Zarkana - Tara Mcpherson

Tara McPherson is an American contemporary artist exploring concepts surrounding the human condition. With a focus on powerful female archetypes, her otherworldly characters hold a compelling tension in their gaze. Inspired by astrophysics, nature, mythology, comics, music, love, loss, and good old life experience. Her portraits delve into the realms of our psychological states, giving us a peek into the complexities of the human psyche. She has exhibited her paintings and serigraphs internationally in galleries and museums. Named the crown princess of poster art by ELLE Magazine, she has created numerous music posters for bands such as Beck, The Pixies, and Metallica. She has worked with Sony Pictures Animation doing character designs & creative development for an animated feature production. Her array of art also includes a variety of designer toys with KidRobot, painted comic covers for DC Vertigo, advertising illustrations for Wyden+Kennedy, Barton F Graf, Publicis, and Bernstein Andrulli. She taught in the Illustration department at Parsons in NYC, and has done many painting workshops in museums and universities worldwide. In 2011 Tara co-founded The Cotton Candy Machine gallery and art boutique with her partner Sean Leonard. The gallery ran from 2011 to 2016 in a former fire department in the Screen printing is a printing technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink or other printable materials which can be pressed through the mesh as a sharp-edged image onto a substrate. A roller or squeegee is moved across the screen stencil, forcing or pumping ink past the threads of the woven mesh in the open areas. Screen printing is also a stencil method of print making in which a design is imposed on a screen of silk or other fine mesh, with blank areas coated with an impermeable substance, and ink is forced through the mesh onto the printing surface. It is also known as silkscreen, seriography, and serigraph. Our Name The term “safe walls” refers to legal spots in the urban landscape for local graffiti artists to do their work without the fear of sanctions. The Poster As A Vital Art Form From the public notices of Antiquity and the first leaflets and placards handed out by traveling performers—which hark back to the end of the 15th century—to the advertisements of contemporary circuses, the poster has had a long and colorful history. With the advent of printing, circuses all over the world were able to produce posters in large quantities for display in public places to attract the attention of passers-by. Generally created by local artists, these visually striking works were the ambassadors of traveling big-top circuses and spread the word of their imminent passage in a city. Like the circus itself, the circus poster of lore exerts a fascination all its own; it strikes the spectator head-on. Poster artists and illustrators have had the uncanny ability to distill enormous amounts of information into iconographic images that penetrate and endure. Posters are designed to mystify, arouse curiosity and the urge to see, but more than mere advertising tools, they have long been recognized as a vital art form—one that shares common roots