Tony Rubino

Tony Rubino is an American artist based in Matawan, New Jersey, who works in two worlds: as a syndicated daily-newspaper cartoonist and as a painter and printmaker of pop-art portraits. His fine art, in his own description, comments on pop culture, celebrity, nostalgia and the flood of information delivered by technology.

Style

Rubino's portraits combine photographic likenesses with graphic patterns, saturated color and text, in the tradition of Andy Warhol's celebrity silkscreens and later street-influenced pop. Humor, parody and juxtaposition, the tools of the cartoonist, carry over into the paintings. His subjects include musicians, film stars and cartoon characters, and series built around figures such as Frida Kahlo. His work has been shown in galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington and Los Angeles and is sold widely as prints.

Tupac Shakur (and Lyrics)

Tupac Shakur (and Lyrics) shows the rapper Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) in a white hooded top, his face rendered in fine concentric engraved lines like the portrait on a banknote, toned in gold and violet. Around him the dark purple background is filled with lines of text from his song "Only God Can Judge Me," whose title phrase repeats along the bottom of the image. The engraving style gives Tupac the formality of an official portrait, while the handwritten-looking lyrics return him to his own words about paranoia, mortality and judgment. The image is a modern relative of the memorial portrait: Tupac died in Las Vegas in September 1996, six days after being shot, at the age of 25.

Where to see his work

Rubino's work is sold through online galleries and print retailers and is in private collections. For other contemporary artists working with pop imagery, see Jonathan Horowitz, and for portraits more broadly, Famous Paintings.