Guitar as Art
Fender Special Edition David Lozeau Art Stratocasters:
People have taken to their guitars with brush, pigment and boundless creativity for ages, treating them not only as sonic canvases, but literal ones too. Take noted artist and illustrator David Lozeau, who has adorned a series of special Fender instruments with his acclaimed and colorfully twisted vision. Lozeau has a quirky, character-driven painting style that wraps Day of the Dead iconography in a modern lowbrow aesthetic, blending fine art technique with illustrative humor to reveal his distinctive and funny perspective on life, death and all the interesting stuff in between.
My good friends at Lauzon Music in Ottawa sent me a note about a limited special edition Strat. The annual NAMM trade show ran from January 22-25, 2015 in Anaheim, California. While there, Lauzon selected a one-of-a-kind, Fender Custom Shop Masterbuilt Rat-A-Tat Strat, with the artwork by David Lozeau.
David painted and aged two Stratocaster guitars for the Fender Custom Shop’s invite-only dealer preview night at NAMM, where industry insiders gathered to snatch up unique guitars for stores and private collectors. Both of David’s WWII nose art pieces, the Rat-A-Tat Strats (Tank version and Bomber version), sold to international buyers. One obviously went to Lauzon in Ottawa. The other? I do not know.
Here they are, the Tank and the Bomber. Stratocasters as art.