Scion Installation Art Tour: 'It's A Beautiful World' : Paintings

Xavier Prou aka Blek Le Rat
Born on the 15th November 1951. Paris France.
Live and work in Paris, France.

1971-1976 Studied Etching, Lithography and Painting at the "Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-arts de Paris".

1976-1982 Studied Architecture at "United pedagogiqued'architecture No6" Paris, France.

From 1981 to 2005 his work has focused on urban art in different cities of the world. He is the pioneer of stencil graffiti art, introducing the technique into graffiti in Paris in 1081 and now followed by many artists across the world. He introduced to the urban art landscape the concept of creating life size figures of people.


Caia Koopman was born in 1968 and raised in Livermore, California, just outside San Francisco. She majored in fine art and earned a B.A. at UCSC in Santa Cruz, California. While in Santa Cruz she was seduced by the local skateboarding scene and rounded out her formal education by skating ramps, street, pools and Derby Park. She instinctively started creating skateboard graphics and soon became equally entranced with snowboarding. Her interest in board-sports and the art the flourishes in and around these scenes inspired her to strive for a career creating snowboard graphics. She has become not only a successful commercial artist but also a fine artist. Caia explains her addiction to art, "I've always been an artist-as a kid I would draw to escape, to travel, to explore...and I still do"

Her artwork has been featured in numerous national and international print media including Surfing Girl, Mademoiselle, Details, Girls' Life, Snowboarder Magazine, Teen, Teen Style, Teen people, J-14, Fine and others. Caia has also been featured on MTV, "mtv sports" as an athlete/artist for her snowboarding and painting. She has shown her paintings in a number of galleries around the world and most recently at La Luz de Jesus in L.A. She is currently working as a freelance illustrator and painter in Oceanside, California. There's a political and environmental undercurrent in much of her work, she is an environmentalist at heart so she often paints an interaction between humans, flora and fauna. Caia is inspired by color, dreams, politics, and life.


David Ellis. "I am an artist from a family of musicians. My uncle plays and restores pianos and my brother travels the world playing tenor saxophone. As a kid I had no patience with piano lessons and learning to read music but absorbed everything I heard on the "Super Mix", a Saturday night radio program that was broadcast from the Fort Bragg military base near where I grew up. It was just far enough away that reception required one hand on the pause button and the other on an elaborate assembly of coat hangers, duct tape and tin foil jammed into the hole that was once an antenna on my boom box. I recorded the show every week with the volume low so not to disturb my mother’s ultra sonic night hearing which would result in radio confiscation. Each week a new style of early New York hip hop found its way into the mind of a 12 year old boy living in the attic of a log cabin in rural North Carolina. By the time Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 dropped "The Message," I was writing my own rhymes and banging out beats on the desks at school. Those beats have been in the back of my mind all my life."

David Ellis lives and works in Brooklyn; where his "motion paintings" travel through time like music, where beats are orchestrated and performed on "drum paintings" stretched and tuned to bass, snare, etc. and played via analog drum machines propelled by air, where player pianos meet SP1200s meet improvisational wild style sign painting.


For the last ten years, Francesco LoCastro has been South Florida's thoroughfare to the national Lowbrow art scene, as both a respected artist and as the curator of intrepid art exhibitions. LoCastro was born in Catania, Italy in 1976, raised in Germany, and transplanted to sunny-yet-strange Ft. Lauderdale during high school. His collegiate employment at a commercial art studio opened his mind to art as a life-long career, as well as being the place of introduction to fellow artists and Europeans, Colin and Sas Christian.

As a painter, LoCastro's works are bound together by a hallucinatory surreality, and along the way have featured appearances by pop culture icons such as Tom Waits, controversial figures like Charlton Heston, and a motley assortment of unearthly creatures affected by intensely earthly afflictions and dispositions. His stylistic influences are widely varied - from Sebastian Krueger's exaggerated pop portraiture, Alfonse Mucha's ornate art nouveau illustrations, Chuck Jones to Chuck Close, and beyond. LoCastro's current series of portraits depict a more human identity, but his scintillating touch of the surreal remains. He has shown in numerous galleries all over America, including Copro Nason Gallery in Culver City, Lineage Gallery in Philadelphia, Perihelion Arts in Phoenix, The Shooting Gallery in San Francisco, L'Art Noir Gallery in New Orleans, Fuse Gallery in New York City and Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles.

As a curator, Francesco LoCastro's electrifying shows in Miami's Design District and Wynwood Arts District have ushered in a caliber of Lowbrow art previously unseen in South Florida. "Parallel Universe", "Culture Shock" and "Monsters of Lowbrow" delighted local and national audiences with their vibrant colors, hand-painted and silk-screened mural backdrops, and eye-catching works by many of the biggest luminaries of the movement. LoCastro's curatorial series culminated with "We'll Make a Lover of You" during Art Basel Miami Beach 2006.

LoCastro is featured as one of the distinguished artists who have forged the New Miami Art Movement in the upcoming book "Miami Contemporary Artists" to be released in Spring of 2007 by Schiffer Publishing.


Cody Hudson, who works under the name Struggle Inc., is a Chicago based commercial artist and painter. He is known for work that has a bold, organic and modern feel to it. He has worked on everything from skateboard graphics to national billboard campaigns to mixtape covers. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the US, Europe & Japan. He enjoys ice fishing, sleeping, reading and things made of wood.