Downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery is proud to announce its next major solo show with San Francisco-based award-winning artist/illustrator Eric Joyner , entitled Machine Man Memories, opening March 7 th in the Main Gallery .

Machine Man Memories is the newest series of fantastical paintings by Joyner, of Robots and Donuts fame. Joyner’s work, which has been licensed from the likes of Disney, Warner Brothers, and the hit HBO show Silicon Valley , depicts the tenuous conflict between children’s toys and adulthood as a portrait of another reality. His work is characterized by his playful and surrealistic style that creates harmony between the mix of cartoon characters, especially Japanese tin robots and colorful donuts (directly inspired by the film Pleasantville) inserted in all kinds of landscapes from the Age of Dinosaurs to the bottom of the ocean.

Consisting of 18 new oil paintings, Machine Man Memories is a promise to fulfill the viewer’s need for robots, donuts and yes, cats. Joyner has created an homage (seen above) to a living artist, David Hockney (British painter, stage designer, and photographer) and decided to bring to life some non-robotic figures such as Frosty the Snow Man, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Wizard of O’s, and a dragon to his surreal body of work. Regarding his new series, Joyner shares “The first paintings were inspired by people I met, some locally and some from new friends in China. I later found inspiration in American illustrators such as N.C. Wyeth, Michael Whelan and the brothers Hildebrandt as well as fine artists Grant Wood and David Hockney. I was distracted by the 1953 movie War of the Worlds and one night I dreamt a white cat came to me and whispered in my ear to paint snowmen. As fate would have it, my friend Lou Lima brought me some snowmen figures to paint. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Eric Joyner was born in San Mateo, California, a suburb of San Francisco. His childhood was filled with reading comics (mostly Mad, Creepy, Eerie and newspaper comic strips), playing sports, and going to school, as well as drawing and painting. He began to take painting lessons after being inspired by a visit to the De Young’s Van Gogh exhibit in San Francisco. Joyner went on to attend the Academy of Art and the University of San Francisco, establishing himself as a commercial artist, creating illustrations for Mattel Toys, Levi's, Microsoft and Showtime. A member of San Francisco Society of Illustrators and New York Society of Illustrators, Joyner has been an instructor and speaker at San Francisco's Academy of Art University and California College of the Arts. His work has been featured in San Jose Museum of Art's exhibition "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon", and he has shown in numerous galleries and cultural institutions worldwide.