If you were riding bicycles around Berkeley, CA in the early 1970s, you were aware of the Velo Sport (bicycle shop in Berkeley) poster of a bicycle rider riding alongside a train. Not nobody, but not many bicycle riders knew who David Lance Goines was, or that he was the artist, but we all knew “the Velo Sport poster.”
DLG was also a bicycle rider and at least once, a long-distance tourist. He told me some story about how he rode a one-speed, I think, from I think Reed College in Oregon—where I think he started college, to U.C. Berkeley, where he ended it when he got kicked out for being too radical even for Berkeley, the most radical city in the country back then. It may have had something to do with Communism or Free Speech, but again, this is by memory. Call me irresponsible for not verifying it, but as I write this I have covid (caught on an airplane ride), and I’ve had an eventful day.
He still rode a big black one-speed around town.
In 1990 when I was at Bridgestone I called him up about a poster, but we couldn’t afford it. I didn’t realize then that the price he quoted included a lot of poster. We “settled” for a David Worrel poster, which is not actually settling, and ended up doing a different one on consecutive years.
Then in 2011 or so I called up DLG again “for fun” for a fresh quote, and it was the same price as it had been 15 years earlier. It was still a lot, but this time he mentioned that it included 1,000 posters. Aha, that's a game-changers, so we went for it.
His rules were, basically: You can give me an idea of what you want, and of colors you like, but then I come up with a sketch. It’s not for feedback. If you don’t like it, I keep the deposit, and if you do, it’ll take 6 more months and cost you the balance.
I liked the way he drew children, and I like blues and oranges with creams and black, and he suggested a photo shoot. We enlisted Keven’s son, then four, to pose with a bicycle. DLG shot 200 photos and liked only one of them, and drew from that.
Here's Keven and Milo, the model for the poster.
A typical DLG poster has seven to nine colors. This one, he said, has fourteen. I can’t count fourteen, but I don’t know the step-by-step. He said it was one of his hardest. We all liked it. We sold out of the thousand, ordered another three thousand, and have several hundred left. I don ‘t know what arrangements DLG made with his printing-press partner, but basically we’re not getting any more of them.
DLG posters aren’t cheap, they ARE highly sought after. We had two before this project began. Both my daughters have four (one rivendell, three others), framed and classy. When you’d go into his shop and talk, he might give you one or two—that’s how they got them. They both love his work.
Back to his being a lefty…. We’re selling these and donating 100 percent of the proceeds (selling price) to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. To a 1.5-person team there that runs a recovery and prevention program for child victims of abuse. This particular reservation is on our short-list of major charities, and although I know this all seems so heavy now—David Lance Goines dying, Indian Reservation child abuse…it’s all real stuff, and we want you to know that they money is going to a place that DLG would certainly have approved of.
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Here's anothter bio:
Proof that he really liked our poster.
And if you want to see his other posters:
https://www.goines.net/poster_art.html