Fuck yeah! Really excited about this! First gig poster ever. I know the picture on the left is kinda small, but you can click on it to see a larger version.
A bit about the concept: The first thing that came to mind with the project was to have a large blue bird (symbolizing the Blue Cranes) feeding music to a bunch of baby birds (representing the audience). I ran this idea across Joe (Tenor Sax – Blue Cranes) and he had a different interpretation of this idea: The larger bird would symbolize Wayne Horvitz while the smaller birds would represent the Blue Cranes. He then went on to explain that the Blue Cranes perform an arrangement “Love Love Love“, one of Wayne’s compositions. A while back, someone had shown Wayne a recording of the Blue Crane’s version of the song and it was very well received. This opened up a correspondence between the two musical acts and eventually they set a date to play together in Portland. That date is Saturday, January 31st at The Goodfoot.
The Composition
The composition took on a few different forms along the way. The goal was to preserve the concept as much as possible. Sounds easy right? Well, not for me!!! This goes against everything I do when I paint. When I’m making a painting, I have no preconceived idea… I just create mess on top of mess – adding lines here and there until something emerges – kinda like a self created & administered Rorschach Test – only my paintings possess more colors and, when it really comes down to it, I have absolutely no love for psychology :).
Here are a few drawings in consecutive order. The third drawing from the left shows the actual wing used in the final design. I learned a very important lesson with this wing… Never draw on ruled paper again. EVER! The blue lines are easy enough to remove once scanned in, but the ink bleeds like you wouldn’t believe causing tedious cleanup work.
The Hat
This is the one distinguishing feature that I had to work with. A quick Google search produced a number of pictures of Wayne wearing a hat of some sort. So I had to figure out how to draw a hat. People never believe me when I tell them that I don’t know how to draw very well, no one ever listens, but here’s a bit of proof: I ended up drawing 5 hats until I got one that I liked.
Although it sounds like I’m bitching, there’s something to be said about drawing things over and over again: sometimes it produces things that you would not have thought about otherwise. Case in point: The Piano Hat. Hat drawing #2 shows me trying to add some secondary embellishment to the bottom of the hat ribbon which visually registered as piano keys. Due to the fact that Wayne is a pianist, this turned out to be a perfect fit.
The Music Staff
This part was fun… and only took two iterations to get to an acceptable state. The music is the first 6 bars to the melody of Love Love Love. You can see from the composition drawings above that this was originally supposed to be a worm, but I really couldn’t figure out how to get the notes into the shape of a worm while retaining the readability of the music, Oh well, I like this better anyways.
