Riding the Wave with Larry Vigon

Artist Larry Vigon is certainly on a roll. An internationally renowned designer and artist whose work in the music industry includes iconic album covers for Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Counting Crows, and Tom Petty, among others, Vigon was recently named as the winner of the 2026 Solstice Santa Barbara Poster Art contest, with his piece, “Wave,”selected as this year’s official image.

Vigon is no stranger to the Solstice team. Last year, his poster design for “Harlequin Dream Dancer” was the winning artwork. Asked about the appeal of Solstice, Vigon said, “As an artist, you like to get your work out there. And I’ve been fortunate, as you know, with the work I’ve done that’s been seen all over the world by hundreds of millions of people. And there’s something about that that’s quite infectious.”

Vigon, who moved to Santa Barbara in 2019, continued, “I still want my work to be seen. And it’s not hundreds of millions of people, but it’s many thousands of people who will see the work. And I find that gratifying. Absolutely. You know, I donate all my time, too. It’s not like a money thing. It’s kind of giving back to the city that I now call home.”

The Solstice posters are chosen from dozens of entries by local artists, with the winning piece selected through a combination of community voting and input from Solstice board members, advisors, and staff.

In terms of the 2026 design, the Solstice team selected the theme of “wave,” and Vigon took his inspiration from there. “So, I was thinking about the idea of wave. There’s different ways you can wave your hand. There’s a wave in the ocean. There’s the sound waves. It could be a lot of different things. But I often sit at the end of the breakwater and watch the surfers. And so, I was thinking of surfing, and I used to be a surfer for many years. And are you familiar with the term ‘shooting the curl’? [A surfing term for riding inside the hollow, forward part of a breaking wave.] Well, I just took it to kind of a more fun place with that.”

It is fun — we’d expect nothing less for Solstice. Vigon’s poster evokes the notion of shooting the curl, but tweaks it with the idea of the curl of someone’s (blue bouffant) hair.

“Solstice is kind of a whimsical, fun event every year, a free-spirited kind of celebration,” said Vigon, whose work will appear on official Solstice posters and marketing materials for the 2026 Celebration. This year’s festivities will take place on June 19-21. See solsticeparade.com.

But before that, Vigon has a long-planned exhibition at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum (SBMM). Opening on April 9 is Aquean: Photographs, Paintings, and Prints by David Ellis and Larry Vigon. A multimedia experience combining Vigon’s Flotsam & Jetsam ocean-inspired work that includes paintings, large-scale prints, found objects, linocuts, video, and dimensional collages with Ellis’s Lobospheres: The Lost Souls of Point Lobos, abstract, impressionistic photographs of textures, silhouettes, and mythical figures discovered in the wave-carved rock forms of Point Lobos, the exhibition is on view through July 26. The two artists are longtime friends and former business partners, and it was Vigon who suggested that Ellis’s 20-year-long creative exploration would pair well with his art.

“Their work captures the power and fragility of the ever-changing California coastline,” stated SBMM Curator/Director of Collections & Exhibits Emily Falke. “In Aquean, the sea is more than a physical presence — it becomes a lens for time and change, reminding us that what endures and what vanishes are forever intertwined by the rhythms of the ocean.” 

For more information, see sbmm.org.