Rick Griffin was born near Palos Verdes in California in 1944,
so it was almost inevitable that in his teens he would become an obsessive surfer.
But he was equally obsessed with drawing, and through a combination
of his youthful talent and contacts he'd made in the surfing community
he went straight from school to work as the staff artist for Surfer Magazine.
While working there he created Murphy, a graphically unremarkable character
who nevertheless quickly became widely adopted as a mascot by his fellow surfers.
In 1964 when he was 20 years old, Griffin left The Surfer to embark on a trip to Australia.
He began the journey by hitching a ride to San Francisco, but the car he was riding in crashed,
and although he survived his left eye was badly damaged and his face permanently scarred.
And not much later his cartoon eye character would become a ubiquitous
iconic presence for the rest of his career.
He subsequently abandoned his plans for travel
and enrolled into what is now the California Institute of the Arts .
In 1966 he began experimenting with the drug LSD,
which wasn't actually made illegal until later that year.
The effect of his use of this drug and other hallucinogenics such as
mescaline on his creative output was profound.
In that year he created his first poster for the band The Jook Savages, of which he was a member.
He created another along similar lines for 1967's Gathering Of The Tribes,
an event which was credited with starting what would be called the Summer of Love.
As the hippie movement grew and San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury scene developed,
Griffin found himself in increasing demand for counter-culture graphics,
and particularly posters for the new rock music which proliferated.
A lot of his work at this time was created for the Chet Helms and Bill Graham,
who staged rock extravaganzas at the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore Auditorium.
Both frequently commissioned him to create arresting images to promote their events
and Griffin responded with posters which more
often than not had nothing at all to do with the actual performers.
They were simply the surreal but compelling products of his formidable,
admittedly drug-enhanced imagination.
And the names of the featured bands appeared in
increasingly difficult to read levels of distortion.
He may have been the most visible and prolific poster artist at the time
but he wasn't the only one.
And in 1967 Griffin joined forces with Alton Kelly, Stanley Miller,
Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson to form the Berkeley-Bonaparte agency,
a collective dedicated to the production of psychedelic poster art.
A lot of the work they produced had no function other than to give visual substance to the
Hippie movement and the drug culture it relied on. These posters were originated in black line only.
Colours were then added as both flat and tonal overlays in subsequent lithographic print runs,
using the vibrant kaleidoscopic colour palettes Griffin and his associates were known for.
In 1967 he created the original logo for Rolling Stone magazine, which for Griffin
was reasonably legible and it continued to be used as their masthead for quite a few years to come.
Robert Crumb launched Zap Comix in 1968,
initially as an exclusive showcase for his own outrageously provocative strips.
But in subsequent issues he invited others,
including Rick Griffin to also submit sequential work for publication.
Unlike Crumb and many of his contemporaries Griffin wasn't a story teller.
In his strips there was rarely a coherent narrative, and instead he created a series of
thematically connected surreal illustrations which usually made only aesthetic sense.
The arrangement of his pages was always visually dynamic
and each panel was executed with immense precision and graphic balance.
It was also in 1968 that Griffin began his professional relationship with The Grateful Dead,
with a monochrome concert poster which displayed the same graphic intensity as his work for Zap.
A year later he created another for the band which featured a mesmerising, typically symmetrical
design in saturated colour. It proved immensely popular as a piece of art in its own right,
and so did his cover art for the Aoxomoxoa album issued around the same time.
And also in 1969 he was commissioned byJohn Severson
to design a poster for his surfing film Pacific Vibrations, in which Griffin also appeared.
This was one of the earliest examples of him actually creating a painted image,
rather than the flatter line based graphics he had made his reputation with.
He also resumed working for Surfer magazine and revisited his character Murphy. But by now
the sequencing and graphic styling were a long way from his earlier more mainstream origins.
Griffin moved back to Southern California in 1969,
and settled with his family in San Clemente, Orange County.
Among other work in this prolific period he created a darkly humorous strip sequence
for the song Why Don't We Do It In The Road,
which was published in the collaborative book The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics.
And in 1970 he produced a series of comics under the collective banner The Man From Utopia.
This was the ultimate collision of cosmic and comic imagery,
executed with astonishing precision and graphic clarity.
Using the comic book format he created a line only portfolio
of wildly imaginative and frequently disturbing visionary images.
And for the first time, among the usual symbolic paraphernalia of his work
some religious imagery was also stirred into the mix.
In that year he had become a born-again Christian and although his incorporation
of religious images was unconventional to say the
least it was nevertheless a genuine expression of his new found faith.
But he continued to produce secular work, including more for Zap,
and a surfing themed comic Tales from the tube.
In 1973 he created a collection of painted and graphic images
to promote The Grateful Dead's album and tour The Wake of The Flood.
And in addition to his ongoing relationship
with them he created memorable album covers for other bands of the 1970s.
Among them was this painted cover for Sail On Sailer by Mustard Seed faith from 1973
And his profoundly surreal airbrushed comic image for this album by Help Yourself
appeared in the same year
In 1976 he created the cover art for the album Slow Motion by Welsh rock band Man.
Sadly it wasn't used in this form as it's depiction of Mad's Alfred E. Neuman
breached copyright so this close up replaced it.
By now the painted and airbrushed work was dominant in his output
and he created another surf film poster, for Tales from the Tube in 1976
In the later 70s he became involved with Maranatha Music, a Christian recording company
and he produced album covers and posters for various of their bands and performers.
In 1980 his illustrated condensed edition of the Gospel of Saint John was published,
And these images were unlike anything previously seem in religious painting.
Although clearly evangelical they were every bit as hallucinatory
and creatively explorative as his earlier secular images.
Whether or not he had continued to ingest LSD or other drugs at this time
none of the sources I've used wants to reveal.
But it's possible that like quite a few others his
earlier use had opened up his neural pathways and it was by now redundant.
The illustrations were painted, combining actual brush work with airbrush application,
and although they were undoubtedly a seriously intended body of work
they were largely rejected or ignored by orthodox mainstream Christianity.
During the 1980s Griffin's pace of commercial work was starting to slow down.
The hippie golden age was gone and fashions in music and graphics had moved on.
But the Grateful Dead were still touring and making albums,
and they continued to use his graphic talents for their promotional material.
And as well as artwork for more religious rock music there was an
unused album cover for British rock band the Cult.
In 1991 Rick Griffin's life was tragically and prematurely cut short.
While riding his motorbike he was involved in a serious collision with a van.
He was rushed to hospital but he died 3 days later from his injuries. He was 47 years old.
Where his creativity and persistent visual
imagination would have taken him in later life we will never know.
And for those such as myself who consider Rick Griffin to be one of the greatest and
most innovative illustrators and graphic artists of the 20th century, we just have to be grateful
that in the short time he spent on the planet he created so many enduring and iconic images.