George Mead is a painter’s painter, technical and exacting to the core, but most importantly he is an observer of space, time, and change. His main preoccupation is American Life; especially the parts that play an outsize role in defining the rest of it.

George Mead draws his life learning from each cardinal point on the compass rose: he grew up in the South, and studied in the East, North, and West —at places like The Museum School Of Fine Arts in Boston and at The California College Of Arts And Crafts in Oakland, under mentorships with notables like Robert Bechtle and Richard McLean — a process that made him a photorealist as much as a visual serialist—his way of recognizing the many faces of American reality, and the many contributors and aspects to its society and spirit.

George Mead creates hyper-reality. He spent years in the entertainment industry, painting large-scale backdrops and other heroic representations of communal dreams, using the same techniques he employed later to augment and honor low-income communities and buildings on the West Coast and elsewhere with massive murals of everything from plants to musicians to humpback whales.

With the Art Of The LP Series, George is back to one of his original passions: contemporary music, the visual expression that completes it, and the history that surrounds it. Whereas modern genres like hiphop and electronica generate an increasingly polyglot and universal soundtrack to these times we live in and our accelerated existence, rock, jazz, and country music more than ever denote origin and identity, and a sense of history and place. In the cycle of renewal and rediscovery, and yes, recirculation, the album cover becomes a touchstone for moments, memories, and lives lived. It is the keepsake of our collective youth, a thin slice of energy that, in the right hands, will topple empires.