Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoco, Rick Griffin, Wes Wilson and Stanley Mouse, known collectively as “The Big Five,” pictured at an exhibition at the Moore Gallery in San Francisco in July 1967. Each artist designed a custom poster for the event. The group designed the majority of the best-known and iconic psychedelic posters in San Francisco during the 1960s.
Stanley Miller, known simply as “Mouse,” is one of the best known and iconic artists of the San Francisco psychedelic era of the late '60s. A rare show featuring his paintings is on display at the Casterline Goodman Gallery in the Little Nell through mid-September. Growing up in Detroit in the '50s, Mouse displayed incredible talent as an artist at a young age.
He was particularly adept with an air brush and he began painting hot rods and wild bug-eyed monster characters, which became popular all over the country (and eventually all over the world). He was so good that by the time he was 19, his family had set up a mail-order business selling his hot rod art. He took on the nickname Mouse when he was young.
He would go to the Detroit Institute of Art where paintings by the masters hung on the walls — Picasso, Van Gogh and Degas, to name a few. “Someday, I’ll be able to paint like them,” he thought to himself. Mouse was attending arts school at the Detroit School for the Society of Arts and Crafts in 1965 when psychedelics came on the scene.
“Everyone was doing LSD and it expanded my art immensely,” Stanley said in an interview with the Aspen Daily News. “Psychedelics opened my mind. Everything went multidimensional, I guess.
“A friend of mine named James Gurley was in Janis Joplin’s band Big Brother and the Holding Company. He sent back messages that everything was happening in San Francisco and we needed to get out there. So some friends of mine got in a car and drove there.
We weren’t there for that long when we were driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, and someone said, ‘How long are you gonna stay here?’ and I said, ‘Forever.’” The Grateful Dead Oxford Circle poster is regarded as the most valuable concert poster of the San Francisco psychedelic era of the late '60s. The poster was designed by Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse.
A collection of Mouse’s paintings are on display at Casterline Goodman Gallery located in the Little Nell. Geoff Hanson/Aspen Daily News Mouse fell in with a fellow artist named Alton Kelley and the two began making posters for the burgeoning concert scene in the bay area at venues like the Avalon Ballroom, Fillmore West and The Matrix. Their art was heavily influenced by the Czech painter and illustrator Alphonse Mucha, who lived in France during the Art Nouveau period of the 19th and early 20th century and made stylized posters for the theater and advertisements for everyday objects.
One day, Kelley and Mouse were in a library in San Francisco looking for inspiration when they stumbled upon an image that would become the bedrock iconography for one of the Bay Area’s most popular bands — the Grateful Dead. The illustration was “Skull and Roses,” a drawing by Edmund Joseph Sullivan, who was born in 1869. It was used in a 1913 printing of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
” “It just fit in so well with the name Grateful Dead,” Stanley said. “There was something so beautiful about the idea of a skull and roses. It embodies life and death.
It gets metaphysical, a skeleton that’s hopeful.” They say that greatness borrows and genius steals. Mouse and Kelley proved their genius, adding graphics to the design that would become one of the most recognizable images in rock ‘n’ roll.
They first used the design for a concert at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco on Sept. 16, 1966. It became known as “The Grateful Dead Oxford Circle Poster” (Oxford Circle was the opening band) and it is regarded as one of the most valuable concert posters of the psychedelic genre.
The Grateful Dead used the design as the cover art for their live 1971 eponymous record, which is known as “Skull and Roses.” The Skull and Roses design was not the Grateful Dead’s first association with a skeleton — that credit goes to Wes Wilson’s May 1966 poster “The Quick and The Dead.” A painting by Stanley Mouse, based on the song “Terrapin Station” by the Grateful Dead.
Paintings by Stanley Mouse are on display at Casterline Goodman Gallery located in the Little Nell. Indeed, there was a group of artists working together in the San Francisco psychedelic concert poster genre in the late '60s. In addition to Mouse, Kelley and Wilson, Victor Moscoco and Rick Griffin rounded out what was known as “The Big 5.
” Mouse said that the artists all pushed one another and it made everyone’s work better. “Kelley and I were making art and our neighbor in our building was this beautiful woman who was married to Rick Griffin. He wasn't living in San Francisco.
She sent some of our work to him and he made a b-line for San Francisco,” Stanlry recalled. “Rick picked up on the lettering I was doing. We would try and top one another.
We were all buddies. It was a really great competition — very positive. Great artists make each other better and that’s what we had going on.
” In July 1967, there was an exhibit of the work of the Big Five at the Moore Gallery in San Francisco. Each artist designed a custom poster for the event. Mouse would continue doing concert posters, designing album artwork for bands like Steve Miller Band and Journey until the '80s.
Stanley said that the iconic cat pyramid design he did for Jerry Garcia’s album “Cats Under the Stars” is one of his favorite works. “That was my swan song,” he said. “I found the inspiration for the cat in a book on cats.
I embellished it with rays and a pyramid above it. There’s something about it. It’s a classic.
” After years of making what he calls “pop art,” Mouse moved to Santa Fe and later back to the Bay Area. He has concentrated on his painting for the last 40 years. In the mid-’80s, Mouse began painting the images that he had done in his days as an illustrator.
The natural progression would seemingly be to make paintings and then illustrate them but Mouse revered the process, recreating his iconic drawings in paintings. It is these works that are on exhibit at the Casterline Goodman Gallery. Paintings by Stanley Mouse are on display at Casterline Goodman Gallery located in the Little Nell.
Mouse was one of the most famous painters of the San Francisco psychedelic concert poster scene of the late '60s. Robert Casterline has owned the gallery with Jordan Goodman since 2009. He collects all kinds of art, from fine art to illustrations.
He owns the largest football card collection in the world with Dan Hunt, owner of the Kansas City Chiefs. Casterline got interested in collecting concert posters, which led him to Mouse. “As a collector, I like to own something that I think is the best,” he said.
“Before I buy, I do research. ‘The Grateful Dead Oxford Circle’ poster is the most sought-after original concert posters in existence. When they come up in auction, they usually come up for $100,000 to $200,000 in good condition.
I was investigating putting one in my collection and I wanted to learn more about the artist. I learned it was Stanley Mouse. And I tracked him down and we started talking about doing a show.
” Mouse has done very few gallery shows and Casterline was able to pull off the largest private gallery showing of Mouse’s paintings ever put on display. All in all, there have been over 20 paintings rotated through the show and while Casterline won’t discuss sales, six new paintings recently went up on to the walls of the gallery. Many of Mouse’s creations have found new homes.
Now in his 80s, Mouse has achieved his goal of being able to paint like the great masters he admired when he was young. “I’ve worked all my life to paint like a master and nobody cares,” Stanley said. “All they want to do is see my skeletons and lighting bolts.
It’s just a smidgeon of my work. I would like people to investigate. It’s a discovery; a lot of them don’t know about it.
I’d like people to discover that I can actually paint, I’m more than just a cartoonist. I hope that people will realize that. But I do want people to see the show and be happy.
” When told what Stanley said about his own work, Douglas Clarke, an art advisor at Casterline Goodman said, “First off, these are paintings and they reveal quite well how good a painter Stanley is.” Casterline interjected, “And as far as making people happy, his work means so much to so many people. People come in here and just start telling their own stories about his art and their relationship to it.
One person told me he is going to get a tattoo of the piece he bought. Very few people can have that kind of impact with their art. Stanley was a main figure in one of the most important art movements of the 20th century.
He is a master.” The Stanley Mouse show runs through mid-September at the Casterline Goodman Gallery..
