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,” Stanle.