Vintage Outbound Era Psychedelic Bird Painting T-Shirt 80s

Two long-billed birds stand in tall yellow grass, looking up at a black sky with Saturn hanging in it. Below them a face in a blue mask stares out from under a shock of yellow hair, wrapped in fabric patterned with checkerboards, polka dots, and squiggles. It’s titled “Outbound Era” and signed 1-1989 © Stabley.

This is a wearable painting, which was its own small genre in the late 80s. Rather than a logo or a joke, you got a single image reproduced edge to edge like a canvas, usually with a title printed underneath and the artist’s signature in the corner — art-fair and gallery-shop merchandise rather than mall stock. The tee is the frame.

Printed on Fruit of the Loom, in a mint green that does a lot of work against the black sky.

A painting that happens to have sleeves.