Noted designer Stefan Bucher at Brandstater Gallery

Bucher is presenting his retrospective exhibit, “Everything is Going Exactly as Planned,” Feb. 21 – March 12. The show is comprised of approximately 98 pieces and includes past works for various clients, Bucher’s popular DailyMonster.com creations, as well as futuristic pieces designed along a story theme that depicts the artist’s work and related events as they might occur decades from now. It also includes a triangular corner mural in shades of wide, pink stripe and the show’s title hand-lettered in swooping, dark font. Bucher, Musso and La Sierra art students created the mural over 45 hours prior to the show’s opening.

Bucher’s design and illustration studio, 344 Design, is based in Los Angeles. The numerical designation represents the day he moved to the United States from Germany on Dec. 10, the 344^th day of a non-leap year. Bucher’s extensive design and illustration portfolio includes work on CD covers, book jackets, posters, magazine covers, newspapers as well as graphics for film and television. His clients range from art galleries and film directors to large corporations and mainstream artists such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Capitol Records, DreamWorks Records, painter David Hockney and the Blue Man Group.

Bucher has also written five books, and developed a popular online interactive creative project called DailyMonster.com in which Bucher creates monsters out of ink spatters on paper and makes videos of the process. He created ink monsters each day for 100 days, took video of the process and posted a new monster daily on a blog with invitations to the public to create stories about the monsters. Bucher wrote a book about the experience titled “100 Days of Monsters” published in 2008 with accompanying DVD. Bucher’s monsters have appeared on the cover of “LA Weekly,” on “The Electric Company” television show, in “Communication Arts” illustration annual, on playing cards, mugs, t-shirts and elsewhere. He offers a monster-maker app on his site along with video archives of monster drawings.

A native of northern Germany, Bucher’s career is rooted in a childhood love of drawing. At the age of 12, he landed an illustration in a German fanzine, “Der Donalidst,” and soon saw his work printed throughout the publication. He later studied advertising and took design classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art. Before launching his own studio, Bucher started his career as an art director with an advertising agency in Portland, Ore.

Bucher traces early artistic influences to a family that appreciated the arts. “My dad used to volunteer his time at a museum for caricature and illustration. That’s probably where I picked up on the idea that this is something people do -- that the things I love are made by people,” he said. Bucher arrived in the United States in 1993, five months after graduating from high school, “on the excuse that I got accepted as a student at Art Center. The truth is I just wanted to live here. I love Los Angeles.” 

In a question-and-answer section of his website, Bucher says he is passionate about design because “I get to shape a tiny piece of the world as I think it should be. …Graphic design is a brilliant home base for a life in the arts. You get to make things look pretty for a living, which is fun. And the boundaries of the field are morphing daily, so you can make your life into whatever you want it to be. You can’t say that about most jobs.”

Gallery hours are Mon.-Thurs., noon – 7 p.m. Admission is free. La Sierra University is located at 4500 Riverwalk Parkway, Riverside. For more information call 951-785-2170.