The Jackson 500 Volume 2

By Tim Biskup

Continuing where he left off with The Jackson 500, Volume One, Tim Biskup's latest fine-art collection contains paintings 101 to 200 in a series of five hundred business-card-sized paintings, reproduced at actual size. Acting as a kind of workshop for new ideas, the tiny paintings in The Jackson 500 Volume Two are spontaneous compositions that contain the buds of many of Biskup's recurring characters, themes, and color theories.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593075332
• ISBN13: 9781593075330
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Dark Horse
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.3" x 0.5" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

good inspiration...

It's neat to see Mr. Biskup working out his thoughts. Lots of awesome color combinations and neat little creatures!

The Jackson 500 Volume 2

Considered one of the most prolific artist of the lowbrow art movement, Tim Biskup has, indeed, done a whole ton of things--from animation, toy design, major painting work, to the curatorship of the (now defunct) Burning Brush Auctions. For the longest time, I've been really interested to really sit down and examine his work; I'd seen his Helper Toy, Alphabeast, and Stack Pack toys (and wanted all of them), a few illustrations (including some he did for the amazing I am 8 Bit series)--really, one can't be into contemporary art and not know Biskup--but, since I live in the middle of nowhere, had never really been able to ooh and aah over the artwork outside of Juxtapoz magazine. Thank god for Dark Horse, then, in collecting this series from him. See, the Jackson 500 series is one of Biskup's many adventures in small painting. And when I say small, I mean all of them are painted on business-card size paper: The book(s) then reprint them at actual size (making the books nice and small--the size you could stand on pretty much any small shelf, just a little taller and a bit less wide than a CD), each providing 100 of the proposed 500 images; you'll notice that each is numbered in correspondence to where it stands in the series: Biskup's sense of design, then: obviously tied to his time spent in the animation industry, his paintings have a surreal simplicity, each with its own unique personality--the bizarre, in Biskup's world, becomes the common; populated by monsters, living spires, and cuteness, it's easy to understand how he's gained so much popularity--how could you not love this, for instance: The answer? You can't not love it. Taking into consideration how each work (even out of a series of 500) stands alone in its characterization (despite obvious 'periods' he goes through--the beginning of this book sees him using a lot of reds while, later, the creatures take on a spindly look), it's nearly mind-boggling to think of the creativity (to say nothing of the ability) that Biskup has under tap--the man's an idea factory, and never once (in this book or anywhere else I've experienced him) have I been able to predict his next movement. And given his extensive use of various mediums, it's easy to get lost in the world of Biskup--even if the images are tiny, business card menageries.