Stanley George Miller (born October 10, 1940), better known as Mouse or Stanley Mouse, is an American artist who is notable for his 1960s psychedelicrock concert poster designs and album covers for the Grateful Dead, Journey, and other bands.[1]
By 1958, Mouse was fascinated with the weirdo hot rod art movement that was founded a decade earlier in California. Having developed skills using an airbrush, he began painting T-shirts at custom car shows, where he met and then worked with Ed Roth, the leading exponent of Weirdo Hot Rod art.
In 1959, Mouse and his family founded Mouse Studios, a mail-order company, which sold his products.
In 1964, he was invited to help in the design of Monogram automobile model kits using the "monster" cartoon characters he had developed to compete with Roth's "Rat Fink" character.
In 1966 and 1967, Mouse and Alton Kelley lived and worked from 715 Ashbury across the street from 710 Ashbury, where members of The Grateful Dead resided.[4][5]
In 1965, Mouse travelled to San Francisco with a group of art school friends. Settling initially in Oakland, Mouse met Alton Kelley, a self-taught artist who recently arrived from Virginia City, Nevada, where he joined a group of hippies who called themselves the Red Dog Saloon gang. Upon arrival in San Francisco, Kelley and other veterans of the gang renamed themselves The Family Dog, and began producing rock music dances.
In 1966, when Chet Helms assumed leadership of the group and began promoting the dances at the Avalon Ballroom, Mouse and Kelley began working together to produce posters for the events. The pair also later produced posters for promoter Bill Graham and for other events in the psychedelic community. From September 1967 to December 1967, Mouse and Kelley created psychedelic posters for shows at Helms’ The Family Dog Denver.
In 1967, Mouse collaborated with artists Kelley, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso and Wes Wilson to create the Berkeley Bonaparte Distribution Agency.[6]
Mouse and Kelley also worked together as lead artists at Kelley Mouse studios producing album cover art for the bands Journey and Grateful Dead. The Monster Company founded in 1971 also developed a profitable line of T-shirts, utilizing the four color process for silk screening.
In 1969 Stanley was commissioned to paint Eric Clapton car in London. After brief periods in London and Massachusetts, he moved to Toronto where he ran a Yorkville waterbed store called The Waterbed Gallery, whose walls featured his artwork.
In 1971, Mouse returned to California, living near Kelley in Marin County, and the pair resumed their partnership, producing commercial artwork related to the Grateful Dead and later Journey. The pair are credited with creating the skeleton and roses image that became the Grateful Dead's archetypal iconography, and Journey's wings and beetles that appeared on their album covers from 1977 to 1980.
In 1977, Mouse, with Kelley, created the Styx album cover for The Grand Illusion, featuring a pastiche of René Magritte. Mouse and Kelley continued to work together on rock memorabilia until 1980.
In 2002, Mouse filed a lawsuit against the producers of the film Monsters, Inc., alleging that the characters of Mike and Sulley were based on his drawings of Excuse My Dust, which he unsuccessfully pitched to Hollywood producers in 1998.[7] A Disney spokeswoman responded that the characters in Monsters, Inc were "developed independently by the Pixar and Walt Disney Pictures creative teams, and do not infringe on anyone's copyrights".[8]
Bibliography
Mouse, Stanley; Alton Kelley; Walter Madeiros (1992). Freehand: The Art of Stanley Mouse. Snow Lion Graphics/SLG Books. ISBN0-943389-12-7.
Mouse, Stanley; Jackson, Blair (2015). California Dreams: The Art of Stanley Mouse. Soft Skull Press. ISBN978-1-59376-546-0.
References
^"Mouse in the House: A Conversation with Stanley Mouse". The de Young Museum. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Retrieved July 14, 2021. Mouse is renowned for his psychedelic posters and album covers of 1960s and 1970s San Francisco that featured The Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and other iconic bands.
