Artists

Kepi is a musician/artist from Sacramento, CA, best known as the front man of punk rock group the Groovie Ghoulies.

Between 1989 and 2007 the Groovie Ghoulies released 9 albums and numerous EP's, did many tours in the US, Europe and Japan and had a country music side project called the Haints.

Their own trademark Universal monsters, urban myth and b-movie sci-fi themed anthems as well as their everlasting positive energy generated them a world wide fanbase called the Ghoulie Family.

The same happy look on the darker side of pop culture found in the band's lyrics can be seen in Kepi's art, showing the weirdest creatures in joyful ways.

Stefan Tijs (1976-present) from Rotterdam, The Netherlands, has been interested in art and illustration ever since he was a little kid.

Back in the late 80's, as a 12 year old he started a monthly graffiti fanzine named Free Style together with his 14 year old brother, which turned out to be Europe's first graffiti magazine. After 32 issues they called it quits, but Stefan's creative output didn't stop there.

In the years to follow he ran his own clothing brand, put out another magazine, worked at an animation studio, started his record label called Stardumb Records (whose catalog includes releases by international artists such as US punk rockers The Queers as well as Detroit soul legend Nathaniel Mayer among many others) and took part in a family business publishing children's books for which he illustrates a series himself as well.

In the spare time left he has been doing graphic design and illustration jobs for anyone from underground bands to companies like Pepsi and Ericsson. Over the last few years he has been focusing on painting as well, being influenced by pretty much anything he came across during his life.

Fred Villanueva (1973-) was born in Oak Cliff, Texas, outside of Dallas, and learned to paint on canvas at a Cistercian Boys School, where he learned about Basquiats death as a boy. He ran away to Santa Ana, CA, but later returned to Texas to finish Arts High School at Booker T. Washington High School for Performing and Visual Arts. After high school, he moved back to California, attending the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his BFA in Painting in 1995, after traveling Mexico to study muralism in Mexico City and pre-Columbian art in general. Finishing his last year independently in New York City through Parsons School of Design, he apprenticed with conceptual heavyweight Dennis Oppenheim.

It was in New York City with Oppenheim that he started thinking about conceptual and process art and how it related to the Abstract, Pop and Neo-Expressionist painting he loved as a kid, in addition to learning about a renaissance approach to working as an artist.

After several stints as a designer, including at a commercial silkscreen press designing billboard size commercial graphics, he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he first encountered Spanish painting, especially Guernica, by Picasso. While living briefly in Montmartre, Paris, he studied large scale canvas paintings at the Louvre by Delacroix, Rubens, and Manet, and vowed to make his own.

Back in New York, switching back and forth between abstraction and figurative work, Fred settled upon using recognizable images in paintings when abstraction looked beautiful but stopped talking back. Current visual language focuses on combining images from popular American media; especially ads, magazines, actresses, models, dancers, brands, and even Saints. The Western Paintings: Cowboys and Indians group of paintings came from the tongue and cheek expression Painting in the Western Tradition.

His mural scale work was exhibited in Washington, D.C. and viewed by Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

He and his wife, actress Norah Sweeney, live and work in New York City.