My friends in the Denver Band, The Knew, asked me to conjure up some artwork for new t-shirts and website material. While these images aren’t silk-screen ready, they could be screened onto shirts or flat stock with a nice high contrast half-tone effect. My desire is always to tell a more direct story with imagery, make a more visceral feeling, and I am always trying to find the fastest and fewest words to compliment photographs when needed. There can be real magic between the relationship of words and text; not only visually, but in their meaning, dynamic (or tangential dynamic) that, when found, nether repeats the message of the other, nor contradicts it but in some way sums up the paradox, the nuances, and the of the ideas I try to express, and the stories I try to tell.
For this project, I wanted to find a way to touch on the spirit of political propaganda imagery (of any stripe), Mexican pulp comic books, punk flyers, and the kinetic frenzy of sprit of the British Invasion era – all of which are strong connotations when I listen to the growling gallop of Patrick’s drums, or the snarl and whine of Jacob’s slide on his big white Epiphone Sheraton II. (See and hear it for yourself.)
I didn’t have a 4′ x 8′ flat bed scanner for this assignment, but I did envision converting a tanning bed into a scanner. Instead, I had my fiancée jump up and down repeatedly on a bed directly under a vaulted ceiling, and I used a portable ring flash shooting pretty wide open (f/ 2.5) to get that odd and un-focused feel you get when you scan a three-demensial object.
