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Written by Greg Baker

It’s common nearly to the point of stereotype. Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, and about a thousand other famous rock acts can trace the roots of their formation to art schools. You know, "Yeah bloke, we were studying art at the academy until we picked up guitars and started getting girls." But Joey Seeman was a rocker first. Then he went to art school.

For a while anyway. The Miami native made his name as a bass player with Samantha Stevens-worshipping goth-punkers the naughty Puritans, fronted by current Cell 63 leader Rob Coe. The Puritans broke up in 1991, around the same time Seeman was offered an art scholarship at Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC). When the scholarship money ran out, he could no longer afford to attend, but that did little to slow his new career.

"As soon as the Puritans broke up" he says, "I put all my energies into art. I had dabbled before, and I needed an outlet for my creative energies. At the time I lived in a bedroom of a house in South Dade, and I just started painting day and night." He pinned large canvases to the wall and covered them with acrylics in bright colors. "Acrylics dry fast, and they’re colorful," he says flatly.

At first Seeman showed his work at exhibitions hung by New World School of the Arts and MDCC, and then he began collaborating with avant-garde innovator Tomata Du Plenty, unveiling the mural on the outside of the Hamlet Bar on South beach in September 1992. The Hamlet would become a favorite spot to display new works, but Seeman says his real break came that same year when he walked into the Gallery of the Unknown Artists and offered his portfolio. "When he first approached us," says Gallery co-owner Gino Paino, "we put up some of his pieces. We sold five of them in less than a week. We were selling one a week, and suddenly he was one of the most popular. We’ve sold almost 50 of his pieces. This is very unusual for a young artist. Now he is recognized."

And now his paintings command up to two thousand dollars, not the couple of hundred people were paying at first. Paino attributes Seeman’s out of the box success to the artist’s unusual mix of contemporary art and graffiti, and his presentations that are controversial in terms of social issues. The colors, the logic, the issues, and all of it very open, loose. He has a painting of two Asian lesbians- that would be crazy for any other type of gallery.

Clearly influenced by Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, Seeman’s oversized acrylics are so crazy-or so sane- that he won the 1993 Overall Achievement award from the gallery. And he notes, "My most radical pieces were the first that sold." He also introduced the idea of having live rock shows in conjunction with the exhibitions there.

Ranging from the morbidly charming to the downright troubling, Seeman’s acrylics and drawings began appearing in shows at clubs, schools, and galleries as well as magazines such as EYE. By the end of 1993, he had a window installation at J.W. Cooper in Coco Walk (Coconut Grove), where he hung his "Fine Americans" series (companion pieces juxtaposing likenesses of Michael Jordan, Charles Bukowski, KISS, John Dillinger, William S. Burroughs, Ed Wood and others for the "male" version; Billie holiday, the Bionic Woman, the Ronnettes, et cetera for the "female") and has continued to post new works.

"There aren’t enough underground outlets." Seeman says. "My work has a marketable feel, but it appeals to an underground audience because the imagery often involves S&M, seedy bar scenes, prison, science fiction, B-movies-not the normally mainstream themes.

Mainly for this reason-and general boredom with South Florida, Seeman has been searching for new outlets for his work. He’s already had a brush with fame in Manhattan. A couple of weeks ago, he went to red-hot fashion designer Anna Sui’s SOHO store and handed over his portfolio. As he walked around the sidewalks of the city, Sui reviewed his stuff. "We went back and they told us to go right in and meet directly with her," Seeman recounts. "She was down to earth, real nice, and she loved it. She loved the weirdest stuff, too."

Sui creates a different T-shirt for each new line, and for next spring’s she’s using a bondage theme, with the shirt’s designs featuring a Seeman original of a stylized devil standing behind two women with betty Page haircuts. One of the women wears a black dress and a dog collar choker, the other woman is nearly nude, her hands tied. The red-orange background is dotted with yellow Japanese characters, and the overall effect intriguing to say the least. "She loved it, and she’s using it," Seeman says. "I already got the check, so it’s a sealed deal."

He should have no trouble finding inspiration from the city so nice they named it twice. Many of his pieces include snippets of writing, mostly from conversations overheard in bars, and he also draws on innovations by writers such as Bukowski and Burroughs, including the latter’s "cut up" technique of matching unrelated snippets of verbiage to create new meanings. " I draw inspiration from Wolfie’s, " Seeman explains. "The people there inspire me. And little bars like the Knotty Pine, I go there and it makes me want to run home and paint. "These people with a manic gleam in their eye, sitting in front of three beers in some cheap dive. These people need more recognition."

But through all of this sudden success, Joseph Seeman, as he’s formally known in art circles, hasn’t lost touch with his punk rock roots. The band Loadface made a poster from a session in which Seeman painted faces on the band member’s stomachs. And about six months ago, he was contacted by the Holy Terrors to create the art for their new CD, Lolitaville. " I like their music, so I said yes," Seeman says. "I had a large painting, about seven feet tall, in bright colors, that was a variations on a woman. They said they wanted that one. I had already been making T-shirts with that design on them and Rob Coe has one. He wears it to the Terror’s shows and it drives them crazy." The original was commissioned and sold, but Seeman created a horizontal version about two feet tall by four feet that was used for the CD.

Former Naughty Puritan bandmate and long-time friend Coe heard about Seeman’s work with the Terrors, and after finding out that Seeman could find the time, asked him to create the inside illustrations for Cell 3’s new CD, Once upon a Drunk…A serial comic by Seeman also graces the Cell’s newsletter.

And Seeman still practices bass, still jams when he can. He recently joined a pickup group called the Wrecking Balls to play a punk party in someone’s backyard, he says that one-off band might be resurrected for his last shows before he leaves town. " We played Blondie covers and stuff," he says. "I’m still interested in music."

Joey Seeman’s next show, "So Long Sin City," will be installed tomorrow (Friday), November 4, and shown through November 18 at the Gallery of the Unknown Artists, 735 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach. Cell 63 performs live on opening night. Admission is free.