Laron Bickerstaff

Laron Bickerstaff was born in 1971. He has been a studio artist at Creativity Explored since 1997. Bickerstaff works in several different veins. He is very influenced by pop culture and media icons. He uses these sources as a reference, but adds his own stylistic conventions. The end result is a unique, radiant and colorful portraiture.

Bickerstaff is deeply aware of the visual characteristics of language. He is deaf and communicates with American Sign Language. Bickerstaff’s text-based artwork mixes thoughts, observation, and a pop-influenced love of brand names rendered as a combination of text and bright imagery. Using expressions of action and objects, this work speaks to the feeling of building hand-made sculptures of words that vanish into the air. These stream-of-consciousness pieces illustrate the wide-ranging stimuli of everyday life: names, stores, food and drink, institutions, and chores. 

In 2011 CB2, one of our Community Arts Partners, based a holiday ornament design on Bickerstaff's drawing of the ASL alphabet, arranged to spell out "PEACE."