Slacker!

I am sorry to the 5 people who actually ever read this blog. I was meaning it to be a constantly updated source of info and images, and over the past month or so life just kind of got in the way. I promise to update soon. There have been some pretty cool art related things going on lately that I feel are blog worthy, so check in with me from time to time.

WARHOL @ The J.B. Speed Art Museum

Hey gang! Sorry to the 3 people who read this about not updating in a while, but I have been working lots of overtime, and my mom got married this weekend. I am also trying to find out how to sell all my stuff on eBay with varying results. But anyway, enough about me, let's talk about art!

Today my mom called me to inform me about a new exhibit opening here in Louisville, KY at the Speed Museum. It is Andy Warhol's "Myths". This collection is a portfolio of 10 prints about myths. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense, like the Dracula, or Santa Clause prints, other prints are socially deeper such as the "mammy" print.

Like I said there are 10 in all. Dracula, Santa, "The Shadow"(a warhol self-portrait), superman, mammy, Howdy-doody, the wicked witch of the west, Mickey Mouse, Uncle Sam, and "the star"(which I think is supposed to be Elizabeth Taylor). It may only be 10 prints, but I have driven to Indianapolis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh to see Warhol's work, so the chance to see it in my own town is pretty cool.

For more info check out www.speedmuseum.org

While were on the subject of Warhol in Louisville, did you know that the University of Louisville has a Warhol? It is from his "10 portraits of jews from the 20th century" series. It is a portrait of Louis Brandeis. Pretty cool, no?

Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Basquiat is one of my favs, so it really sucks that this doc. probably won't come near Louisville theaters. There's always DVD.

Furniture-ish!

I would post more photos of the work I completed in Nashville, but I want to get some really nice shots of them, and I am just not that good with the camera, or my camera just isn't that good.

But last week, as former Hatch intern Harry began his cross country adventure back home, he stopped by Louisville for a few fun days (minus the 2 days I spent on the couch with a stomach virus) and he gave me a few pics he took of some of my prints.

This job was for the California College of Art's Furniture design program. The senior show was called Furniture-ish, and the copy for the show stated that the students had been able to see Jim (Hatch Show Print manager) give a lecture and loved the way the posters looked so much, that they wanted one for their senior show. Very cool. At the time I did the poster I was not even 1 year out of college yet, so the feeling of putting up your senior show, and graduating was still pretty fresh in my mind. I knew how special this was for them, and I wanted to do something pretty special for their poster. (which I guess is true for all posters, but y'know...)

This was a challenge. It may have even been more challenging that all the posters I did with the tiny lists of sponsors. The reason that this was more difficult was because there are only so many of a certain letter in each size. So when I began, I not only had to find out what size would be best to fit all the information on the poster while maintaining my hierarchy of information, I also had to do it without running out of a the letters I needed in a certain size.
So I would build a couple of words, then realize I was out of N's.

Another problem I ran into often was that the names were too long to fit into one line. The two most challenging were the "Dorothy Bell" and "Smoke and Mirrors" line.

This was a little frustrating at first because I had to rebuild the first few lines of names a few times before I found a way of doing it that gave it the traditional Hatch look, but also didn't make it look like it was thrown together without any consideration to the desires of the client.

I maintained the letter height, but made the thicknesses of the letters vary. This gives it a cool funky look, that is only a slightly exaggerated version of something seen on tons of Hatch posters. Some of the people's first and last names have this look, but for the most part I thought I could maintain the birth names, but make the nicknames funky and fun.

Another creative way of fitting information into the poster was by using smaller font sizes, but stacking it. This helped solve the space problems I was having with "Smoke and Mirrors" and "With Special Guest". This was the first time I had done something like that in a poster and it worked really well. I think that it offsets the poster enough so that it wasn't 100% centered.

I sent the poster off and then a few days later I got this via fax.Yeah I framed it. I feel like this is what it's all about. Not necessarily having people stroke my ego, but knowing that I did a good poster and that the person who ordered it is truly happy with it.

The history of each poster from start to finish is pretty unique. In the case of most of them, you send them out and never see them again, sometimes you see them on a bulletin board, sometimes you see them hanging in a record store. In the case of the Furniture-ish job, I found this on the internet a few weeks later.I've been appropriated!! Someone designed a similar poster for the same show with similar colors, and even the funky letter thing has been reproduced. Interesting! Also they were giving away my design to people who came to see the show!

New Shepard Fairey Print

Shepard Fairey is releasing a new print on the 13th of someone very special to us Louisville folks. Muhammad Ali! Very cool image. It looks like Shepard is heading back towards a more rough style with his prints. It seemed like everything done around the time of the Obama poster was very clean and looked very digitally put together. This print has a mixture of both, the dripping background but still has the look of digitally separated cleanness. If I had $70 I would totally buy this print!

I feel like I kind of owe anybody out there who reads this thing an apology. I've kind of been out of it for the past few weeks in regards to keeping up with this blog. There hasn't been too much to report in my personal art life, and I haven't kept up with the art blogs much.

