‘Miss Santa Claus’ is based on a Christmas golden age DC Comics cover from 1945. The work is part of Pocobelli’s Nostalgia Studies series, which celebrates the visual influences that helped shape his youth and that continue to inform his art practice to this day. He began collecting comics at age 12 and has remained deeply impressed by the design, colour and aesthetic resilience of golden age comic covers. For Pocobelli, there’s nothing more nostalgic than Christmas, and this print captures the spirit of the series in spades.

Pocobelli has been working on the Nostalgia Studies series since 2015, when he began making drawings and paintings of 1980s space Lego boxes, which had a deep influence on his aesthetic sensibility. Later, the series expanded to include trading cards, comics, Apple II computer games, Star Wars action figure boxes, postage stamps, board games, Roland equipment manuals and more.

“Despite their commercial purpose, I consider these designs to be amongst the most important visual creations of the twentieth century, ranking alongside its greatest paintings in terms of their quality and aesthetic impact. It gives me joy to give homage to what I consider to be an unrecognized canon of visual design that provides an unending source of inspiration to me and my work.”