Behind the Artist: Covering 75’s Celeste Byers

Each month in 2023, we’re asking a local artist to recreate one of our iconic covers from the past 75 years. For December, we tapped artist Taylor Chapin to help us recreate San Diego Mag‘s January 1965 cover. Check out her unique translation here and learn more about Chapin in the Q&A below:

Tell us about how you found your distinguished style and how you honed your skills.

The style I’m currently working in was developed during my recent time in grad school at UCSD. I’ve always been fascinated by branding and advertising, and my earlier work explored this very overtly through painting brands and products representationally.

During my time experimenting in school, I was challenged to think of new ways to explore these themes, and I had the idea of very literally covering up the products and brands I was painting with fabric so that their form was obscured. I began painting these covered forms as a way of critiquing how value is represented. This led to my current obsession of covering everything—including the human form. 

I’ve always been really into pattern and detail since I was a kid, and now I’ve found ways to incorporate all the patterns I’m attracted to into my work through this act of covering the form in fabric. I’ve honed my skills over the years through countless hours of painting, and I continue to do so by painting pretty much everyday. Painting never ceases to challenge me, and I love working through the process slowly and methodically and learning more as I go. 

What artists do you admire or look up to?

There’s so many artists I look up to. I’m currently really inspired by the work of Amy Adler, she was one of my advisors in grad school. I’m also really into the work of Jean Lowe, Hilary Pecis, Ken Gun Min, and Ilana Savdie, to name a few.

How do you think your art reflects the Southern California lifestyle or plays a role in the way your art comes to life?

To me, Southern California has such a specific color palette and aesthetic associated with it. I think my palette of bright and contrasting colors is very much inspired by Southern California. I also think my interest in consumption and consumerism is related to my observations and experience of living in Southern California, because it is a capital for conspicuous consumption, entertainment, and the performance of wealth and beauty. I think being in such close proximity to this type of display has heightened my fascination with our culture of consumption.  

What was your big break?

I was in a group show in 2018 at Hill Street Country Club, a nonprofit arts space in Oceanside. Dinah Pollenitz, the cofounder and curator at Hill Street, subsequently offered me a solo show there in 2019. This first solo show has led to so many other amazing opportunities throughout San Diego, and I am forever grateful to Dinah for supporting my work and providing me with one of my first opportunities to show my work in an art space in San Diego. 

What do you have on the horizon workwise?

I have a solo show with Quint Gallery in La Jolla in March of 2024 that I’m currently working on. I will also be doing a public mural in Pacific Beach next year, and I have a few other projects that are currently in their early stages of development.  

Where can people find your work to admire or hire you?

People can check out my work on my website. I have a show up at ICA North through the end of this year. I also have a few murals around San Diego including one on the side of Warren Hall at UCSD, an indoor mural at Corner Pizza in Oceanside, and one on the south-facing side of the Leucadia Donut Shoppe. I am available for hire via the contact form on my website. 

Check out this trippy new take on a classic.

The San Diego arts struck gold in 1965 with the debut of the new Civic Theatre, designed by famed modernist architect Lloyd Ruocco.

SDM’s January ’65 cover celebrated opening night with a glam-filled illustration by artist D. Wayne “Bunky” Millsap. A packed house, all diamonds, tuxedos, and fur.

In that issue, San Diego Magazine’s Associate Editor Roberta Ridgely captured the feeling of being in SD’s newest home for the performing arts. “A theatre is the shiver of excitement that tingles through the audience at the precise moment when the curtains part,” she wrote.

To celebrate SDM’s 75th birthday, we’ve collaborated with local artists and creatives to recreate classic covers with a contemporary twist in each month of 2023. For our finale, we asked Encinitas artist Taylor Chapin for her unique translation.

“I was interested in doing something in the style of the work that I already do, but updating the music and the space for 2023,” Chapin says. “[In] this age we live in … it’s so important to be closely linked to your identity and brand, so I was really interested in this idea of covering the figure up as a playful critique of this social media age.”

