Self Portrait of the Artist as a Memory of a Rock Star

This piece is actually a culmination of 20 years of work. I started with a couple a drawings from my high school sketch book. One was a psychedelic portrait of Jimmi Hendrix and the other a study for a self portrait. I scanned these two drawings and overlaid them together in Photoshop. Along with a third image for which some back story is appropriate.

In high school my intrigue and enthusiasm about various rock stars led to me playing music and attempting to be a rock star myself. A couple years or so after high school I joined an indie "conspiracy rock" group called The Penny Regime. My "audition" was an impromptu sitting in with them at a live gig at EJ Bugs in Fells Point. I sat in on drums and having no drum sticks, played with coat hangers and rolled up City Papers. I continued playing in this band for 7 years, switching to bass after the first couple. In 2010 we had a reunion show at The Ottobar and Mike "Cheech" Simmons took some photos of our set. I used one of those photos as an additional overlay to create the final composite image used as the basis for this drawing. The drawing itself is on a piece of paper from the same high school sketch book. The "penny regime" scrawled in the top corner was written there way back in the late 1990s when I first started playing in the group.

When viewed from a close perspective the original two older drawings are more prominent. But when viewed from a greater distance of about 10 feet (or as a thumbnail on screen) the newer reunion show photo image comes more into focus as the older fade into memory.

This piece was inspired by and created for the exhibition Self Portrait as a Rock Star at the Current Gallery on Jan 28, 2011.
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Mike's original photo is here: www.flickr.com/photos/haileysimmons/4656294495/in/faves-8...

Below are the three separate source images side by side.