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A Great Parade

I made this back in October for A5 Magazine‘s Remix issue, taking inspiration from Sufjan Stevens’s All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands. I received my contributor’s copy in the mail on Friday, and it’s gorgeous, both the featured work and the design of the magazine itself. I don’t even want to call it a magazine; it’s more of an art book, really. Have a look for yourself (and click for a bigger view):

Please check out the (equally gorgeous) website, too; there’s a really cool gadget there which lets you check out everyone’s songs.

It was a bit of an impossible task to try and figure out what my favourite song even was (as the brief asked for a visual interpretation of it), but Sufjan Stevens’s Seven Swans is one of my very favourite albums, finely poised as it is between a sense of wonder and unsettlement, even fright. No song more so than All the Trees …, and I’d always got strong visuals off that one anyway, so – choice made.

The brief was to make a (square format) greyscale image, which prompted my decision to use ink for the drawing. Having now seen it printed I think it was the right decision after all, as it looks much more striking than a pencil drawing would have. I really wanted the shapes of the trees to look forbidding, which the stark black of the ink made possible. I did however lose some fluidity of line in the thinning branches towards the top. Ink and I are still not on the best of terms, and it’s hard not to get discouraged from practicing when pencil work generally yields results so much more satisfactory.

Anyway, this was a great experience all round, and I hope I’ll get to contribute again in the future. Thank you, Golan and Keren, for making it possible.

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I’ve also been notified I’m a runner-up in Creative Quarterly 18, so my work should be up on their website in the … not too terribly distant future. I’ll be sure to point excitedly at it once there’s actually something to look at.

In the meantime, thanks for reading! I hope to update with some more recent work soon. One of the things I’d really like to do this year is to work with models more; I tend to have fairly concrete visuals in mind early on, so I think my work would benefit greatly from being able to shoot reference as I need it rather than trying to cobble it together from a dozen sources.

(I’m just not sure how to go about it with images like the one I’m working on right now – “Excuse me, lady, would you mind if your pre-adolescent child took his shirt off and held this rabid rooster for a moment?”

Yeah, no.)

First one is done, but I think I may have to play around with the values on the second one some more. I kind of wish I’d gone with a different image of an older Marlon Brando now; I liked the idea of using Kurtz, but the effect isn’t quite what I had in mind.

So if I’m looking to establish a pattern here, I suppose I should be posting seven Paul Newmans next …

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I’ve recently made an account at Society6, by the way, in case you have one too and want to say hi. I’ve been shopping around for a good place to offer prints of my work, and I’m hoping Society6 might be it. (Though if anyone knows of a place that does archival quality prints and doesn’t charge exorbitant amounts for international shipping, please do let me know!)