I’ve uploaded my most recent poster from my “gigs that never were but should’ve been” series. You can find it on my posters page at

https://artofgregoryevans.fr/blog/posters/

I did this piece in tribute to a remarkably special man who kept his needs very simple, asked nothing from no one, and lived in some bushes of the undeveloped lands just right behind the Mayfair supermarket (or was it a Safeway, or maybe the gas station?) on the Coast Highway in Malibu, California.

In the 1970’s, this man was already an old man when I was just a little-shit kid running the beaches with my little-shit friends – those beaches that I called my home at the time. One of these beaches was properly called Surfrider Beach for obvious reasons, even though surfers of my day never called it that. We just called it Malibu, or when needing to be specific, we told people we were up at The Point, or any one of three points refered to by number, but that’s not relevant to Old Joe. What is relevant to this man is that out there just beyond Third Point was a kind of Fourth Point, a ragged pile of rocks in the water that delineated the public beach called Surfrider from the private beaches of the Malibu Colony, the land of a few, long-term successful middle and upper-middle class families and ordinary folk and a bunch of ultra rich movie stars and producer, Hollywood lawyer types. The Colony was home to many of the elite of the elite, and right next to it was a small section of beach that the community named for a guy named Old Joe.

In a land that boasted a Mediterranean climate maybe 340 days a year, many times one could find Old Joe with his hat and bicycle down there on the sands at the place that he had named for him. It bears to mention that just because me and the small crew I hung with called this man Old Joe doesn’t mean his name was Old Joe. In trying to find information on this man via google, it became apparent that others now call him Malibu Joe. This may be what we should have called him, but we didn’t, and to me, it seems redundant, like calling a house on the beach in Malibu a Malibu House. So, a man named Joe on the beach in Malibu became Malibu Joe? I think I’ll stick with the moniker Old Joe.

In this land which was far from the same that it is today, if you opened your eyes and ears to the denizens of this beach, you would know that trudging the sands were people looking for opportunity – surfers looking for the next big wave, wannabe starlettes looking for their next big part, wannabe movie producers looking for the next big job and some of those wannabe starlettes who were also looking for those same producers to entice them with false promises, and on and on and on. And then there was Old Joe. He was looking for nothing except what he had, a slice of sand in this coveted Malibu neighborhood, a slice of sand that he could call his own, and he knew that he had it, that he had all that he wanted.

In those days, if you opened your eyes and ears, you would know that there were no homeless people living in Malibu, and because of this you would never think of Old Joe as homeless. He had his place, and he had his home, right there in Malibu!

So you might wonder what Old Joe has to do with art and drawing and painting and such, well, art and the creative pursuits are driven by inspiration, and you never know which direction your muse might point you. In this case, my muse pointed me to memories of this gentle old man.

In regards to the artistic process, this is one of the few pieces I’ve done that are strictly digital. Other than painting mostly on canvas or other less traditional supports, I am a painter more than anything. In some case a painting of mine willingly lends itself to a later digital project such many of the posters I have on my posters page. This one of Joe had me take a photographic image and doctor it up in an artful way via photoshop and other softwares, add some text (in the form of my own fictional band names which provide further sub-narrative to the times) and some other graphics, and voila, a poster done in tribute to the legendary old Malibu beachboy named Joe Costello.

“Old Joe” Costello died in 1988 at 96 years old.