Craig “Skibs” Barker likes legs. This Southern Californian artist grew up during the early ’80s in the midst of both the punk rock and surfing culture explosions. These influences soon inspired his own fine art. With a healthy dose of punk flyers, album covers, and surfing magazines buzzing through his head as a youth, Barker began making flyers and t-shirts for his friends and his own punk bands. Fast-forward to today: Barker’s most recent paintings infuse his long-standing love for painting and rendering the human female figure with his punk-fueled graphic design.

Mixing different approaches, techniques, and mediums, he creates a sense of memory, personal history, and appreciation for the female form. Combining elements of pop culture, literary censorship, and a positive mental attitude, he creates layered scenes of voyeuristic mischief. Barker’s work explores the junctions between past and present, memory and imagination, fantasy and reality, while creating a dialog between image and viewer. More recently he has been involved in creating spatially extended versions of these mixed media creations via three dimensional assemblage pieces, and large-scale gallery installations.

Current and Previous Works by Craig ‘Skibs’ Barker