FOR SALE: Daniel Johnston - Last Chance!

In honor of what would have been Daniel Johnston's 61st birthday on January 22nd, we hosted a solo exhibition at Gallery 30 South in Pasadena.

You can Access the available Artworks Here:
Daniel Johnston Exhibition

Contact us at either [email protected] or [email protected] and we will provide a Paypal or Square invoice –or you can click the images in this gallery for a link back to the shopping cart on the Gallery 30 South website.

About the artist:
Texas-based Daniel Johnston (January 22, 1961 – c. September 11, 2019) was a manic-depressive genius singer/songwriter/artist, active in the music scene since the late 70’s. He was a self-taught, pop rocker and illustrator whose art and music was greatly focused on his obsession with unrequited love and the pop culture that he first encountered as an adolescent. Johnston’s songs have been covered by several hundred artists, including David Bowie and Tom Waits. The late Kurt Cobain mused that Daniel Johnston is the best song writer in America. In 2006, his life was documented in the award-winning film “The Devil and Daniel Johnston,” and his painted illustrations were exhibited in the Whitney biennial.

His artwork was also shown in London’s Aquarium Gallery, New York’s Clementine Gallery, and at the Liverpool Biennial twice–in 2006 and 2008. In 2009 his work was exhibited at The Museum of Love at Verge Gallery in Sacramento, California.

Daniel had a lifetime battle with mental illness, and medication prescribed for this condition damaged his liver requiring multiple hospitalizations. He passed from a heart attack in his sleep before the morning of September 11, 2019 leaving behind a legacy as perhaps the greatest outsider musician-artist of the twenty-first century. Daniel was included in the memorial reel at this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony, alongside inductees Little Richard, Spencer Davis, Eddie Van Halen, Ginger Baker, Neil Peart, and Ric Ocasek, among others.

The collection of Johnston’s drawings that comprises this exhibition is extraordinary, showcasing many elements of the artist’s obsessions but based primarily around his love of comic books. These pieces pre-date and inspired the work in Daniel’s first comic book, Space Ducks – An Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness, published by BOOM! Studios. Within are several tributes to the late Jack Kirby, who Johnston cited as a tremendous influence. Daniel had attended college to study illustration with the intention of becoming a professional comic book artist long before embarking on the musical career that brought him such acclaim.

A focal subset of Johnston’s comic book inspired illustrations that are on display in this collection prove at once both timely and timeless: Jack Kirby’s Captain America battling Nazis is as pertinent to America in 2024 as it was in 1941.