URBAN ART : The Star-Makers of Sunset Strip

If there’s anything more ephemeral than Billboard’s Top 40, it’s Top 40’s billboards. When an album falls off the charts, its Sunset Strip showcase tumbles right along.

When record companies want to turn yesterday’s Madonna into today’s Megadeth, Solbrook Display Corp. of North Hollywood can do. Solbrook’s artists, most of them free-lancers, are specialists in doing really big art really fast--and really cheap. They have only a day or two to paint canvases for the billboards, which can be as large as 10-by-24 feet, and they get about $250.

“There’s no money in it. You have to love what you’re doing,” says Paul Bedard, who has worked for Solbrook for eight years. But it’s fairly easy work: Artists basically copy an album cover onto a canvas. “And with a six-foot head, it’s pretty hard to blow it,” he says. “It’s hard to get two-foot eyes crossed or lose the shape.” His work so impressed Michael Jackson that he has commissioned 15 portraits from Bedard.

The company sells reproductions of its rock billboards for $350 to $500. Among the most popular? Jimi Hendrix, who hasn’t had a billboard on Sunset Strip for more than 20 years.