Art Direction & Design

Co-Creation between Artpowerhouse and Buckman Coe: CD cover and artwork for By the Mountain’s Feet.

Field Notes:: November 13th, 2010 :: east is east, meeting with Buckman Coe for his new album.

{in his words} COLOUR TONES: all natural tones especially vibrant green. TEXTURES: bark, branches, roots, moss. SMELL: earth, ocean, eucalyptus, palo santo. (smudge from Peru) SOUND: OM, river, bubbling brook. TASTE: ginger, lemon, salt, seaweed- roasted & raw. VISUAL: washed out, weathered, urban, the impact of man and where it rubs up against nature. Slightly steam punk while blending the flavours of ancient china, europe and the future. 3-5 years from now. THEMES: Eco-centric in nature as well as humanistic. Touching upon transformation in ourselves and the world. Hint of political, social movement & hopeful…with destruction. Personal and global sorrow.

{We} began this project by creating a vision board from internet files and photographs Bucky took with his iphone. Initially, it was an odd collection of images and his music was still being recorded so my imagination had to fill the gaps. I blended the themes and colour pallet into a comic strip format to see if a story wanted to unfold. The Chinese characters blowing in the wind over the bubbling river came from the sacred Heart Sutra… a type of music to me.

So many different elements are required in a project as large as this and each one of them brought us closer to the final product. Bucky had some beautiful photographs taken previously which we decided to incorporate but for the cover he wanted something new. We scheduled a shoot. Guitar cables morphed into roots and branches illustrating the harmony between… and his hair got to dance a little too.

Bucky’s logo and signature underwent development at the same time. Photographs became vectors, tree roots had their own shoot and the Buckman Coe signature was custom made by hand ensuring that the creative going into designing the album cover was as original and authentic as the music being recorded on the cd.

As the project  continued and I listened to Bucky’s thoughts I realized that we are professionally working on the same topic… just in a different way. I too am filled with hope as I walk across landscapes scared by man and I wonder how much can she take. Trees have been a large focus of my personal work so it was easy to tap into my data base to find images that I have taken. In 2008 I traveled to Easter Island to hear their stories of destruction and the collapse of an entire civilization. They call Easter Island a microcosm of the entire planet. (a small sample of what is currently happening globally) The issue is the world is so large -so-we-think that we can’t see the destruction piling up. Easter Island (4-hours by plane off the coast of Chile and in the middle of the ocean) at one time was filled with trees. They were used to build their homes, build their fires, in construction of their boats for fishing and used to roll the massive statues carved at the volcano (pictured below) to the coastline where they were left standing. One day the last tree was cut. Soon after their houses could not be repaired, the fishing boats were set a flame to keep warm and cook food and once the last fishing boat was gone they no longer  were able to go into the ocean for food. It seems hard to fathom that on such a small island and at a time when the indigenous cultures were more connected to nature that something like this was even possible. The people became desperate, fighting broke out and cannibalism was the end result. Of course nature survived… nature always survives.

The second photograph was taken at Cathedral Grove on the way to Tofino. One of our majestic examples of a west coast rainforest. So much power and peace in one place and every time I visit I can’t help but feel how small I really am.

In 2006  a destructive wind blew though Vancouver’s Stanley Park and snapped or ripped down approximately 1000 trees. The clean up took over a year which gave me plenty of opportunity to take my camera in and photograph it. I wasn’t sure at the time why I had such a strong desire to document it… and I may never know fully. However if it is to lend an image to a fellow artist to bring more awareness about our roll on the planet then thy will be done. I had enough photos of trees and the vibrant greens but I was missing ruins. I changed my focused and began looking into the history books. I wondered, what ruins is Bucky singing about? Are they ancient… or are they modern? I sent Bucky an email asking this question and a couple days later I got a response. Modern Ruins. I scratched my head.

After a couple more days I came across the work of  a Japanese artist, Hisaharu Motoda and a collection of his drawings turned into lithographs. I was captivated by his attention to detail as well as his imagination of drawing his homeland in ruins. He describes them like this, ”Neo-Ruins” series of lithographs depict the cityscape of a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar streets lie deserted, the buildings are crumbling and weeds grow from the broken pavement. The antique look of the lithographic medium effectively amps up the eeriness of the futuristic setting. “In Neo-Ruins I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” says Motoda.

His website was down, links were broken but after a few days I found an email for him and I sent a message asking if he was willing to collabortate with Buckman Coe by granting the right to print one of his images on the cd. He agreed and we were so excited because his work felt like the perfect fit. Three weeks after our initial contact Japan’s landscape suddenly changed and Hisaharu’s image no longer looked like a figment of his imagination. We have kept in touch and he and his family are safe. I send him BIG LOVE daily. Moments like these amplify how small the planet really is… and how we are interconnected.

Destruction of nature and civilization were merged and a portion of a lyric from the song the Apocalypse is not Guaranteed floated across Bucky’s chest.

Deeply involved at a new level I felt the last layer was to be done by hand by connecting and blurring the lines with paint. I’ve come up with a number of different processes to combine photography and paint and this is a sample of a simple one. A hand painted canvas became the new back ground as I printed out the image 24 X 65 inches. Over Hisaharu’s Tokyo Station I blurred the image with a stain of water to remember the tsunami and Bucky’s hair grew even wilder.

Finally, All the pieces were pulled together, merged with templates and spell checked. Hollie Whitehead from Glamorous Monk dropped in the final text layer plus her own custom handwritten font and we were DONE! Bucky is on tour now promoting his new album and spreading the love… and we are wishing him the best!