Background
Raymond Ginn did not become an artist through traditional means. A precocious teenager, he graduated from university at age nineteen with a degree in economics. But Ginn would not use his talent with numbers for very long. He soon found an outlet for his other talent: drawing. Ginn became the chief artist for his brother's band, Black Flag, one of the seminal groups in punk rock history. He designed Black Flag’s logo—an arrangement of four black bars—and he produced images for the band's album covers and concert fliers. Ginn also decided to change his last name to Pettibon, a variation of the nickname "Petit Bon” (good little one) that his father had given him when he was a child. In interviews, Pettibon has claimed that he abandoned the name Ginn to avoid being called "Ray Ginn,” which sounded too much like Ronald "Reagan," the conservative U.S. President.
Indeed, Pettibon was never a conservative artist. His darkly humorous illustrations for Black Flag helped make the band famous. Raymond was also creating his own, more personal art—stacks of drawings that he would collect and disseminate in book form. Most of his early collections were dis-tributed through his brother's record label, SST Records. Pettibon enlivened his black-and-white art with a fluid sense of line, and he incorporated cleverly written texts into his compositions. One drawing from the book, Tripping Corpse #3 (1983), depicts the infamous hippie criminal Charles Manson. It shows Manson being led away from one of his murdered victims by two police officers. The caption at the top reads, "The LSD really cleared the cobwebs of up-tight, straight-world reality from my mind. I feel free for the first time in my life." Works such as this revealed Pettibon's interest in the foibles of the hippie generation, a generation he felt had been destroyed by its own false idealism.
Pettibon's art also used and reused established icons from American pop culture. Baseball players, superheroes, guns, and even Biblical figures made their appearance in his work. As with some of Pettibon’s hippie imagery, many of these drawings touched upon the undercurrents of violence and sex in American life. One untitled piece from 1990 features Batman being held at gunpoint by a mysterious woman—a mock femme fatale. Batman's vaguely erotic thoughts are displayed in text that covers nearly half of the image. Yet this Batman is an impotent character, evoking a society more interested in self-reflection than action. Pettibon often showed greater sympathy for America's diminutive heroes. One of his favorite characters was Gumby, the surreal, human-like clay figure from fifties children's television. Pettibon discussed his attraction to Gumby: "He goes into a biography or historical book and he interacts with real figures from the past. George Washington, or whatever.
And I tend to do that in my work.”
Since the nineties, Pettibon has experimented with different materials, expanding his use of water- color and other paints. His series of blue "wave" paintings from 2004 depicts the iconic beach culture of Pettibon’s Southern California home. The artist has also produced large-scale wall art and animated films, enlisting new media to create his distinctively American imagery.