Carnal
Trumpet vines overhang aging stucco doorways, creating some cool respite for the bees seeking sweetness in the stamina of the afternoon. Ruby-throated birds, like mosquitoes, sip a Coca-Cola that has spilled and lies evaporating in a sticky pool on the street. Somewhere, children are yelling after a football.
In the shadows, intentions are made. Intentions wrapped in paper and string. Colognes are opened after baths and caramel skin is anointed in Tres Fleurs and Saint Teresa water. An effusion of Bay Rhum and roses floats out a window on an upper floor, and down to the passers-by, acknowledgment that even in this soporific heat, someone stirs.
Cigars, dry, their outer wrappings peeling, are lit and left to smolder as long as they will. Cones of brown sugar are placed on floors, surrounded by feathers and photos. Veves are drawn in chalk and housepaint. Shirts are swapped for beads. Flames flicker in a hundred glass cylinders, making tiny church windows from images of saints and orisha.
In the heat of the afternoon, someone will be uncrossed.
Wild Boys Always Shine!
To all The Hubbs, congratulations on another boffo show last night. I wish I could have been there, but I look forward to seeing the photos! Another one down, another one coming, this time, in leopard spots and zebra stripes.
I’ve been using the Hubba flyers as a personal forum for artistic growth and experimentation, and with this Wild Animals! edition flyer, I attempted to tighten up a few things that had been bothering me about my previous Hubba offerings to this point. Happily, I think I succeeded.
First, this was a fun theme to tackle; the theme of Wild Animals! calls a number of visuals immediately to mind, and lends itself to lots of light and color, two things I find myself increasingly craving. Creating a double-sided flyer for a new theme each month is a definite challenge. Some themes are easy to illustrate and practically form themselves (Soviet Union!), while others require some serious research, and a good bit of trial-and-error before hitting on the right look or being able to condense the possibilities into something that will fit onto a 4″x6″ piece of card (Caveman Show! Around the World in 80 Girls!).
Further adding to the challenge are the strictures of 1) conveying the pertinent textual information in a clear, legible manner, 2) finding a clear and obvious way to carry the theme over to Side 2, 3) keeping the overall look similar enough to “family” this flyer in with all the others that came before, 4) do justice to that month’s Flyer Girl and 5) not do anything that looks like I’m ripping off R. Black. Throw all those challenges together with one of the more general themes like Awards Show!, and I’ve got myself a real brain-scratcher. Thankfully, Wild Animals! only presented a couple of those challenges and I was able to go from conception to execution relatively quickly.
Dear Hero Imprisoned…
When I was a teenager, I spent hours drawing pictures of Robert Smith, Martin Gore, Alan Wilder, Dave Gahan, Andrew Fletcher (Fletch), Simon LeBon, Nick Rhodes and Morrissey. I wish I still had those; they were some of my best early work.
When This Charming Band hired me to illustrate and design the posters for their annual show celebrating Morrissey’s birthday, I jumped at the opportunity to take a jaunt down memory lane and pay tribute to three bands I’ve loved since childhood.
It was a kick to translate my teenage-daydreaming into a legitimate career skill with this job.
These are the moments I feel I live a charmed life. Even with all the hell my body has put me through (and it’s been a full inferno), overall, my life has been blessed. Blessed with opportunity, blessed with good clients, blessed with the chance to earn my keep doing what comes naturally to, and satisfies, me. I’m very grateful for that. (Although, given the subject of the poster, I feel like I should be mincing about something instead of waxing optimistic.) I’m pleased with the way this turned out, generally, but I get a tickle every time I look at it and realize Moz is glaring at his birthday celebration with disdain. Really, how could it be otherwise?
The Spring Smells of Emeraude
I love these.They were quick and dirty, but for featuring lo-res, vintage pulp art nicked from the ether, I think they shine. I credit their effectiveness to the color palette, as much as to the original images.
Inspiration comes from far and wide, and the inspiration for the colors used here came from an anecdote the client, Jim “Poogie” Sweeney, shared, about recently standing in line behind someone wearing cloying “old lady perfume”. In my gray matter, the words “old lady perfume” immediately dial up one word — Emeraude.
Someone, somewhere, far back in the annals of my existence, gave me a fragrance sampler for an adolescent birthday. I was thrilled, until I began removing the bottle tops and discovered all four perfumes to be nothing more than four unwearable, escalating levels of “cloying”; the type of cloying that appears to have been favored by perfumiers and women everywhere until about 1960. Either our olfactory receptors have mutated, or tastes really do evolve that much. I can’t imagine a woman wearing any of those fragrances now, without someone nearby calling the CDC. One drop would shut down a yoga class faster than you can say “fragrance-free studio”. While I can’t recall the names of the other three levels of cloying contained (barely) in those bottles, I know the fourth-and-utmost of them was Emeraude.
The word cloying, Virginia, was coined for Emeraude. (more…)
