Rocking the Art: Vol.1: After the Crash
Welcome back, friends. I've been thinking alot about music lately. How it is interwoven into our lives, our routines, our memories, the deepest places of our psyches. We all have our own personal soundtrack to our lives. Songs that are strongly attached to pivotal and important formative moments throughout our lives. I have been thinking alot about it and wanted to take a few sketchblog posts to devote to that topic and the role it plays in my art, the making of it, or just my life as an artist in general.
Over my years of doing freelance illustration and design work, Ive had some opportunities to create album art for music artists. I thoroughly enjoy these creative projects, in particular. They give me the opportunity to combine two art forms that I love in a way I don't normally get to. They give me a chance to work collaboratively with other artist/artists to create something new and something that couldn't be done by myself alone, which excites me. Working with musicians to create something visual from their art is an experience that is unlike any other that I get to experience. In all honesty, I love it and miss these projects. I'd love to work more with musicans on album art again. Fun stuff.
I want to start with one of my favorites, still to this day. Just a little over the 10 Year Anniversary of it. It was illustration work I did for an E.P. Called After the Crash for Johnny Shumate. Just a quick shout out to Johnny. Thanks again, man, for the great expereince. One of my favorite illustrations Ive created and still one of my favorite E.P.s to listen to. Keep Rocking. Cheers, LEWIS
Amazing musician. You all should check him out.
This was such a beloved project that I used to use it in my print portfolios (you know when they were a thing) and on my website as an example of conceptual thinking within my work. I used to call this "Birth of a Concept" and it was on my Website and a walk-through/step-by-step explanation of the creative process for this project to give people an idea of how my mind works creatively, where my inspiration comes from and what can be created from it, collaboratively with others, from start to finish. [I even made a cute little icon for it because I'm such a nerd like that.] Also, I know it's interesting for non-artists to peek behind the veil and get behind-the-scenes of what goes on in an artist's mind when they are creating. It is that keen and wily ability to think conceptually and creatively, to see things differently and possibly on the tips of our toes that make us the artists we are.
It's been over ten years since Johnny approached me about doing some artwork for a collection of songs he had written recently and planned to record into that E.P. {**check on the anniversary date***) We were both working together at the same company, in Macon, Georgia, at the time, and he knew I was an artist. We both have an affinity for classic Emo Rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Jimmy Eat World, so we also connected on that level as well. He had pitched me an idea of images of car crashes, boys with guitars (not necessarily him), screaming pedestrians fleeing the crash scene, passers-by stopping to see what all the commotion is, all contained within a very southern city like Macon or Savannah, Georgia with southern architecture framing the scene. It was an interesting concept and an understandable visual analogy, and I was happy and excited to be working on the project as I had never made album art for anyone before.
Johnny went into the studio and recorded 5 tracks and handed me a copy of the recordings along with the song lyrics so I could read them and listen to the songs to get a real feel for the project he was creating. The lyrics were also to be included on the jacket art as well so I would have needed them eventually.
I remember working on Macon/Savannah ideas for the album as he had requested, and I mean, they were good/ok/certainly usable (and he really liked them, as I recall.) However, after listening to the 5 songs on repeat for several days, morning noon, and night, during everything I was doing, really ingesting the tone, the melody, the mood, the feelings... I knew that the requested concept wasnt right for this project. It could really be and mean so much more. These 5 songs were how Johnny had creatively worked his way through a tough divorce. After the Crash was a love letter to the meloncholly and anguish he was experiencing. It is raw and vulnerable and it touched/moved me. It took me into my own recent experience of a bad relationship I had gone through, myself. I completely felt all the feelings and comiserated right along with him as I listened to that collection of songs. What he created was not only emotionally driven, heartbreaking but more importantly so universally accessable. The songs are also SO VERY GOOD.
So I began to work, in addition to the art concepts he had wanted me to create, an additional third concept that I felt was really more right for the project and something more fitting for what he had made. This collection of songs weren't about the initial heartbreak, but what life is in the aftermath right afterward; the inbetween, the void, the purgatory. I began work on a third idea to pitch to Johnny. His concept was more about the crash, the breakup itself. Whereas the name of the E.P. and the content of the songs it contains are about living in the aftermath of that breakup. While he loved my first to conceptual ideas based on his original request, I'm so glad he fell in love with and trusted me with this 3rd idea I had come up with to represent his music visually.
