sTrEeT aRt

Ron English (born 1966) is an American contemporary artist who explores popular brand imagery and advertising. His signature style employs a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, including comic superhero mythology and totems of art history, to create a visual language of evolution. He is also widely considered a seminal figure in the advancement of street art away from traditional wild-style lettering and into clever statement and masterful trompe l’oeil based art. He has created illegal murals and billboards that blend stunning visuals with biting political, consumerist and surrealist statements, hijacking public space worldwide for the sake of art since the 1980s.


English is as well known for his photorealist technique and inventive use of color and comic book collage as he is for his unique cast of characters, including sexualized animals, skeletal figures, Marilyn Monroe with Mickey Mouse breasts, the corpulent fast food spokesman MC Supersized, and one of his most significant creations, Abraham Obama, a fusion of America’s 16th and 44th Presidents. During the 2008 Presidential Election, he combined the features of Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln for a popularly-distributed image entitled "Abraham Obama."

Culture jamming is one aspect of his work, involving 'liberating' commercial billboards with his own messages. Frequent targets of his work include Joe Camel, McDonald's, and Mickey Mouse. Ron English can be considered the "celebrated prankster father of dollar-pop", who wrangles carefully created corporate icons so that they are turned upside down, and are used against the very corporation they are meant to represent. Ron English is considered one of the fathers of modern street art[by whom?] and has initiated and participated in illegal public art campaigns since the early eighties. Some of his extralegal murals include one on the Berlin Wall's Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 and one on the Palestinian separation wall in the West Bank in 2007, with fellow street artists Banksy and Swoon (artist).[citation needed]
English has also painted several album covers including The Dandy Warhols album cover "Welcome to the Monkey House". He painted the cover of the new Slash (album). More recently he painted the cover for American superstar Chris Brown's Album (F.A.M.E). Some of his paintings are also used in Morgan Spurlock's documentaries Super Size Me andPOM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Following the credits, he receives special thanks and is credited as "The Greatest Living Artist."

Here are some of his other works...

Drawing of Egyptian Artifact

Egyptian Artifact

The ushabti (also called shabti or shawabti, with a number of variant spellings, Ancient Egyptian plural: ushabtiu) was a funerary figurine used in Ancient Egypt. Ushabtis were placed in tombs among the grave goods and were intended to act as substitutes for the deceased, should he/she be called upon to do manual labor in the afterlife. They were used from the Middle Kingdom (around 1900 BC) until the end of the Ptolemaic Period nearly 2000 years later.
Most ushabtis were of minor size, and many produced in multiples – they sometimes covered the floor around a sarcophagus. Exceptional ushabtis are of larger size, or produced as a one of-a-kind master work.

Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa

To understand the painting of who the Mona Lisa is we have to understand more about the artist who painted the picture. Mona-Lisa simply translated to Lady Lisa was probably a painting of a middle class woman who at the time Leonardo was so captivated by the woman’s beauty and elusive smile is what caught the painters attention that he himself was obsessed with the picture, even when it was finished he never delivered it. The last 16yers of his life Leonardo carried this painting with him wherever he went, even into exile.

 While growing up he was separated from his biological mother, who was married away to another man in the next town away from where he grew up in Tuscan in Florence and was raised by his step mother, both who had so much love for the young Leonardo that the smile he had depicted in the painting of the Mona Lisa could have been the thing that caught his attention while painting maybe because he had last seen this smile on his mother. It is the sort of smile where we as the viewer are not quite sure if she is smiling because she knows something that we don’t or a smile that says you caught me not on my best of days. So the painting could have been a painting of his mother maybe but the smile seen in the Mona Lisa could also be seen in his other painting of two women and child called the Virgin and child with St. Anne, which could also could have been a reflection of his two mothers who he was so dearly loved and raised by.

Question still stands to who is this painting of the Mona Lisa. Well to my prediction, I wouldn’t say it was Leonardo who had painted himself as a woman, or that it could be a painting of the Virgin Mary or  Mary Magdalene , but in fact a painting of this middle class lady named Lisa, who was probably pregnant at the time in her mid 20’s there is evidence due to her swollen hands and her posture, as to cover up what lies beneath her dress in the painting, and this woman at the time probably wanted a picture of herself before she gave birth to the child she had been carrying, or the painting of her was to celebrate her pregnancy.

The background of the painting, which i think has very little and no relations to Mona Lisa herself, shows the a landscape of what Leonardo imagined what it used to look like before it became what it is today, and in relation to Mona Lisa where Leonardo came to the understanding that women played a big role in the world to the cycle of life, where the mans role was very quick and easy.