it says a lot about what goes on off the field as well about the society in general. It's kind of a microcosm of the society as a whole. ""

About the Artist

Born: 1957, Tucson, AZ

Lives and Works: Los Angeles, CA

Media and Materials: drawing, watercolor, text, artist books, installation

Influences: Punk rock, politics, surfing, baseball, popular culture, cartoons and comics, Gumby, the Bible, film noir, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsberg, The Scarlet Letter, Francisco de Goya, James McNeill Whistler, Charles Baudelaire, R. Crumb The fourth of five children, Pettibon earned a degree in Economics and worked as a high-school math teacher before launching a career as a professional artist. A cult figure among underground music devotees for his early work associated with the Los Angeles punk rock scene, Pettibon has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist's books. Pettibon explores subjects as diverse as surfing, themes from art history and nineteenth-century literature, and figures from contemporary popular culture. In his 1998 anthology, Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, the viewer can read over Pettibon's shoulder to discover a handful of the artist's muses--Henry James, Mickey Spillane, Marcel Proust, William Blake, and Samuel Beckett, among others.