Logan Ganshirt's Arting Your Billboard

Nice to see something up there that isn't the piebald cows of corporate homophobes.

And sometimes the image on the board is selling nothing but itself: Which might work for a basic definition of art in the first place, yes?

My first week in Austin was more than 22 years ago, and there were Art Boards on display throughout the city then, too. Huge, regular old billboards – but bedecked with the works of local artists whose creations had been judged worthy of public display. The only one I remember, though, was a gorgeous, muted-color abstract with hand-drawn words.

The artist was Gail Marie Fischer. The words on the billboard said:

THE WORK IS WHAT'S IMPORTANT.

Which I've always found to be true.

Usually, though, artists – or writers or musicians or filmmakers or whatever – have to do other work – some accursed day job – in order to support their more personally important projects. Which is how I, for instance, came to be employed as a waiter at the Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin Boulevard. Which is where, about seven years into that foodservice grind, I happened to meet Gail Marie Fischer.

I know, right?
Big city, small town.

She was with a six-top of customers in my section of the patio during some Sunday brunch, and she proffered her credit card when the bill came; and I looked at it and I was like, "Gail Marie Fischer? Oh, hey!" And told her how inspired I'd been by having seen her billboard with "The Work Is What's Important" on it almost a decade before.

And she stood up and hugged me – Austinites, y'know? –
and left a big tip, besides … so it was a definite winner of a day.

But what's really cool is that, also at the Magnolia that day – working with me and the other waiters, expediting food in the midst of the brunchian maelstrom – was a young man named Logan Ganshirt.

This is really cool, I'm suggesting, because this same Ganshirt – now more than a decade later, having graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design – has his own art among the newest iteration of these Art Boards from Reagan Advertising.

(So do nine others: Robert Boland, Taylor Winn, Marilyn Flanegan, Emily Cayton, Rachel Noffke, Reagan Hackleman, Doug Pollard, David Bjurstrom, and Jules Buck Jones.)

Ganshirt's face-filled horizontal is out there at 13639 SR 45 between Parmer and Rundburg.
You can see it in all its cartoony color, day after day and night after night, for the next several months.

For more work by Logan Ganshirt –
illustrator, animator, serious-dude-with-serious-cheekbones –
you can click here to visit his website.

And you can see the man himself talking about his Art Board piece right here.