The lowbrow art of Stanley "Mouse" Miller

"If I had to pick a half-dozen definitive characters of the 1960s, Stanley Mouse would be one of them." —Bill Graham

Stanley "Mouse" Miller (born October 10, 1940 ) in Fresno, California, United States ) is a psychedelic artist who produced 1960s rock concert posters and album covers for the Grateful Dead . Along with artists such as Rick Griffin , Alton Kelley , Victor Moscoso , and Wes Wilson , Stanley Mouse founded the Berkeley distribution agency Bonaparte to produce and sell psychedelic posters. Stanley Miller and Alton Kelley also worked together at Mouse Studios and the Monster Company, which produced album covers for the rock bands Journey and the Grateful Dead . Since 1983 , Stanley Miller has been a painter in Santa Fe, New Mexico .

Read any book about the '60s San Francisco scene and you'll encounter Stanley "Mouse" Miller. Born in Fresno and raised in Detroit, Mouse moved to San Francisco in 1965, where concert promoter Bill Graham asked him to illustrate the rock posters for which he would become best known.

Stanley "Mouse" Miller was a child of the fifties growing up in Detroit, where Stanley spent his days drawing and his nights under the covers listening to Devils R&B, soaking up the music, and developing a teenage crush on what would later be dubbed "Kustom Kulture." Stanley was expelled from Mackenzie High School, Michigan in 1956 for dabbling in graffiti, where he mischievously painted over the facade of "The Box," a popular restaurant and school hangout directly across the street from Mackenzie High. Stanley would complete his formal education at the Detroit Arts and Crafts Society. Mouse learned how to use an airbrush early on and quickly found himself immersed in hot rod culture, striping, and car detailing. With the support of his family, he started Mouse Studios, a mail-order T-shirt business where he sold airbrushed "Weirdo" hot rod shirts, the ones he also took them on the road, selling his wares at venues like the State Fair and Midwestern Hot Rod Shows and Drag Strips, which is how he met Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, an encounter Mouse would surely not forget. Roth "borrowed" some of Mouse's designs, including the Fred Flypogger character, and transformed them into his iconic Rat Fink. The two characters are so close that the word similarities is inadequate. This has since been confirmed by Steve Fiorilla of the Ed Roth stable of artists who illustrated Roth's catalog at the time.

In San Francisco, he became one of the “Big Five” designers of psychedelic rock posters, finding and manipulating public domain images that gave the genre its signature look. The Grateful Dead’s famous Skull and Roses drawing, for example, was taken from an illustration taken from an old library copy of Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát. Heavily influenced by French Art Nouveau, Mouse’s cut-up style helped set the course for our current pillaging of the public domain. As Blair Jackson notes in the new collection, it’s easy to underestimate the rock poster movement of the ’60s, but “there was never anything like it; the closest antecedent was probably the posters that were springing up around Paris in the late 19th century.”

Mouse’s eclectic work spans many mediums and decades of pop influence. Likewise, his style straddles the worlds of oozing flesh wounds and burnished chrome. California Dreams is the first collection spanning Mouse’s entire career, including his recent landscapes and figurative paintings. Taken together, the work is a strange, gilded, space-age, flame-licked way of tracing the rise of late-20th-century youth culture.

English version

“If I had to choose half a dozen definitive characters of the 1960s, Stanley Mouse would be one of them.” —Bill Graham

Stanley "Mouse" Miller (born October 10, 1940, Fresno, California, United States) is a psychedelic artist who produced 1960s rock concert posters and album covers for the Grateful Dead. Along with artists like Rick Griffin, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse founded the Berkeley distribution agency Bonaparte to produce and sell the psychedelic posters. Stanley Miller and Alton Kelley also worked together at Mouse Studios and the Monster Company, which produced album covers for the rock bands Journey and Grateful Dead. Since 1983, Stanley Miller has been a painter in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Stanley "Mouse" Miller was a child of the fifties who grew up in Detroit, where Stanley spent his days drawing and his nights under the sheets listening to Devils R&B, soaking up music, and developing a teenage crush for what would later be dubbed " Kustom Kulture. Stanley was sent from Mackenzie High School, Michigan in 1956 for dabbling in graffiti, where he mischievously repainted the facade of "The Box", a popular restaurant and venue school meeting place directly across the street from Mackenzie High. his formal education at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. Mouse learned how to use an airbrush at an early age and quickly found himself immersed in Hot Rod culture, stripes and details of the cars. Studios, a mail-order T-shirt business where he sold airbrushed Hot Rod "Weirdo" shirts, ones he also taken on the road where he sold his wares at venues like the State Fair or Midwestern Hot Rod Shows and Drag Strips, which is how he met Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, a meeting Mouse would surely never forget not. Roth "borrowed" some of Mouse's designs, including the Fred Flypogger character, and transformed him into his iconic Rat Fink. The two characters are so close that the word similarities are inadequate. This has since been confirmed by Steve Fiorilla of the Ed Roth stable of artists who illustrated Roth's catalog at the time