Artwork Description
Say Goodnight Gracie Blotter Paper Limited Edition Archival Pigment Print Art on Perforated Blotter Paper by Herbie Greene pop culture LSD artwork.
2021 Signed & Numbered with COA Archival Pigment Print on Perforated Blotter Paper Artwork Size: 7.5 x 7.5 Inches Release: April 19, 2021. Limited blotter editions are hand-perforated by Zane Kesey.
Say Goodnight Gracie by Herbie Greene: Blotter Paper Resistance in Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork
Say Goodnight Gracie is a 7.5 x 7.5 inch archival pigment print on perforated blotter paper by Herbie Greene, released on April 19, 2021. Signed and numbered with a certificate of authenticity, each piece in this limited edition was hand-perforated by Zane Kesey, reinforcing its symbolic roots in psychedelic counterculture. The print features a black-and-white photograph of Grace Slick, the iconic frontwoman of Jefferson Airplane, overlaid with colorized elements including a paisley red outfit and piercing cyan eyes. The backdrop includes Egyptian-inspired sketches and faded, spray-painted text reading Happy New Year, creating a layered composition that mixes defiance, memory, and cultural critique. Herbie Greene, a legendary photographer from the United States, was known for capturing defining moments of the 1960s San Francisco music scene. This print is more than just a photo—it is a protest embedded in a relic. Slick’s expression and raised middle finger become the central focal point, offering a timeless act of rebellion immortalized through photographic grit and street-inflected style. The surrounding textures—worn concrete, hand-drawn symbols, and fading graffiti—echo the raw surfaces used in Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork, reinforcing the voice of anti-establishment figures who spoke through walls, posters, and sound.
Grace Slick, Counterculture, and the Power of Visual Protest
The image of Grace Slick in Say Goodnight Gracie resonates deeply with the cultural spirit of the 1960s and its aftermath. Slick's role as a voice of psychedelic rock and protest was unmistakable, and this moment of visual resistance encapsulates that spirit perfectly. She does not perform; she confronts. Her multicolored attire, contrasted against a grayscale background, draws attention to individuality and dissent amidst uniformity and decay. The visual isolation of colorized features within a monotone space mimics the effect of street stenciling or wheatpaste posters, techniques commonly used in urban protest art to highlight voices against a muted backdrop of authority. The print format on blotter paper is significant. It bridges the documentation of music history with the tangible aesthetics of drug culture and underground art. Zane Kesey’s involvement in hand-perforating the editions ties this piece directly to the visual traditions of LSD blotter art, where iconography often merged political satire, celebrity, and surrealism. This connection reinforces the idea of art not just as commentary, but as a vehicle of transformation—mental, social, and spiritual.
The Urban Palimpsest as Art Form
Herbie Greene’s composition in Say Goodnight Gracie operates like an urban palimpsest. Layers of history, rebellion, femininity, and symbolism are built into every detail. The hieroglyph-like drawings add an archaeological tone, suggesting lost messages or forgotten rituals that still echo in the present. The crumbling wall texture and ghosted graffiti add urgency and vulnerability, as if the image could fade at any moment—just like the posters pasted on city walls, fleeting yet unforgettable. This quality is central to Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork, where temporality, public visibility, and emotion collide to create impact. Grace Slick’s raised hand and unflinching gaze are a signal, not just a pose. They challenge the viewer to consider where protest lives today. In Greene’s composition, the past is not frozen but reanimated on blotter paper, a medium that has transported minds beyond the visible world for decades. This visual dialogue between photography, protest, and psychedelic symbolism speaks not just to nostalgia but to the ongoing role of image as resistance.
Herbie Greene and the Documentation of Rebellion
Herbie Greene’s work captures moments that transcend the frame. By reissuing Say Goodnight Gracie on perforated blotter paper, he transforms documentation into object, memory into statement, and portrait into symbol. This choice elevates the piece beyond archival photography into the arena of Street Pop Art & Graffiti Artwork, where message and method matter equally. Greene, born in the United States, became known for his close work with artists like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Janis Joplin. His lens documented a generation seeking transformation, and in this work, that spirit persists—vivid, fierce, and permanent on a medium built for moments that change everything. Say Goodnight Gracie is not just a tribute to a music icon. It is a distilled act of visual rebellion, sharpened by decades of cultural memory and executed on one of the most subversive print surfaces in art history. It offers a flash of resistance captured in time, formatted for the hand, the wall, and the mind alike.