Most everyone has had their heart broken severely. It's a pretty universal human experience that each of us has had before and probably will again. It's a part of human life and human love. We all can also understand the sort of images that the emotional turmoil of having your heart broken would evoke. With a car crash being, of course, the central theme and focus of the illustrated imagery, I began to ask myself questions. What is the aftermath of a relationship? What exactly would that look like if it were a physical place? Would we live in or fit in with this environment? How would we survive? What other things are there? Does anyone else live in this environment or do we exist there alone? If we are there alone, are there other remote decimated satellite environments that others live in close to us? How close or how far away do they exist from us? What do we ourselves look like when we live here? How have we changed?
Visualizing the environment of the aftermath of a relationship in the context of a car crash, meant that "living in the aftermath" of it would be living within a city, not built of brick and mortar, but built entirely of crushed and wrecked cars stacked and welded into buildings, broken shards of jagged glass and all. I wanted it to be almost like living in a junkyard. To me, this is what living in heartbreak feels like. I knew that there would be other things that needed to live and/or exist in this car crash city; characters, items, symbols. They all would represent our emotions, our thoughts, and things that help get us through each day during the "bad times."
Let's pull out a few key visuals from the cover art. One of these main images is a pair of jousting knights, their heads replaced; one knight with a glove, the other with a boot. This was a little illustrated nod to Lewis Carol. In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters two knights in the forest. These two knights meet everyday to "battle to the death," though they are always foggy on the details as to why they do this. On the day Alice meets them, they decide to fight over the honor of Alice, simply because she is there and they can fight over her. In my illustration, the two knights symbolize the inner conflict that we would experience during this time. The conflict within ourselves is caused by a conflict between ourselves and a former lover. Since conflict is usually a result of a breakdown of communication, the glove and boot become a visual representation of how we then begin to communicate with the world around us at this time. They represent the human extremities, our hands, and feet, what we use to communicate with when our words, our voice, and our mind/head cannot. Hence, a decapitated head and either a foot or a glove in its place, locked into a battle to the death every day we live in the aftermath of heartbreak. A brief aside: My penwork was also another nod to Alice. I wanted to tip my hat visually to John Tenniel, the original illustrator of both books. You can see his influence in my penwork.
The main focus of the illustration is, of course, its central figure: a guitarist with a telivision set for ahead. One of the things I thought ALOT about after that relationship that I had been relating to and thinking about when I was listening to Johhny's demos, was this sort of feedback loop. After breaking up with someone, our first action is usually to playback the moments of the relationship in the t.v. of our minds. We replay the good times, the bad times, the fights, the makeups and particualrly the breakup itself, the words that were said, etc. They replay and replay and replay in our minds. People usually use the analogy of a broken record in which a viinyl record, being played on a record player, has a scratch in it and the needle skips back over repeatedly replaying a section of the song over and over and over again. I began thinking about what it would look like if this same phenomenon would appear on a television set. I thought about those old school days when we used to watch television stations that you could pick up with an antenna. Some of you may not be old enough to rmember those days. If not, Im sure someone captured on a YouTube video somewhere. It's worth a Google. Anyway, sometimes, the signal from the antenna would not always come in or transmit to the tv set so clearly, causing this distortion that would disect and cut the video image into two pieces, like a magic trick gone awry. The distorted line where the images were cut was this pointed scribbly sort of line of jagged peaks and valleys that would begin at the top of the tv screen and travel all the way down to the bottom. I thought if there was such a thing as a "broken TV" that there would be footage that looped on the screen with this jagged line making its journey from the top of the screen to the bottom of it. So we now find ourselves with a television set for a head and the "car crash" of our relationship playing on a feedback loop on the screen, like a broken television.
Another key image is the "T.V. characters" that are floating away in the background. I thought that if we werent here alone in this carcrash city, who else might be here with us? Many times in a relationship, we have this tendency of losing who exactly we are individual. We tend to give in to it, most times to our own detriment. With each day we move a little further away from who we once were before that relationship. The process is so slow and gradual that we usually aren't aware that it's even happeneing until the relationship completely disintegrated and we are left afterward wondering who we've become. Sometiems there is no point of return afterward. There usually is no going back to who you once were. It's impossible, really. So I wanted these characters floating away, presumably lost within their own heads, possibly never to find their voices again.
