Cee-Lo (4,5,6)

Cee-lo is a street dice game played with three dice, a patch of concrete, and whatever cash is in your pocket. The name comes from the Chinese for four-five-six, the highest roll in the game, and it arrived in America with Chinese laborers in the nineteenth century before Black and Latino neighborhoods made it their own.

Where craps runs on two dice and a stack of side bets, cee-lo runs on three and settles fast. Roll 4-5-6, and you take everything. Roll 1-2-3, and you are done. Anything else sets a point, and the next man has to beat it. No table, no come line, no waiting. It has been played in alleys, on stoops, in schoolyards, and behind corner stores for generations. Frank Morrison grew up on those blocks with a spray can in his hand, and this painting puts you back on that sidewalk, down at eye level with the dice.

Morrison rendered all three men in tight, controlled oil work, then painted the wall behind them in the actual language of graffiti: flat color, hard outline, and layered overspray. Two visual systems sharing one canvas. The low viewpoint puts you on the ground with them, and the strong horizontal of the sidewalk cuts across the bottom third and locks the composition down. The bent backs and extended arms show the elongation that runs through all his figurative work, drawn from the Mannerist masters who inspired him and applied their techniques to a Saturday afternoon on the block.

Frank Morrison started as a graffiti writer in New Jersey, tagging walls before anyone was calling it art. Break dancing took him to Europe on tour with a crew, and a visit to the Louvre reset the entire direction of his life. He came home and taught himself the methods of the Old Masters, then turned that training on the neighborhoods, corners, and people he already knew. The result is the fluid, elongated style now known as urban mannerism. Morrison has illustrated over thirty children's books and holds Coretta Scott King Illustrator Awards, a John Steptoe Award, and NAACP Image Award recognition, with work shown at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art Basel, Scope Miami, and Expo Chicago. Every canvas he signs carries the notation TTG, for "Thanks To God."

Cee-Lo 4,5,6 is a 2026 release measuring 30 x 40 inches, offered as a giclee on canvas, hand-signed by the artist and shipped with a certificate of authenticity. Choose the unstretched canvas, the gallery-stretched canvas ready to hang, or the stretched canvas finished in a black floater frame.

Edition Sizes: Cee-Lo 4,5,6 is released in four tiers, seventy-eight pieces in total. The Limited Edition is 60 archival giclees on canvas, hand-signed and numbered. The Remarque edition is 10 canvas prints enhanced with original hand-painted details by Frank Morrison. The Artist Proof edition is 5 canvas prints, individually hand-painted and signed. The Hors de Commerce edition is 3 hand-painted prints, the rarest tier, traditionally reserved for exhibition and private collection use. Once a tier sells through, it is closed permanently.

A strong fit for a game room, a bar area, a finished basement, a barbershop, or any wall where people gather and talk.