Charles White III was one of a group of California artists (including Dave Willardson, Peter Lloyd, and Peter Falcombi) who transformed American illustration in the 1970s. They used airbrush art inspired by psychedelia, surf graphics, and Hollywood glamour to create posters as well as album and magazine covers featuring glossy images of palm trees, landscapes, and body parts for Playboy, Levi’s, the Rolling Stones, American Graffiti, and numerous other bands, films, and commercial products. He is best known for his 1978 Star Wars poster.This is one of a series of posters White made featuring his idiosyncratic interpretations of the signs of the Zodiac. Here, he subverts the traditional representation of Aquarius, a man pouring a stream of water from a vessel, installing him as a decoration on another vessel, itself broken into shards at the top. He further deploys the airbrush technique to introduce gleaming, three-dimensional raindrops to the surface of the image.
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