In contrast, I wanted to visually ground our "hero" (ourselves) firmly on a city bench on the city sidewalk. It was important that they be clearly on a different path. They weren't slipping away, but it's not exactly clear where he is headed either. I wanted it to visually imply that maybe he is waiting for a bus that would take him out of town; out of the center of his heartache. there is a lit street lamp at the end of the sidewalk. Lamps in art usually resent illumination or discovery. In this case, the streetlamp symbolizes self-enlightenment and self-discovery. He is on the path back to himself.
Conceptually speaking, the reason behind the color choices, the materials you use, and even choices in typography and layout can contribute to the illustration or the entire project overall. In our initial meetings, Johnny and I discussed the use of a more simplified color story. We wanted it to echo record covers that we really liked for the bands we were listening to at the time. Bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, Say Hi and Peter, Bjorn and John. These artists would employ a detailed line drawing and jutapose it with a saturated solid colored background. We decided to use this design strategy to emphasize the hand-drawn symbols within the main cover illustration. It originally was just Red, Black, and White, but the color story evolved to also include some earth tones as well. Including these colors within our color story would illustrate the muddy and hazy "gray areas" of everything we encounter in our relationship are. Lines blur, and things cease to be defined with clarity because everything can't always be so "black and white."
I next considered what types of materials could conceptually convey this vision. I thought of how fragile human relationships can really be and how easily they "tear" apart. I wanted to find a way to make this illustration "feel" like a collage created from paper to emphasize the fragile nature of those human relationships. I hunted and gathered a wide variety of specialty handmade papers based on texture and color. After gathering them, I began experimenting with how I could use them to visually strengthen the concept of the Illustration. I really enjoyed the process of creating a digital collage for the first time. This Illustration project is the actual forerunner to my current illustration process. With the illustration finally completed, I needed to move forward to creating the other parts of the project, The rest of the jacket art, the liner notes, the cd print, and the jewel case art.
With the packaging design, I continued with the concept of collage and torn paper. I invoked works like that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns (very personal favorites). I kind of wanted it to feel like a lo-fi "gallery" piece if that doesn't sound too silly or ridiculous to admit here. The more it felt like a "painting" to more I felt like it connected with my concept. If you look at the liner notes, for example, I wanted to show how "exposed" and "vulnerable" Johnny is being with his own personal experience. He is taking off his skin and letting us see what is happening inside him. I wanted to show this visually. The brown paper, the skin, that is torn reveals a very pink, raw, rough, and exposed texture underneath it. Etched across the inside are Johnny's words. The lyrics of his songs literally burned into the inside of the skin. The cd employs the same "exposed" strategy. I used a rough textured deeply saturated red paper. It reminded me of blood or skin that was bleeding. I placed the roughly inked drawings on top. The interior of the jewel case is handled in the same way.
I'm so very glad that Johnny trusted me with this vision. In the end, he was not only happy with the outcome, but it inspired one of his tattoos. I'm very flattered that he wanted to tattoo my artwork onto his arm. This is one of those projects that will always stand out in my mind. It was such a labor of love (or really of the loss of it.) It is something that resonated with me at the time and I think resonates universally with anyone who is going through such a rough time in their lives.
I would encourage everyone to check out Johnny's music online and follow him on IG. You can listen to 4 of the 5 original tracks from After the Crash on ReverbNation. Click {HERE} to link to it. It's SUCH A GOOD LISTEN! Also, {HERE} for additional tracks. Elusive is a personal favorite.
Thank you for coming on this little journey with me today into the past and looking at this project again. I hope you all are well and happy. If you are going through a break-up, my heart goes out to you. You'll be ok, friend, in time. Keep showing up at that city bench and sing your blues by the street lamp. One day that bus will show up and you will be on to better places. All my love to you. I'll leave you all with my favorite track from the E. P.: We Were Lovers.
Until next time, friends,
Keep dreaming, keep sketching, keep thinking, keep laughing, and most important of all, keep making art.
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