Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2014SYR12
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Men in Fedoras
poster information
Description
Men in fedoras
sit in Italian cafes
espresso and smoke.
I started going to Rocky's Cigar Shop on North Salina Street to smoke cigars. The city had that big push to resurrect Little Italy. They started out with these little Italian shops, with Italian men sitting outside, drinking their espresso, smoking cigars. Sadly, that seemed to go nowhere. With harder times, many of the shops closed. Of course, Rocky's is still there. Rocky's will always be there—open twenty-four seven. There are a lot of Italian men who go to Rocky's. It's also a real cross section of people. A cigar shop, like a barber shop, is one of the last places to have a small-town feel to it. You meet some interesting characters. Everybody from the down and out buying lotto tickets to “hit it” to wealthy Italian men sitting around, smoking a cigar, and talking about their mothers.
I love to draw people and create new characters. So a lot of my work features portraiture. Whether the person is famous or not, I try to think, what does he look like and what does he do? For instance, I recently did a portrait of Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. In the portrait, I included him doing the Spock Symbol because it shows the nerdy and quirky personality he displays on the show.
All my work is graphic, simple and colorful, and lately I've been gearing it more conceptual. I enjoy putting different elements together. In the poster, it's of a man drinking coffee sitting on a man holding a cigar and drinking coffee himself. So it could be the man thinking about himself or the man himself in a surrealist way. I didn't think much about what would happen next. Although I am hoping he doesn't fall into the coffee or get burned by the cigar.