The Blue Whale

Jeff Soto is an artist, illustrator and muralist who has exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. The artist’s distinct color palette, subject matter and technique resonate with a growing audience and bridge the gap between Pop Surrealism and graffiti. Inspired by youthful nostalgia, nature, graffiti, hip-hop and popular culture, his bold, representational work is simultaneously accessible and stimulating. In 2002, Soto graduated with Distinction from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. In 2008, his work was the subject of an exhibition at Riverside Art Museum. Soto was born and raised in Southern California, where he currently resides with his wife and two daughters. Soto is represented by Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York City. Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.