Artist Sandow Birk began his presentation with a slideshow when speaking to SF State students on Thursday evening. He began by chronicling his early work, which featured images of people surfing along with images of historical objects such as colonial ships.

“I was always an avid surfer and I wanted to paint about surfing in a serious way,” Birk said. “I looked at old painting of the ocean, like Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa,’ stole the idea, and added surfers.”

The event, which was put on by the College of Creative Arts, gave Birk a chance to explain the motivation behind some of his more well-known works of art, share other pieces of art he has worked on, as well as share what he is currently working on.

Birk has had a number of paintings in which he took paintings of the past and added modern events and cultural activities that reflected the actions of the original works.

He showed another work, which he titled “President Bush Visiting the Riots in Los Angeles,” that mirrored Jean Gros’ “Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa.” Birk’s painting portrayed President George Bush in the position that Napoleon was in Gros’ work.

“Art history books discuss Gros’ painting as being propaganda for Napoleon at the time, which is why I used it to portray George Bush visiting the 1992 LA riots,” Birk said

Birk also went into detail about why he chose to paint certain works of art. He went into a lengthy explanation as to why he painted every single prison in California.

Painting 33 prisons in three years, Birk said that he thought it was interesting how people flocked to the west, particularly to California, during the Gold Rush period and yet California has so many prisons within its borders.

“The Gold Rush was this period of hope for people. I had this image of people from New York jumping on trains to come to California for the gold rush, and now California is the state with the most prisons,” he said.

Birk said is not just about painting. Some of his artwork was the inspiration for a fake documentary he made with his friends entitled “In Smog and Thunder: The Great War of the Californias.”

The film was made after Birk did a series of paintings in which Los Angeles and San Francisco were at war. Birk even created a fictional history of the war, creating generals and fake battles, such as the Fuji Blimp versus the Goodyear Blimp.

“Doing the film was great. Some of my friend dressed up and acted as though they were veterans of the war,” Birk said.

Birk’s artwork has also inspired a film interpretation of “Dante’s Inferno,” made using paper puppets.

Birk began doing ink drawings from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” on Mylar when he was contacted by Trillion Press to make a series of prints. Afraid that he might be infringing on copyrighted work, Birk said that he completely re-wrote Dante’s poem and turned it into three art shows.

After being contacted by his friend Paul Zaloom, with whom he worked on “In Smog and Thunder,” to make another film, Birk decided to create a film out of “Divine Comedy,” because he enjoyed working on “In Smog and Thunder” so much.

The film, which features the voices of Dermot Mulroney as Dante and James Cromwell as the ghost of Virgil, had its world premier at the Slamdance Film Festival last January. It will be at the San Francisco Indie film festival in February.

In addition to the film, which was filmed in only 15 days, Birk is working on prints and paintings on the war in Iraq, which will be displayed at the Catherine Clark Gallery in May.

“I pulled from the person who inspired Goya, as well as old Russian and Soviet paintings that feature soldiers walking off into the sunset with big smiles on their faces,” he said. “There will be humor in the Iraq series. I have always tried to make things funny.”