Paul Madonna - Art Career

Art Career

Madonna is an artist and writer with a background in painting and is best known for his series All Over Coffee, which he calls a 'strip,' a comic strip without the comic. Madonna's ink-on-paper drawings are characterized by their detailed depictions of urban cityscapes paired with stories. Madonna prefers to draw on site and straight to ink. He began with rendering his home town of San Francisco but has gone to draw, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo and other cities. "All Over Coffee" is a weekly serial made with ink wash drawings that runs in the Sunday Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. The subject of the series originally depicted the everyday thoughts and clipped dialog of two characters, Maurice and Sarah, who are never seen in the frame, but evolved into flash fiction stories of changing and nameless characters, conversations and aphorisms. Madonna was characterized early on as writing overheard conversations, however, all of his stories are fictional. The relationship of Madonna's imagery to his stories is purposefully not literal, and is in defiance to common illustration.

Madonna is also a prolific gallery artist, showing his original work several times a year. His work has been shown in the Oakland Museum and the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Madonna also produces a comic strip, "Small Potatoes". As with his other "alternative" works, it involves deliberately rudimentary characters, in this case potatoes.