Wednesday, November 5, 2014

cover art pretension fail?

maybe, but it works. i'll make sure this is good....

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/time


actually, maybe i should make a general comment about the cover art...

with few exceptions, most of it is lifted. i'd hesitate to say i have little visual art talent - i've actually been told there is talent, to my honest surprise, underlying the little bit of work that i've done - but it's not something i like to spend a lot of time with. i just don't get the kind of creative burst out of it that visual artists need to get out of it to keep doing it. i think it's no secret that paintings can fetch absurd prices, too - my insistence on focusing on the art form may act as a mental block in diving into it. that is to say that i'm not driven by the kind of profit motive that tries to pass off a picture of a soup can as a work of art.

to me, music is a purely abstract creative form, whereas i tend to interpret the visual side of something as trying to capture an idea or an expression. that is, i see the visual as something much more concrete. further, i'd never doubt it's power in doing that. visual images can be quite striking in that context. so, if i had unlimited resources, i'd generally rather make use of a good photographer than an actual visual artist. when i do fall back to actual paintings, it's usually going to be with the same kind of mindset. it's maybe a bit backwards to look for something concrete in the surreal or in impressionism, but it's how i'm going to approach it for album cover art.

so, i went with the dali for this because it's a concrete representation of the abstraction of the track; however absurd or surreal the painting may be, it's the concrete connection between a picture of a clock melting and the sound of time caving in that is the point, here.

there are a few things i tossed together in paint, often constructed from existing images - like a sample art project. they're pretty obviously discernible. and the dali there is one of a few paintings that i feel have that concrete connection. generally, though, i'm going to focus on trying to find a photographic representation of the album's content - something i feel encapsulates the sound on the disc.

none of it's credited. i'm not selling a lot of records, so it's not a problem for me right now. i come out of a plunderphonics background, and don't see a lot of problem with borrowing the images, so long as i'm not exploiting the creators. and, the truth is that i'm currently not.

i've long committed myself to tracking down the original artists if a time comes where there's serious pressings and serious sales. this will happen, if or when that happens.

for now, i'm just lifting, and i'm thinking of it in terms of sample art.