Artist capturing the look of a Vegas night

By Kristen Peterson

Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Artist Jerry Misko sits on the back of a 1970s gray velour coach in his home studio — an annex off his living room. A laptop is open in front of him. A near-complete painting leans against the wall. The television is on, but the sound is down.

We’re discussing his upcoming exhibit, “Jerry F’n Misko,” opening today at Henri & Odette, when a lone chipmunk meanders into the back yard. I wonder what seems more out of place, common wildlife in Las Vegas or Misko living comfortably in the suburbs.

Misko, 36, is old-school Vegas, a downtown guy, a partyer, an Arts District fixture, a local personality, a social networker and a shameless self-promoter.

He’s everywhere and anywhere and so are his mostly large-scale abstract paintings of neon and Vegas lights — separated into varied colors and forms, capturing the buzz and vibration of neon. They are a little out of focus, kind of what you’d see when leaving a hotel a little bit drunk, Misko says.

If you haven’t seen his work at the Fallout Gallery, Trifecta Gallery, Contemporary Arts Center or Winchester Gallery, you’ve probably seen it at Saks Fifth Avenue, on Las Vegas Boulevard as part of the city’s aerial gallery or covering a wall. He did a Las Vegas Centennial mural at Cashman Center and led a project for the television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” at the Mission Building behind the Arts Factory.

But here he is in the suburbs, as far west as he was willing to go to be near his 6-year-old son, Julian, whom he calls “the coolest thing I’ve ever made.”

His home is a three-bedroom loft with exposed piping and vents, concrete floors, a Zen back yard, a hot tub on the balcony and floor-to-ceiling windows that look north over the valley. Chives, parsley, basil, thyme and tomatoes grow in a planter out front. Works by artists such as Elizabeth Blau, JW Caldwell and Ripper Jordan are featured throughout the interior, but none of his own.

“I can’t afford one of my paintings,” he says. “If I have a painting on the wall, that’s money in the bank. I had a big 6-by-6 (foot) there and sold it two weeks ago. But that’s my job. I don’t get terribly attached to them. I’m not too sentimental about it. At the end of the day, I’m just a capitalist artist.

“I’m not a millionaire by any means, but I do what I love. I feed myself and my kid. As arrogant and egotistical as I come across, I’m really humbled when someone buys a painting.”

Born and raised here, Misko attended Bishop Gorman High School, where he took a few art classes and graduated with a 4.0 grade-point average. He went to the University of Southern California as an architecture student — a compromise with his father (a devout Catholic and pit boss from Biloxi, Miss.) between art and a “real career.” He dropped out of USC three years later.

“I didn’t want to make pretty buildings,” Misko says. “I wanted to make pretty stuff.”

He came back to Vegas where he ran a wine cafe, Jazzed, and worked freelance design.

“It was art world versus making things mentality,” he says. “I wanted to make things. School was all about concept before facility.”

His career as an artist took shape while working as a designer for a slot machine company. He’d zoom in on the symbolic slot images and began to see them as pieces, rather than as a whole. “A cherry stopped being a cherry and became a great set of shapes,” he says.

From there he made paintings combining religious and slot machine iconography, then began painting decayed signs of Las Vegas’ past until he landed on his trademark style.

Some 30 images of the current works are featured in a 52-page book that accompanies the exhibit at Henri & Odette along with writings by Geoff Carter, Gregory Crosby, Matt Kelemen, James Reza and Jarret Keene — friends of Misko.

Crosby, who now lives in New York, says artists such as Tim Bavington, Yek and David Ryan are important exports, but Misko is more quintessentially Vegas.

“Jerry Misko is part of the wave of artists who came out of Vegas in the late ’90s, all of whom took inspiration from the visual overload of Vegas, from the sheer beauty and weirdness of the Vegas streetscape — and did so without drenching it all in irony,” Crosby says. “Jerry distinguishes himself from that cadre in his deep exploration of the iconic nature of Vegas, specifically in that most obvious icon, the neon sign. Jerry recognizes that on some deep level, the neon sign is Las Vegas.

“Without it, and everything that it contains — pleasure, luck, freedom — Vegas would just be Phoenix.”