Fish paint­ing by Chris Shaw

Elvis Illu­mi­nati paint­ing by Chris Shaw

Acrylic on Can­vas, 2010

I have a long his­tory of mak­ing Green Elvis Icons,  though few have been used as posters or painted as art.  I did make sev­eral large scale Green Elvis paint­ings as con­cert art for the big sum­mer con­cert fes­ti­vals in the 1990’s. These images were seen by mil­lions, and since then, the Green Elvis has been a trade­mark image of mine.  That said, I retired the theme many years ago.

Recently, I had the oppor­tu­nity to make a poster for the doc­u­men­tary film “Amer­i­can Arti­fact”, a film about Rock Poster artists which I am fea­tured in.  After stew­ing on it, I fig­ured there really couldn’t be a bet­ter image to use than a Green Elvis,  he is after all, a true Amer­i­can Arti­fact.  I got to work right away at mak­ing the ulti­mate Green Elvis.

This image is firmly rooted in Masonic Geom­e­try,  and of course it has a nice hand­ful of Masonic sym­bols included.  If you look closely,  you’ll notice that every­thing from the hands, to the angle of the elbows are based on the Freemason’s square and com­pass.  The angles repeat at many scales through­out the paint­ing.  The hands are appro­pri­ated from Albrecht Durer, one of my favorite artists, who was coin­ci­den­tally one of the lead­ers of Freema­sonry in his time.  His work is very influ­en­tial to me.

The ques­tion I always get,  is why the old Elvis, and why green?  The answer goes back to my child­hood.  My mother once told me (she was prob­a­bly jok­ing) that Elvis was like Jesus.  That stuck for some rea­son.  When Elvis died, I watched how he was dei­fied in the com­mon con­scious­ness.  He did in fact, suf­fer for us…  Its really an inter­est­ing con­cept to me.  One day I received a post­card from Grace­land,  it was the worst pic­ture of the old Elvis ever.  It was printed so badly that his skin was green­ish…  That was the inspi­ra­tion behind the first Green Elvis,  which was my first “mod­ern icon”.