I pretty much moved back to Louisville from Nashville and went right back into working retail full time, and trying to recover financially from the 2 months of free work at the internship. I sold some comic books, my drums, cashed in some savings bonds, and worked about 40 hours a week since I've gotten back and I am still barely staying afloat with my bills. Student loans man, Student loans.

But in art news, I did go to the grand opening of Louisville's own local letterpress shop Hound Dog Press. Very new looking materials and they had a show of contemporary letterpress work which was very cool. They have a couple of small presses in the shop and I don't think they do too much other than invite sized work, but it is still exciting to think that the move to the new location could bring them the business they need to upgrade to a Vandercook proofing press.

The Nashville Flood of 2010

Nashville is in trouble right now. Recently it rained so hard that major flooding occurred all over the city. Because of my internship I have a special place in my heart for Nashville. For those of you who read this blog often, you know that I lived in Nashville for 2 months and got to know the city better by bicycle, than I know my own city. Nashville is where I really got to live on my own for the first time, and got to meet some amazing people along the way. Nashville is my second home and it is terrible that they are going through this right now.

A recently Facebook post from a friend who currently lives in Nashville states:

"Temporary shelters are at capacity, missing people unaccounted for, many homes
are under water, we're in a water conservation emergency, much of
Nashville's economic base is threatened by flood damage, etc, etc. In
other words, we're going to need help. Text 'REDCROSS' to 90999 to
donate $10 to disaster relief."

It is a good idea, and it is only $10! Also, if you live in the Nashville area there is an art auction taking place on Saturday May 8th which benefits flood relief. Check it out here. http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=120105011341130

The videos below were taken from youtube, but both are places that I have been in Nashville before the flood. The first one is of the Opryland Hotel where me and the interns once made a trip to find a stamp and postcard convention. It turns out it wasn't there, but somewhere else nearby. Instead we walked around through the hotels large open spaces walking through the plants, and over bridges, and past the indoor river. Now the whole place is underwater. You can't tell where the indoor river once was, and the walking paths through the plants are gone!





This second video is where I used to buy y groceries. It is about 3 miles from my apartment in Nashville. Which means it is also 3 miles from the one thing I left behind in Nashville. My car. I hope it didn't get carried away.


I talked to one of the interns earlier who said the country music hall of fame was flooded, but that it hadn't reached Hatch Show Print. He said that they were closed for now, and that everything of value was lifted 6 inches off the ground as a precaution.

Good Luck Nashville!

Famous People.

Today one of the Flaming Lips came into the shop. Pretty exciting stuff. Back in my pre-intern days I wondered what it would be like if someone came into the shop to pick up their posters, place an order, or just visit, and it turned out to be a celebrity. Would people make a big deal out of it? I don't know who I imagined coming in really, but someone should right? I mean we are a famous print shop, we make posters for famous people, and we are right next to one of the most famous venues in the history of music.

At Hatch we have 3 presses. The "mid-press" is also the celebrity press. It has autographs of all the famous people who have made their way through the shop. It's kind of cool, but I can't really read or recognize a lot of the names on it. Right above that is an autographed Weezer poster that was designed by Hatch Show Print.

There is a superstition at the shop where if you play a certain musicians music all day while they are supposed to be in town to play a show, then they will stop by. For example: Tegan and Sara played here a few weeks ago, right around the corner from Hatch at the Ryman Auditorium. So all day we listened to nothing but Tegan and Sara. They didn't come in, but if the myth was true, then they would have. The reason has something to do with how embarrassing it is to be caught jamming out to a band when the real band is in front of you. The awkwardness, and unlikeliness of the situation, makes it more likely to happen. We tried the same thing for Vampire Weekend a week later, but we only had one of their albums at the shop. We listened to it once, and no one showed up.

That isn't to say that we never get the famous visitors. In the two months that I have been there, we have seen our fair share of famous-type people. Designer Stanly Hainsworth came by before giving a lecture at nearby University, the director of the documentary "Helvetica" Gary Hustwit stopped by, the Bassist (I think) for the Flaming Lips, some people from American Routes, and I think maybe some soap opera people have stopped by.

As fun as it is to see people like that stop by and have access to those bragging rights, Jim's philosophy is sort of different when it comes to celebrity. In essence, it is about all the posters on the walls that are for people who have had their time come and go, or the people who never got their time. For every one poster of Johnny Cash, there are 20 posters of people nobody knows. This is supposed to keep you humble and grounded. A common saying around Hatch is that "It's just a poster."

That is great advice, but in the two months I have been here, very little of the magic has worn off. I still feel like I have become a part of the history you see in books, read about in magazines, and listen to on the radio. I have made posters for annual events, indie bands, and even 40th birthday parties, but I have contributed to something larger than myself, and more personal and less corporate than the retail world. So while I agree that I am just and intern, and it is just a poster, I am going to enjoy my few remaining days soaking in the specialness of this opportunity that I have been given.