JP The Money Bear

Coming from the harsh realities of life in West Philadelphia, Raheem Saladeen Johnson otherwise known as King Saladeen, took it upon himself to grasp at true happiness within his life and those around him even when things may have looked bleak. The idea that there are three things necessary for a person to be happy in this world is a concept that this young visual artist can readily accept as his someone to love, something to do and something to hope for have all revolved around his obsession for the arts since an early age. Since the age of 5 Saladeen’s passion for the arts has been a consistent part of his life, with the young budding artist drawing on whatever he could get his hands on from paper to walls. Having been raised in a tough urban environment where artistic outlets were few and far between, Saladeen instead turned his attention to basketball where he shined and became a force to be reckoned with while a high school athlete. His efforts brought him to numerous places across the country where his eyes were opened to the landscapes, shapes and colors that were vastly different than what the kid from Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.