PINKSICK: THE INCREDULOUS WORLD OF MR. WONDERS

Words by Michael A. Gonzales l Images by Shah Wonders

Having grown up listening to the aural science fiction of Parliament Funkadelic, while getting lost in the freaky album art by Pedro Bell, it doesn’t shock me when 38-year-old artist Shah Wonders declares, “I’m an alien from the planet Rizq. My mother was virgin who was impregnated by an alien. Even as a child, I told my mother that I had a UFO and could travel between dimensions.”

Sitting across from him in the backyard of a Bushwick, Brooklyn bar dressed in jeans, t-shirt and a stylish jacket, who am I to doubt Wonder's ancestry? Like self-proclaimed aliens Sun-Ra and Rammellzee, representing Afro-Futuristism before the term was invented, the evidence of “otherness” can be seen in Wonders’ dazzling art.

Working in “many styles,” Shah’s steez ranges from fine art paintings combining the hardness of hip-hop with the whimsical imaginary of Japanese anime, to more commercial images created for music videos, skateboards and t-shirts for Roc-A-Wear.

“I came out the womb wanting to do art,” the Brooklyn-born Wonders says. “I told my mother if they cut her open, her insides would be covered with art like the Sistine Chapel.”

Back in the 1980s, when Wonders wasn’t drawing or playing basketball, he could be found in the crib watching Godzilla movies or escaping into his vast comic book collection. “I was into Frank Miller, Joe Madureira and Todd McFarlane. To this day, I still collect comics.”

Although Wonders later attended a formal arts institute, he still pays tribute to the dudes in the hood who influenced him. “Where I come from, there are so many ghetto Basquiats,” explains Wonders, who, as a teen, hung with a crew of freight train graffiti bombers. “They inspired me, but even then I knew I didn’t just want to be a train yard legend, I wanted to make the big leagues.”

In the freight yards, Wonders tagged "Lemon" on trains. “A girl told me I looked like the guy from the Lemon Head’s candy box and the name just stuck.” After high school, Wonders relocated to Georgia, where he attended Atlanta College of Art and studied art history at Clark Atlanta University.

However, broke as a joke, he became another kind of outlaw when he and a friend began burglarizing apartments. “We were robbing affluent houses in the suburbs and spending the money on school and strip clubs. They loved us at Magic City, but after awhile we knew we had to stop.”

To his disappointment, Wonders and his homeboy got jobs as janitors. While cleaning a lawyer’s office, Wonders caught a glimpse of his first celebrity supporter, TLC member Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. Three weeks later, he presented her with a painting of the group sitting on a toilet.

“I wrote on it, TLC: The Shit,” he laughs. Lopes loved the picture, inviting the artist to meet her the following day. He showed up on time for his noon appointment. Lopes made him wait for hours. “I was excited, but also worried that I was going to be fired from my job,” Wonders recalls. “When I told Left Eye, she asked how much I made a week. When I told her $170.00, she threw me $5,000 and ordered a few cheese steak sandwiches.”

Still in art school, where Wonders studied illustration, animation and photo shop, he began working as the creative director at TLC’s label LaFace Records. In addition to working with resident video director Billie Woodruff and the Geneva Films production company, Wonders also creatively spearheaded the TLC “Waterfalls” concept.

“Before the song was even thought of, ‘Waterfalls’ began as a series of drawings I did for the group standing on water and underneath the falls,” Shah says. Produced by Organized Noize, “Waterfalls” was the second single from TLC’s CrazySexyCool. Wonders also contributed the cartoony illustration for the single sleeve. “The girls were suing their manager Pebbles, so I drew TLC with their pockets out, having no money.”

After his stint at the record company, Wonders lived in Los Angeles where he ran the video division of Geneva Films and later started the first all-Black animation studio Imajimation with director Michael Shultz. “It was me and my partner Kenya Barris, with Michael putting-up the seed money,” he explains. Later, the Wonders and Barris sold their stake in the company, but was able to retain the rights to their intellectual properties.

Back in the borough of Brooklyn, Wonders is currently wreaking artistic havoc at his studio in Bushwick. Working on projects through his PinkSick corporation while exploring alien visions, he is producing a series of paintings conceptualized around his personal ideas of sexy. “I’m a sexual being who finds sexy in everything. It may be the way you chew your food or the way your curl your toes, but that’s the moments I’m attempting to capture.”

When it’s art time, Wonders sits in front of the computer screen, canvas or a black page, puffing trees and swigging from a Guinness as Biggie, his favorite rapper, Wu-Tang or Jay-Z blares in the background. Closing his eyes while sailing on his ever-present UFO, Wonders takes trips to other lands or conjures past travels.

“I’ve been around the world and stayed in Japan twice,” Wonders says. When I remark that some of his work is reminiscent of Japanese painter Takashi Murakami, he quickly assures me, “I lot of people think that, but I was doing this years before I ever saw Takashi’s work. But, when his retrospective came to the Brooklyn Museum (2008) I still went and bought a catalogue.”

Finishing our beers, we exit through the front door as a subway screeches overhead. Glancing at Shah Wonders, who is equal parts bizarro painter and budding media mogul, I think this young visualist just might be the ideal manifestation of entrepreneur and twenty-first century all-purpose art soul brother.

You can see more of Shah Wonders' work @ PinkSick.com