Rob Larsen

About Rob Larsen

Day Job

Currently, I work at Isobar. I make web sites. Formerly I was the Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer. At Cramer I managed a small team of front end and Flash developers. We built web sites. Prior to that I worked as a consultant for companies like Gillette, State Street, The Museum of Science, Boston and Compete. Check out HTML + CSS + JavaScript for more details.

Art

The path to this point in my creative life is surprisingly direct. Bits grow on top of bits and styles evolve, but everything I am now as an artist can be accurately traced back to the kid who’d been a regular at the MFA since before he could walk, started drawing as soon as he could hold a pencil and immersed himself in the energy and urban chaos of graffiti in the 1980s. Currently all of that stuff (and the intervening 25+ years) is funneled into work that tries to distill the energy of the city and the freestyle typography of graffiti onto canvas. My process tries to replicate the layering of city walls and the random, energetic way that the environment and man conspire to transform the city’s surfaces.

I've shown my art regularly over the past several years. I've been fortunate to have my art hang alongside artists like Seen, Cope2, Blade, T-Kid, Rickey Powell, Sever, Tracy 168, Ces, Med, Sever, Kem5, Alert, Vault, Alone, Percy Fortini Wright, Sly and Rath. Here's a full list of shows I've taken part in:

I've been interviewed dozens of times for everything from school papers to web sites and newspapers about the subject of graffiti art. My comments on the subject have appeared in several places including the the Weekly Dig, local arts website Big, Red and Shiny and in The History of American Graffiti.

See the graffiti section of this site or my for-sale gallery site RobReact.com for more information.

I've also done some illustration, both black and white and color, for several local publications; most notably a cover for the Weekly Dig's graffiti issue.

Teaching/Speaking

  • Technology

  • Enterprise 2.0 Boston, MA 20th–23rd June 2011
  • Boston PHP: Learn CSS October 13, 7:00PM Bocoup, 319 A St, South Boston, MA
  • Design Camp Boston: Learn CSS November 6 Microsoft New England Research & Development Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
  • Front End Performance for the Common Man: Practical Strategies to Speed Up Your Site May 19, 6:30PM - 8:00PM Bocoup, 319 A St, South Boston, MA
  • "JavaScript 101: Using JavaScript to Add Interactivity to Your Web Site" Boston JavaScript Meetup at Microsoft New England Research Division
  • "The Future is Now: Theming Wordpress with HMTL5" WordCamp Boston. Microsoft New England Research Division
  • "JavaScript Library Comparisons" Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
  • "JavaScript Library Comparisons" Boston JavaScript Meetup at Microsoft New England Research Division
  • Appeared on the panel MITX panel "Building Social Applications & Widgets for Top Platforms" with Matthew Adkisson, (CEO, FreeCause.com); Norris Boyd (Engineering Manager, Google); C.C. Chapman (Partner, The Advance Guard); and Ann Glenn (Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive.) Moderated by Chris Brogan.

  • Graffiti/Street Art

  • 4/2010 I did a presentation for grades 5-8 at Sacred Heart Academy in Hyde Park, Ma
  • 3/2010 I taught a class on graffiti lettering at the Phoenix Academy in Chelsea, MA.
  • In 2009 I taught a class on graffiti/street art at the Rogers Middle School in Hyde Park with the Citizens Schools program
  • I also taught a one day class on graffiti at Northeastern University’s Stetson West dormitory

image, drunkenfist.com rob larsen

Writing

I wrote about cinema for several years for Boston's Weekly Dig (where I also served as Film Editor), Shovel Magazine and The Boston Metro. My movies section contains my (almost) complete film writing archive.

When I was younger I also co-wrote and co-produced a play called Black Cats and White Lies that played at the C. Walsh Theater at Suffolk University.

I recently wrote a cover article about collectible comics for Rare Book Review and an article about Social Networking for Association Meetings magazine.

I've begun doing some writing for IBM DeveloperWorks.

Comics

I worked as an inker in the traditional collaborative process for several years. My credits in that regard include:

image, drunkenfist.com rob larsen skateboarding
  • Cadre #3 from Nifty Comics: inks on an 18 page story
  • Across the Pond Presents #2 from Across the Pond Comics: inks on a 7 page story
  • Shakti Warriors #3: inks on an 8 page story
  • Shakti Warriors #2: inks on an 8 page story
  • Futurius: Tales from the Plex inks on a 10 page story
  • Commercial Suicide vol. 3 inks on 2 pages of a 6 page story
  • Vamperotica #38 from Brainstorm Comics inks on two pinups
  • Vamperotica Tales #1 from Brainstorm Comics inks on two pinups
  • Vamperotica Tales #4 from Brainstorm Comics inks on a 12 page story
  • Vamperotica #41 from Brainstorm Comics inks

Not art-related, but definitely comics related, I maintain a general comics blog at itsalljustcomics.com called "It's All Just Comics" that deals with everything from the world's most valuable collectible comics to the latest/greatest Comics/Manga/BD on the shelves.

Social Networks

I have a presence on (and actually use) the following social networks and services:

The Important Stuff

Beyond all that I live in Boston with my wife and our cat. She does UI Design and the cat mostly sleeps. We have fun together.

About DrunkenFist.com

Colophon

The current version (the third major revision) of the site was designed and developed by me in about a year and a half starting in 2008. The actual work involved probably took three months of that time.

Software used in the creation of this site:

  • Microsoft Visio for wireframes
  • Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Photoshop CS4 for the design
  • Dreamweaver CS4 for prototyping and site management
  • Fireworks CS4 for image production

My current work machine is a 16.0" Sony Vaio FW Intel Core 2 Duo (2.53GHz) with 8GB of RAM running Windows 7. As for the server, I've hosted for over eleven years at Futurequest, on a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and MySql. I host all of my media with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. My site source code is under Subversion hosted at Wush.net. I use Atlassian's Jira for bug-tracking. I use the Magpie RSS Parser and the Keith Devens PHP XML Library to do some XML magic around here. I also use the QuickCache caching system to serve cached/gzipped content. My blog is proudly running WordPress.

This site generated 1,541,116 page views in 2007, 2,400,320 page views in 2008 and 2,985,177 page views in 2009.