RockArt: Jay Alders

For some time I’ve been a fan of the work of Jay Alders, an American fine artist, photographer and graphic designer. He’s primarily known for his work featuring surfing and musicians, and that’s enough to make him a favourite in my mind! Add to that his unique flowing style and you get an artist creating some amazing works. The first piece of art I purchased from him was a print of Rio Jam.

Rio Jam was created during a two week tour of Brazil in 2007 and features Donavon Frankenreiter, G Love , ALO, Matt Grundy and Matt Costa jamming out in the hills of Rio. The piece later became Donavon’s tour poster and Billabong’s Promotional Poster for Donavon’s tour.

You can see the session from which the painting emerged below. Jay is in the blue t-shirt with the purple cap and you can see him making the sketches he’d base the piece on – pretty cool to see the inspiration for it as early in the process as this.

Alders grew up in Howell, New Jersey and took to all board sports: skateboards, snowboarding and surfing. He also became enamored with his dad’s record collection with bands like Led Zep, The Beatles and The Doors, became a vegetarian at 16 and got heavily into environmental causes. Take that background, add in an art major at college and you can see how he arrived where he is today! Over the years he has collaborated and/or toured with talented folk such as: Donavon Frankenreiter, Matt Costa,  The Slater Brothers, ALO, Sean Davey, G Love, Paula Fuga, Echo Movement, John Butler Trio, Rob Machado and Guns N Roses’ guitarist, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal to name a few. I’d recommend you head to his website to check out more of his work!

Website: www.jayalders.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/jayalders.artist
Twitter: @JayAlders

RockArt is a series of posts that looks at the non-musical side of things: videos, photos, logos and artwork. You can find more here.