KRK Ryden | Biography Page Four

Upon arriving in Escondido, KRK discovered that his youngest brother Mark had become an artist. This was a shock. When KRK left just a few years earlier, no clue was given that Mark Ryden had any interest in art. All around the house were large oil paintings on canvas, including a huge vertical seven footer of King Tut, (it was the year he was touring).

All the art had the surreal influence gleamed from the art KRK had left behind earlier. Mark soon won a scholarship for the prestigious Pasadena Art Center. The rest of Mark's story is history, (click on to Mark's Ryden's website for more dope!).

In 1981, KRK had established a small studio in Encinitas, in Southern Cal. A phone call had come to KRK as he was watching TV at his folk's home in Escondido. It was Mark Mothersbaugh who was celebrating the success of Whip It and the New Traditionalists tour. Devo was literally popping a cork of champagne in celebration. This was going on during the first conversation of KRK Ryden and Mark Mothersbaugh. Mark had asked him to come to Hollywood and meet him at Larraine Newman's (Saturday Night Live, The Coneheads), house to work on a project he had in mind called The Brainwasher. Larraine was a girlfriend of Mark's at the time.

Currently, some art from this one and only issue is used electrically on Devo's website at Club Devo, (refer to the links). This initial project would lead to other art gigs with Devo and a twenty year friendship between KRK Ryden and Mark Mothersbaugh.

KRK left Encinitas to start a small studio off of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Here he met various bands and artists, (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rick Wilder of The Mau Maus) and helped Celebrity Skin with some early promo art.

Around 1990 KRK did a radio dj stint on cable radio (Kaleidoscope Radio). The name of the show was The Radio KRK Show. Lots of Devo and techno pop was played. It was a lot of fun and taught KRK how to spin disks. Around this time the logo for Mystic Records was created. Doug Moody paid $80 for the logo, (a skull on a yin-yang symbol), which is still used to this day.

During the late 80's an involvement in what is referred to as the lowbrow movement saw a lot of KRK's art in group shows up and down the west coast. And finally, in 1997, KRK took one semester of art at the San Francisco Academy of Art, learning mostly sculpting. His major was Motion Picture Art but changed it to Illustration.

After a couple of years working at the Vorpal Gallery, KRK got a job working at Last Gasp of San Francisco. Thirty years earlier, Keyth Ryden, (then a teen-ager), had met Ron at his new company Last Gasp Eco-Funnies. Babba Ron commissioned him to design a stationary head utilizing images of some underground comic caricatures circulating at the time.

The cost of living in San Francisco went sky-high like the gold-rush days, so KRK moved to Oakland, where he lives in a house with a lovely garden.

After moving to Oakland, KRK quit his job at Last Gasp, but not before selling a sunstantial amount of original art to his boss, Ron Turner. Ron currently owns one of the largest collections of KRK’s art.