We at Castro's Barbershop have always had our dextrous fingers in a few different pies.
We love cutting hair but it's a big, beautiful creative world out there and we are inspired by many different innovative pursuits including music, design, art, photography, literature, fashion and many other cool things.
For us that has been one of the best things about finally being able to open our shop. We can cut hair, sure but we can also do all the other things we love. Put on a gig with the addition of some vintage burlesque in the shop? Check. Create our own cocktail inspired by our favourite pomade? Also check. We know so many talented people, DJ's, musicians, photographers and artists. We have long wanted to collaborate with some of the great illustrators and designers we know and admire. And to this end, we are finally curating a collection of exclusive T-shirts with some incredibly talented individuals. There will be more in the future but for the first collection we are featuring three artists: Ivan Castro, Berto Martinez and Gary Boller.
Ivan Castro:
Ivan Castro is a graphic designer based in Barcelona, Spain, who specializes in calligraphy, lettering, and typography. His work involves everything from advertising to editorial, and from packaging to logo design and gig posters. Although Ivan claims to have no specific style, one could say that he has a strong respect for the history of popular culture. He has been working in the field for 15 years, and has been teaching calligraphy and lettering for 10 years in the main design schools in Barcelona. He travels frequently, holding workshops and giving lectures at design festivals and conferences. He has recently published The ABC of Custom Lettering, a lettering handbook.
Berto Martinez:
Berto Martínez is an illustrator based in Barcelona. He works for different magazines and NPO´s like The Optimum, The Washington Post, GQ, Amnesty International, etc. He is very interested in the function of illustration in the media and he is a collector of illustrations, his favourite artistic expression. Berto enjoys working for record labels doing covers for amazing artists like Hank Williams, Otis Redding, Miss Lavell, Elvis Presley, and many more.
Gary Boller:
After many years in London, Gary now lives a little more south in the glorious countryside in Hampshire, UK, with his wife and two children, one Chihuahua and four cats. He trained as a graphic designer gaining an HND and also thereafter had a career in design and advertising in London.
He was always doodling as a kid, even on his parents walls. He loved the comics of the day. The Beano and Dandy, famous titles in England. One day in a summer vacation job from college a co-worker said to him, on observing a cartoon he'd drawn on the back of an old envelope, "There's something in that!" Well so it turned out. After engaging illustrators as an art director it occurred to him that he would really rather be the illustrator.
A chance encounter led to an enrolment in the, now defunct Portobello Cartoon School, which at that time was the only cartoon school in Europe. This lead onto a career in comics, character design and animation for many and varied clients in design, advertising, editorial and entertainment.
He also eventually worked for both the Beano and the Dandy. Gary also has a love of music, jazz, rockabilly, western swing in particular and has played double bass in bands and toured Europe and the USA.