SAN JOSE (KRON) — A local Bay Area artist had his work grace the cover of Time Magazine on Thursday.
The theme — gun violence.
The man behind the magic is San Jose’s own John Mavroudis.
The cover came just days after a series of mass shootings in the United States.
Mavroudis told KRON he was in contact with the magazine two days prior to the release.
“I spoke to their art director and discussed what they had in mind,” he said. “I spent the next two days pulling kind of an all-nighter, getting it to them in their hands by Wednesday morning.”
Mavroudis was already familiar with the almost-century-year-old magazine as he graced the cover last year — and it was familiar with him.
“I do these type of graphic portraits so they had the idea in mind,” he said. “I played with what their basic idea was and formatted the cover.”
Mavroudis said there was one thing Time prioritized: the word “enough”.
“The only directive was to put the word ‘enough’ in there somewhere and leave a little space for the subhead,” he said. “I looked at the Parkland student cover that Time did, (it) had the word ‘enough’ written in that same style so I worked around that. It’s kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, putting things together.”
The Bay Area artist said they had to do their research to complete the cover.
During the research, they pulled a list of 253 U.S. cities that have encountered mass shootings thus far.
“There were certain cities that were obviously fresh in everyone’s mind,” he said. “Gilroy, Dayton and El Paso. They wanted to feature those prominently. So I was just adjusting them and putting them where I thought they would fit best.”
Being a Bay Area native, Mavroudis said it was especially difficult when it came to places near home.
“I had to stop a few different times when I got to San Jose,” he said. “That’s my hometown. When you see other Bay Area cities like Richmond, Vallejo, San Francisco, Oakland — you realize how many people have been affected my gun violence.”
Mavroudis said we have learned to quickly process things.
With the unfortunate numerous amounts of mass shootings occurring, we have learned to grieve, then the next big thing comes along, we forget about the previous thing, and it turns into a never-ending cycle.
“That’s kind of the impact of the cover,” he said. “When you see the cover and you see all of these cities in red states, blue states, in major cities, in small towns — what they all share is gun violence.”
To learn more about Mavroudis’ work, visit http://www.zenpop.com/.