Ut pictura poiesis

"as is painting so is poetry” 

(Ut pictura poiesis--Horace, Ars Poetica)

Jacopo Ramonda (songwriter-poet-musician) and I met because he was looking to have a better pronunciation. Being from Texas he had no idea that my accent is standard, American that is. Now thinking back, it would have been rather cool to add a southern twang to his indy grunge rock sound. I approached him to help him on his new cd, but this time with the visuals. I felt I had first hand knowledge having spent a good part of my life in a place where grunge isn't just a style of music but a way of life, albeit mostly Saturday or Sunday brunch at Guerro's South Congress in Austin,TX.

Jacopo's needs were centered around the word "naive", and I was then left to materialize it. As early 20th century Surrealists, Dadists and Futurists' affinity with poetry, my inspiration for his cd and subsequent website was a hand drawing of a boy playing off a graphic design piece I had done some years back. The concept behind it was The Morton Salt Girl, you know the girl with the umbrella vintage 1968--the girl's umbrella that connotes the boy's forever wistful haven. I had found an equally dreamy poem about a tender hearted boy that wrote it for her that goes like this, "I'm in love with the Morton Salt Girl. I want to pour salt in her hair and watch her dance. I want to walk her through the salt rain and pretend that it is water. I want to get lost in the Washington Cathedral and follow her salt trail to freedom..." 

Conceptually it made sense to use this tender hearted boy yet again to make leaps and bounds and offer up the chance to enter his private world juxtapose reality--Jacopo's play on words in his song lyrics and poetry being somewhat akin. Oriental artists must have had something similar in mind when using calligraphy as a means of expressing painting and poetry in the late 19th c. Technically, hand drawn text and sketches in the design mirror the low-fi quality of Jacopo's music.

Ezra Page's website has original poetry by Jacopo too, one of which was recognized by the reader's poll of The Rolling Stone Magazine. 

Marco Missano from Rome, also intrigued, approached Jacopo and spun out an award winning woolgathering video for his song entitled "Joy Machine", which won Best Music Video at London Independent Film Festival 2009. 

http://www.ezrapage.com/

Lackadaisical: adjective-lacking spirit or liveliness; lethargic; listless; languid.

It's June, a September thesis deadline, and that word deadline is starting to sound strangely ominous. My research has taken me away from producing art work for this project. Love my title though: How to Make a Band Dangerously Cool, but there won't be anything close to dangerous (not to mention cool) if the cover is lackadaisical. Face to face with what the creative process means and how it works (at least for me). I've always found it sterile, without inspiration, to just sit in front of a piece of paper (or document) and expect genius to pour out. Instead, it happens when the light shines on or out from those unexpected places at those unforeseen times. Can't tell you what was shining at that moment, but I had an idea for my cover that has to do with vintage guitars, Johnny Cash and a symbolic gesture.

Before and After: Paper bag Album Covers

Hungarian Pathé Record Cover before Alex Steinweiss came on the scene; the covers were paper bag plain (much like the ones some of us carried to school before those metal boxes came along), which has a straight forward appeal (it's time to eat), but doesn't say a thing about what we're about to listen to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path%C3%A9_Records





Alex Steinweiss's eloquent expression began in 1938. An exercise I gave myself was to look at the cover and imagine the music within before actually hearing it, a lovely exercise I found in the case of Zino Francescatti.
http://www.alexsteinweiss.com/as_index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSx37Ounv98