ABOUT  THE  ARTIST

Rick Ross is an artist, filmmaker, and New York Times Best Selling author-illustrator. Imprinted with a life-long fascination for American comics and movies, Rick creates artworks which combine the triumphalist iconography of the super-hero with subversive surrealist double imagery, which together both reify and scrutinize the mythos of American consumer culture.
 
A recent solo show at the Begovich Gallery of California State University Fullerton—entitled The Explorers Guild: Rick Ross and Explorations in Graphic Fiction—highlighted his most recent paintings, along with examples from his nearly two decades working in comics, multimedia, and films. Featured prominently were a selection of illustrations from the New York Times Best Seller, The Explorers Guild: Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala (Atria Books/Simon & Schuster), a four-year collaboration with Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Costner and acclaimed novelist Jon Baird. For this sprawling 770-page part-novel, part-graphic novel, Rick created over 600 pages of illustrations and graphic storytelling, along with six full color oil paintings.
 
In his wide-ranging career as an illustrator, Rick drew the Image Comics series Urban Monsters, was lead artist for the graphic novelization of Spike TV’s 1000 Ways to Die, provided storyboards and production art for movies and commercials, and created artwork for a number of animated motion comics, among them for the Cinemax television show Femme Fatales. Since 2008, he has written, illustrated, and published stories for the online graphic fiction anthology Agitainment Comics.
 
Rick is an MFA graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, and since 1997 he has created more than 20 films, both traditional and experimental, including the award winning Backslide, starring Felicia Day. Backslide  screened at more than twenty film festivals around the world—winning five awards—and was named one of the ten best comedy shorts of the year by the American Cinematheque.