About this poster

"The central image was my nod to Casey Sonnabend’s photo of the ash-covered Saddhu with Michael Bowen’s third eye drawing on the Saddhu’s forehead which appeared on the cover of SF Oracle #5. The Sonnabend photo also was used on AOR 2.217, the Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse advertisement for the Human Be-In. The top third of my poster depicts a garden scene with a feathered fellow waving a peace sign from behind a teepee, as well as dozens of birds, insects, and a striped armadillo. All of this was drawn within a bed of daisies, mushrooms, and my upside down “lazy lightning”, or “crazy grass”. The “25th“ contains paisley and “lazy lightning” textures, with yin yang and peace symbols. In those days I used to invent lettering fonts for each poster. The lettering is a hodgepodge of experimental styles, all of which I’d never used before, or since. Here, the idea I experimented with was using shapes of playing card clubs in the holes and spaces of letters as the common theme. The side borders feature a background of marijuana stalks, with three ovals on each side. Each oval depicts a different character from my Trip City Posters… a medieval executioner, a pirate, a gunslinger, a grinning maharaja, a psychedelic cyclops, and a Cherokee chief. Dividing them are card suits and diamond shaped flourishes which happened to be the pattern of the fancy inlays from the sides of an octagonal table I once had.

This is the only poster I ever took to the printer as a pencil drawing. The main reason is hilarious: I was hosting a party while typically detached sitting on the floor carpet drawing. At some point I got up, leaving the sketch pad unattended, and a friend accidentally kicked over a beer on my drawing. The next day I placed the dried but rippled and mildly stained paper artwork into a giant 1957 Rand McNally world atlas, and placed some heavy encyclopedia volumes atop to flatten the paper out. A week later I continued drawing, now with the necessity of further flattening the paper by drawing heavily on it – laying down heavy lead with heavier elbow grease. I could not ink the pencil drawing after that. The exotic borders and thick striping in the circle are a result of that beer spill. I had 500 of these 15 ¼ x 23” posters printed by North Coast Reproductions on super heavy semi-gloss 60 pound cover stock. I hand numbered them all the day I got them back from the printer.

I’m aware of just two posters advertising the 25thanniversary of the Human Be-In. The other is by Stanley Mouse. I took one stack of posters with me to San Francisco to help promote the event. I gave Ben Friedman at the Postermat a dozen or so to sell." - DL