Brian Gershey (Master of Fine Arts ’06) loves to watch cartoons. He raves about South Park, and Ricochet Rabbit the way other people gush over a sunset or a perfect rose. “The flat colors, the stylized images—other people may not see these things as beautiful,” he says, “but I get really excited about animated forms.”

He’s not the only one: his playful, psychedelic paintings have turned up in galleries in New York and Boston, and they’ve earned him the Museum School’s Dana Pond Award in painting and an Award for Excellence in printmaking. While Gershey’s audience may appreciate The Jetsons on a slightly lesser scale than he does, it’s hard to resist his colorful, hard-edged fantasy worlds. With their fluid washes of sky and rounded alien creatures that often appear to be floating by on a conveyor belt, the paintings feel full of movement, as though Gershey is escorting his viewers from one space-age scene to another.

Gershey discovered contemporary painting in the company of his grandmother, a modern-art enthusiast who occasionally whisked him away from his northeastern Pennsylvania home for field trips to museums in New York. He started out creating abstract paintings that “were basically just brush strokes, kind of sloppy,” he says. It was the cartoons—and video games and sci-fi movies, as well—that focused his artistic vision. “I realized that I was interested in landscapes and places, even though they were places that didn’t exist,” he says. “Now I’m more specific about imagining worlds and characters in those worlds.”

Even imaginary worlds have their beginnings in real life, though. Gershey recently ventured to Los Angeles to gather “source material” for a new series of paintings. “I was blown away by the landscape and the crazy futuristic architecture,” he says. “L.A. is almost like a fictional place; it’s dream-like and colorful and pop-y.”

Just like his paintings.