Instead of opera at the Civic Theatre, Chapin’s recreation—a real 32-by-24-inch oil painting entitled Sonic Shift—features a silhouette rock band at the new Epstein Family Amphitheater at UCSD. In place of look-at-me formalwear are anonymous patterned figures, perhaps talking about the shiver of excitement they’re feeling as the curtain lifts.

It’s easy to write our city off as merely an always-sunny hub for laid-back beach bums—thus forgetting that culture, innovation, and progress have always been baked into SD’s identity.

This cover from 1956 marries all these values. Bali Hai opened in 1952 at the dawn of tiki culture. Four years later, photographer Paul Oxley shot the three-wheeled Messerschmitt KR200 outside its doors. Designed by a German aircraft engineer, the sleek microcar broke 22 international speed records in 1955. It’s a promise of the auto technology to come, plopped in the middle of San Diegans’ favorite haunt for tiny umbrellas.

In honor of our 75th anniversary, we’re recreating iconic covers from our past. The new cover stars the same beloved Bali Hai and another futuristic, three-wheeled vehicle, the SD-grown, battery-and-sun powered Aptera.

The original cover featured an uncredited model. This time, we chose two unforgettable
locals pushing our city into the future: Shavone Charles, head of global diversity and inclusion communications at TikTok, and chef Claudia Sandoval of cookbook and Master Chef fame.

They (and the other movers and shakers sprinkled throughout this issue) are proof that San Diegans are always headed towards the next big thing—we’re just doing it in better weather than most.

Most doctors we know can’t fly or shoot lasers from their eyes. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t at work constantly pulling off superhero-esque feats. Because the MDs who keep us healthy typically don lab coats instead of capes, it can be easy to forget that the stethoscopes and clipboards they often rock in classic regional magazine covers (like this one from October 2009) are their own Bruce Wayne–style tools to save lives and help those in need.

In honor of our 75th anniversary, we’re asking local artists for fresh takes on retro covers. To remind us all of doctors’ daily heroics, we asked Keithan Jones, a local comic book artist and founder/owner of independent publishing company KID Comics, to recreate this past Top Docs cover, touching on many of the medical advancements and STEM-related news happening in San Diego.

You’ll spot references to the Human Milk Institute, which studies how medications impact breast milk; Orchyd, a period-tracking and telemedicine app offering confidential access to healthcare; new scientific research in outer space; the much-discussed Ozempic craze; and groundbreaking lab-grown fish at San Diego company BlueNalu.

San Diego is a hub for science and technology, with companies like Illumina, Erasca, Gilead Sciences, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (to name just a few) calling this city home. If you look close enough, the future of medicine is unfolding before our very eyes. And the doctors, scientists, and researchers leading the charge are actual superheroes.

As fall approaches, it’s a good time to pause and savor the mellow of summer. Night comes quicker with each day that passes. Soon, quiet afternoons in the backyard will give way to dark evenings by the fire. Now is a time to slow down.

Nobody takes it all in quite like San Diego’s slow-rolling, suntanned philosopher, John Kitchin, aka SloMo, who you can generally find floating one rollerblade at a time down the Pacific Beach Boardwalk. A neurologist and psychiatrist, SloMo took up skating in retirement as a way to mellow out.

“Since then, I’ve been living freely,” he says. “And skating literally everyday on the boardwalk for 24 years.”

As we celebrate San Diego Magazine’s 75th anniversary, we’re reflecting on our history—blading the boardwalk down memory lane, ontology. (Though we’re doubtful that pipe will looking to past covers for inspiration and putting a modern shine on them. This month, we peek back at our August 1972 cover, an homage itself to Lippencott Magazine’s 1895 cover, dubbed “Tennis.” Here, a stately gentleman finds a moment of repose on his way to a friendly game. We assume he’s mulling over his own thoughts on the state of being, how to unravel his personal elevate his tennis skills.)

In our new version, SloMo pauses in his garden—reading, daydreaming, hidden away like the San Diego treasure he is.

“There are two things that we all have,” he says. “One is the world of objectivity. What’s back in the other world, that of subjectivity, is where dreams are.”