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My friends and co-workers Jason Filipow and Mike Ternosky found this shirt of a very old design of mine at the Rose Bowl flea market selling for $500! In the summer of 1989, the same summer I made the original “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” sticker, I also did a design for a local Providence skate/streetwear company called Jobless Anti-Work Wear. I had submitted a drawing of a kid skating in a pool as a tee graphic which was rejected because they said they were looking for less literal skate stuff and more graphics that reflected the skate/street rebellious attitude. Based on the name of the company, my love of Kubrick’s film “The Shining,” and my recollection of exactly which film still would make a provocative graphic, I set out to make an intentionally rough and degraded visage of Jack Nicholson that screamed, “I don’t like work” with a dose of danger and bad attitude. Conveniently, Nicholson’s character in “The Shining” was supposed to be writing a novel, but as he went insane from isolation, he simply typed hundreds of pages of “ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY.” I typed this phrase out with a few variations, laid it under the degraded face in red, added the Jobless logo in red beneath, and the design was complete. It took about an hour and a half. This shirt was my first underground “hit”… it sold very well and boosted my confidence as a designer. It also, ironically, landed me a job working for Jobless as their primary designer and printer through 1990 until I started my own company, Alternate Graphics, in the summer of 1991.
-Shepard
