The Infectious Blog

California native Tara McPherson has a thing about space. She was the Vice President of the astronomy club at school and even started studying for an astrophysics degree, but luckily (for us) she chose instead to follow her artistic talents. But even now she illustrates her characters under starry skies, on alien planets or wearing spaceman-like helmets. One of her most iconic images, a female figure with a heart-shaped void in her torso, is called Orion. A recent series of paintings is based on a gravitationally lensed quasar called Einstein’s Cross. And for her Infectious Car Art she envisioned intergalactic bunny Ion Z zooming down your car in his rocket ship. Tara is now based in Williamsburg, New York, where as well as pursuing her otherworldy themes, she has also created critically-acclaimed gig posters for the likes of Beck, The Strokes and Depeche Mode.

Check out her stellar and heartbreaking artwork on our website.

In the immortal words of Bad Company…. We feel like making love. Making love to all the Infectious artist submissions that is.

We just launched the gallery, voting and commenting functionality for Infectious submissions. We’ve got some great initial pieces of art already. The submissions area also includes the very exciting design LOVE-O-METER.

So go ahead and make some love to our artist submissions. We don’t mind. And maybe add a comment while you are at it.

This year we got to participate in Pixar’s Motorama event – their own little mini car show. Koz who has the 61 Plymouth Soul with the Pink Dalek Monkey agreed to dedicate his Friday to the event. Check out some amazingly beautiful and unique cars at the event.

We’ve been proud and excited to see artists all across America rise up and channel their support for Obama through their art. We want to take it one step further – by blowing up the political bumper sticker into something big and beautiful.

Join us in taking all that collective Obama passion to the streets – literally. The average car is seen 3000 times a day… Imagine a car with beautiful Obama art all over it – each car could touch the lives of up to 400,000 people in the run up to the election.

Guest Judges Include:
CRO from GoTellMama
Jon Reiss, the director of Bomb-It

100% of all profits from the Obama Art we sell, will be used to print up more Obama Art that we’ll distribute for free.

Winning designs get:

• $500
• 5% of net sales
• Bomb It DVD and Poster designed by Shepard Fairey.
• A signed Obama poster from CRO

“Come make some Obama Car Art with Infectious…”

Today we warmly welcome artist Yumiko Kayukawa as the newest member of the Infectious family.

Yumiko’s first ever drawing aged four was of a hyena devouring a zebra, while a vulture looked on. Her obsession with wild animals hasn’t abated – her Infectious Car Art is populated by pandas, octopi and tropical fish – but her style has changed up a bit. Nowadays Yumi’s animal kingdom shares the spotlight with her pretty and punky Japanese girls and they’re both intertwined with traditional Japanese imagery and an American pop art style.

Yumi’s art has hung on museum walls around the world and even been collected by a few rock stars. But she says “I’d rather my paintings hang next to rock star pin-ups than on museum walls. Ultimately I want to connect with people all over the world on that level.” What better way than on the blank canvas of a car?

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note: we’re a somewhat mixed group of cultures here at Infectious (American, British, Ukranian, etc) with our artists coming from an even more diverse set of cultures. So language can be an interesting thing at times. This original blog post was written using the word Oriental. It was quickly brought to our attention, that used to describe people, Oriental is often considered an ethnic slur. Whoa! As you can imagine…. we had no such intent. So instead of just deleting it in the dark of the night, we thought we’d post the learning.

Big hugs to Yumi especially… no offense intended, we promise.