California-based artist Raymond Pettibon (b.1957) began making his signature ink-wash drawings - combinations of cartoon-like images with short, enigmatic texts - in the 1980s. Since then he has produced thousands of drawings in his unusual drafting style. Framed or pinned directly on the wall, they are often combined by the dozens in no discernible order, like a giant scattered notebook. With solo exhibitions worldwide, including a retrospective at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1994), Pettibon has become renowned as one one of the world's most significant innovators of figurative art.

Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper speaks with the artist about recurring obsessions, among them baseball, literature and surfers. Curator Robert Storr examines the full scope of Pettibon's prolific career, examining the context of 1960s-80s California culture and the work's rich variety of visual and textual references. Critic and curator Ulrich Loock, who curated Pettibon's first retrospective in 1995, looks at a single image from Pettibon's oeuvre, a drawing of the loudmouth cartoon character Vavoom. The artist has chosen extracts from three sources: The Arte of English Poesie by George Puttenham, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and Modern Painters by John Ruskin. This book also includes never-before-published song lyrics and scripts on subjects ranging from Jim Morrison to Hollywood seduction.