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.
More Info : www.facebook.com/home.php#!/event.php?eid=114089415311952

Current Gallery Website

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.

Old School #1 - Note to Self

I pulled out some old sketchbooks from high school when my friend Ian told me about a call for submissions for an art show he thought I was up my alley. So I started scanning in old drawings to archive them as the books are getting old and paper is yellowing.

This is one of my favorites from this book. I'll be posting a bunch more over the next couple weeks too so stay tuned.

Band Posters

It's been a while since I've posted anything. Been so busy with the little one and all. Here is a poster I just finished up for my band Deep Tree Mantra's upcoming performance at the Johns Hopkins Outdoor Summer Film Series. For those of you in the area, come check it out. It's free, family friendly and following our performance will be a screening of the stop motion action film The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Also eating up my time as of late was a recent reunion show for my old band The Penny Regime at the Ottobar. It was a heck of a lot of fun to get back together with the boys and rock out our old songs again. Here is the poster I designed for that little shindig.

Joey Cape

Joey Cape, originally uploaded by Mr & Mrs Speeed.

My friend Mel Fratta-Yukna commissioned me to make a drawing of musician Joey Cape to use for T-shirts and promo. I had to whip it out over night to get it to them in time. The label ended up up voting it down, so it wasn't used for the promo materials. But I'm still pretty proud of this one and I really enjoyed making it. I was working from a photo he provided that captured this great perspective of the guitar coming right atcha. If you haven't heard of Joey Cape, he's a great songwriter so go check him out.

Sam's Goodies

Sam Goodies at the King of Prussia mall had a big going out of business sale so I had to go through every CD in the store and look for gems as they were all like no more than $4 a CD.  Here is what I got all for a whopping $47:

Blind Melon, Soup - Pretty good, I've been going through a bit of a throwback to the 90's phase lately  revisiting some of the bands I was listening to in high school during the early 90's, so this fits into that little musical mid life crisis of mine.

Liz Phair, Somebody's Miracle - Also pretty good, not as artsy and innovative as her first album (which also came out back in my high school days). A bit more mainstream, but a good listen and it has nice photos in the artwork which make it worth having the physical CD as opposed to downloading from iTunes. I'm a sucker for cool album art and being a designer, that makes it qualify as a tax write off. It's called research and education. BONUS.

Strung OUT on U2, The String Quartet Tribute - OK I'm also a sucker for novelty cover versions of popular music. This one is pretty good. The older U2 songs lend themselves better to the classical interpretations on this album more so than the more recent ones. Especially I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Of course this also plays into my revisiting the music of my youth phase, so I guess there is a common thread, being that all the new stuff was picked off the shelves by the time I got there. A good overall dinner music or background CD.

I Believe to My Soul, Various Artists This is a sort of a "What are they up too now / tribute to the soul masters CD. It features some of the giants of soul from back in the day doing new songs with a tip of the hat to their roots. Not trying to relive the past so much as show what they are writing currently having come from the roots of Soul music. Pretty good, but I definitely have to be in the right mood for it. Nothing really earth shattering here or better than the Hits they carved out in the past. Again good, dinner or background CD, definitely leaning towards the gospel sounding soul roots.

Thrice, VHEISSU This one I pretty much picked up because the album artwork was of a certain style that really appeals to me and is usually wrapped around a CD that I inevitable will like. It is what I guess would be defined as Emo-Core. Melodic and screaming at the same time. It has a lot of the overproduced, over compressed, over layered sound in current popular music that I do not realy care for. But something about it I like. I think I will like this one more after a few listens. After all the artwork never steers me wrong.

Eels, Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, This one is one of the best ones I picked up. I really dig this double album. It is refreshingly different and has a nice melodic and casual feel to it. Highly recommended. Something about it I really connect with, which is refreshing.

Spottiwoode and His Enemies, Building a Road I recognized this one, from a song I heard on WTMD that was decent. I was not overly impressed with this album on the first listen. Maybe it will be better next time, but I'm not holding out hope. The artwork is pretty nice, but not enough to make up for the complete lack of focus on the album. It is a bit too rough around the edges and has all the trademark disappointments of a freshman album that should have been worked on a bit more, or not at all.

Mos Def, The New Danger It's been a few years since this came out and if I recall correctly it was several years in the making. If that recollection is true, this album is a bit disappointing. It has it's moments but is about 50/50 good shit/blah shit. On a side note I really hate when rappers go "uugh, uugh, uugh" I mean come on, write some fucking lyrics what is with all the grunting. They all do this and every time it ruins it for me!!! Rap dammit, like with words!!! You never heard Grand Master Flashing pulling that lame ass shit!

Brad, Welcome to Discovery Park, I always liked their first album so I picked this one up which there was still 50 copies of on the shelves. First of let me just say the lyrics and the vocals in this band are kind of crappy. But beyond that, they do put together some great songs. Their mellow stuff is really where it is at. The more rocking songs are so so, but when they do the low mellow thing it's really nice, barring the lame ass lyrics and the poor vocal execution. Again this is throwing back to my high school years, when their first album came out around the rise of Pearl Jam.

The String Quartet tribute to the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Yes, I got two string quartet tribute albums. So what. I told you I was a sucker for this kind of crap. The U2 one is better. Some of these songs come across really nice, but others just do not work in this format. Still this is for my novelty collection, got to take the good with the bad.

NYC Subway, Songs From the Underground, This was another gem. It is all NYC subway musicians and it is up there with the Eels album as the best finds I got from this sale. Very eclectic and every track is damn good. Also highly recommended. It is about half acoustic so you have to be able to appreciate that, but the other half is worth it too even if you don't dig the acoustic solo stuff.

I also have two more that I have not listened too yet....
The Sound of Urchin, The Diamond
and
Super Furry Animals, Out Spaced.