GARY PANTER Original Preliminary Artwork for "Pee-wee's Playhouse". 1986.
Hand Drawn
***Hand-drawn by Panter himself***
Gary Panter is the Emmy Award Winning Set Artist for Pee Wee's Playhouse
This is a piece of Pee-Wee's Playhouse art that you will love! ("If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?") You are bidding on a piece of preliminary artwork showing variations of potential designs for characters of the "Pee-wee's Playhouse" TV show. It was drawn in 1986 prior to the show's release later that year, in which Panter was developing ideas for various characters for the show. This artwork is from the hand of Gary Panter himself. The art is rendered in ink marker on onionskin paper. It is very lightly tanned due to its 30 years of age. You would have to search the basement of the Alamo for a better deal than this!
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Provenance and Item Background: This item was purchased by us (the sellers) as part of an auction offered by Heritage Auction Galleries (HA.com). This item was originally part of Gary Panter’s personal 1986 Pee-wee Herman preliminary artwork collection. We (the sellers) personally took this item from the collection itself.
So just who is Gary Panter?
Gary Panter (born December 1, 1950 in Durant, Oklahoma) is an illustrator, painter, designer and part-time musician. Panter's work is representative of the post-underground, new wave comics movement that began with the end of Arcade: The Comics Revue and the initiation of RAW, one of the second generation in American underground comix. Attended East Texas State University now known as Texas A&M University-Commerce where he studied under Jack Unruh.
Panter has published his work in various magazines and newspapers, including Raw, Time and Rolling Stone magazine. He has exhibited widely, and won three Emmy awards for his set designs for Pee-Wee's Playhouse. His most notable works include Jimbo, Adventures in Paradise, Jimbo's Inferno and Facetasm, which was created together with Charles Burns.
As an early participant in the Los Angeles punk scene in the 1970s, Gary Panter defined the grungy style of the era with his drawings for Slash magazine and numerous record covers.
Some time around 1980, Panter's Rozz Tox Manifesto was published in the Ralph Records catalog, calling for artists to work within the capitalist system.
In the 1980s, he was the set designer for Pee Wee's Playhouse, where he won three Emmy Awards. Prior to Panter's work, kid shows had a more lulling aesthetic: everything was round, "cute", simplified, and pastel. The set of Pee-wee's Playhouse was the antithesis of pablum-art: it was dense as a jungle and jam-packed with surprises, often loud and abrasive ones.
While doing illustration and set designs, Panter kept up an active career as a cartoonist. His work in comics includes contributions to the avant-garde comics magazine RAW and the graphic novel Cola Madnes. Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons TV show, once noted that Panter "applied his fine-art training to the casualness of the comic strip, and the result was an explosive series of graphic experiments that are imitated in small doses all over the world today". Groening himself can be seen as an example of a cartoonist who has learned much from Panter. The jagged smashed-glass rawness of The Simpsons (think of Lisa's hair) can be traced back to the post-apocalyptic world that Panter was sketching in the early 1980s. The Simpsons could be seen as mutant escapees from Panter's early work.
Panter also created the online series Pink Donkey for Cartoon Network.
He has recently published Jimbo in Purgatory, and Jimbo's Inferno, lavishly produced graphic novels which incorporate classic literature elements (most prominently Dante's Divine Comedy) with pop and punk culture sensibilities. One of his paintings was used as the cover art for Yo La Tengo's album I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass.
He is best friends with Matt Groening. From 1978 to 1986, Panter was married to writer Nicole Panter, who was the manager of the notorious Los Angeles punk rock band, The Germs.
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