Thanks to Mari Kasurinen, even if you never loved My Little Pony as a kid, there is a perfect My Little Pony for you now. Her original sculptures are the best of pop art: fun melt-in-your-mind candy.

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Taylor Gonzales is a Cleveland-based artist whose work I’ve seen on the streets. He takes a bold geometric approach to pop culture icons.

Andy Rementer’s gonzo cartoon style seems to wink at those of us who have gotten the cosmic punchline and are just grinning at our fellow humans as they start to wake up as well.

Pop agit hero and occasional Lost At E Minor contributor Ron English played a typically clever, snide, brilliant April Fools joke down on the US-Mexico border last week, though, as our friends at Boing Boing note: ‘this piece of sociopolitical satire is going to backfire because the Tea Party will find out about it and demand that it be permanently installed at every border crossing’.

Martin Kreloff is a second generation pop artist living and working in Las Vegas. His work features iconic stars of Hollywood and Broadway juxtaposed with traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e art. Much like East Meets Mae West.

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Popaganda artist, and occasional Lost At E Minor contributor, Ron English, has a simple message for us all: ‘Tuna recall? Stock up on Sea Monkey Soup!’ Indeed.

We’re pleased to welcome the return of the legendary pop culture artist and father of the Agit Pop Movement Ron English as a contributor to Lost At E Minor this week, writing about his favorite cultural discoveries of recent times. Keep an eye out for English’s posts as he joins other notable artists such as Shepard Fairey and Tristan Eaton as guest writers on the site. [Read Ron English's posts and watch an excerpt from a documentary about him]

Brazilian-based graphic designer Rafael Castilho (aka Atomic Ghost) seamlessly pastes up and blends images of motorcycle gangs to zombies and grizzly bears to create highly iconographic productions inspired by the Pop Art movement. Check out his impressive series titled Collages.

Ryan Riss, aka Craptical, is firmly rooted in the grotesque school of pop art, drawing heavily from horror comics, drug culture imagery, and the work of Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth. Beneath the irreverence and sophomoric imagery, however, is contrastingly well-controlled line work and a mature sense of design and composition.

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Norman Saunders was one of the most celebrated pulp artists of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, with his images adorning the covers of thousands of comic books, dimestore paperbacks, and trashy men’s magazines. The Illustrated Press has just published a retrospective of Saunders’ work.

Stranglehold, at Sydney’s First Draft Gallery, is an exhibition of new drawings and screenprints by James Jirat Patradoon, exploring his take on fantasy hyper-masculinity with portraits inspired by slasher movie villains, pro wrestlers, biker gangs, and Elvis. This series examines notions of deferred mascullinities: confused and misdirected rites of passage informed more by cartoons and action heroes than by reality itself. Drawn in a style influenced by the comics and cartoons of his youth, Jirat Patradoon’s images of fist-fights and tough-guy bravado consider the idea of violence as the purest form of masculine statement and its integral place in the male mythos. The exhibition opens on February 4.

I’m really enjoying the beautiful work of artist Mike Bertino. Each piece is like ten stories crammed full of pop references and then wedged cheek-to-cheek into one glorious, colorful piece of surreal, eye popping goodness.

I just adore the retro, colorful paintings of Vancouver illustrator Ryan Heshka. Teeming with curvacious bombshells and sci-fi monsters running amok, Heshka most certainly has the retro B-movie aesthetic down to an artform. As an added bonus, Heshka even dedicates a section of his portfolio to his childhood drawings. This guy clearly had skills from the get-go.

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Antonio de Pascale is somewhat of a modern pop artist. He recreates familiar supermarket packaging with highly detailed illustrative narratives. His website is content heavy, so prepare yourself. But it’s worth the wait as the works are high resolution and 3D. The acrylic on canvas works are available to view and purchase. It’s food for thought. I’m sorry, it was too easy.

Joe Coleman’s paintings are a feverish cross between Ivan Albright-inspired grotesqueness and R. Crumb-like pop-social critique. Calling himself an ‘apocalyptic visionary painter’, the 52-year-old artist references Spanish-Mexican religious iconography and his intricate and obsessively detailed images often feature well-known criminals and outsiders, whom Coleman seems to consider himself to be.

I paid a visit to the local bookstore the other morning and came across The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and back again). Although not a true Warhol fan, and always a skeptic at heart, I found this book surprisingly witty, so much so that I proceeded to finish it during lunch. No matter what page you might turn to, you’ll find Warhol’s various thoughts on money, class, beauty, love, sex and even buying clothes. Take heed though. As he says: ‘I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote’.

Artist Yumiko Kayukawa states: ‘I’d rather my paintings hang next to rock star pin-ups than on museum walls. Ultimately, I want to connect with people all over the world on that level’. It seems whatever she’s doing is working because, to date, each one of the 100 pieces she’s created has sold. Apparently there’s even a waiting list to snap up one of the manga-pop art inspired pieces. All that hype is genuinely justified. Want to be part of the in crowd? [see also the work of Japanese artist Fuco Ueda]

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