The frightening beauty of Six Foot Owl’s ‘Closing Thoughts’ tees

Most of Six Foot Owl’s hand-painted T-shirts and jackets verge on being a bit too romantic for my tastes. The “clothing art company,” founded by high school friends Brianne Cirel and Johnie Thornton, plays with images both sorta cute (piano keys, telephone poles, ants tracking down a cupcake) and definitely disturbing (knives and T-bone steaks, human hearts). But when it mixes the two, as in the “Closing Thoughts” line, the result makes for some truly striking graphic tees. A series of seven different designs (each of which bears an edition of seven shirts and seven canvas paintings), Closing Thoughts focuses on famous dead folks—Cleopatra, Vincent Van Gogh, John Lennon. But what unifies many of them is how they died, and, as Six Foot Owl puts it, “their timeless ability to inspire and affect people long after their fatal deaths.” And so here we have JFK, Kurt Cobain, Abe Lincoln and Hunter S. Thompson, each immediately recognizable and very nicely captured. But what’s that coming out from behind their heads—or, in the case of Van Gogh, his ear? JFK has flowers; Cobain, a blood spattering of plaid; the Stars and Bars and the American Flag both fly out from behind Lincoln; Thompson, evidently, went out with bats, cacti, and a bull skull. When you finally realize exactly what you’re looking at (initially, I fell for the JFK shirt because the red, orange, green and yellow floral design is really pretty) it throws you for a second—was Starry Night really the last thing on Van Gogh’s mind? Did Lennon die in peace, as the vibrant flowers and squiggles emerging from his neck suggest? Currently on view at the World Gallery in Costa Mesa (the limited editions are going fast, and some designs may already be sold out) the shirts give you pause, which is more than I can say for the “I Hate My Girlfriend” tee I spotted recently. I’d love to see what his closing thoughts are.

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